BBSI's Profile

After all is said and done the verdict should be that the marketplace would determine product successes or failures and this standard whine is just more liberal (socialist) social engineering and control or power over the masses. ASCII data formatting has been in place forever. You can standardize on that basis alone. MS kept changing their file formats every 14 months or so to control their monopoly. That's one of the many reasons why it is so difficult to communicate between older PCs and new ones. Many companies use Macs to move files across a network between PCs. And that's a fact. The MS-DOS IT Nazi mindset was in place almost immediately back in the beginning of the desktop era. The majority, if not all of the apps, for DOS and Windows in the 80s and early 90s, would not allow for exporting and importing of data. Total lack of data portability. THEY WANTED TO KEEP YOU LOCKED INTO THEIR APPS AND OS. If you had data portability than who cares what OS you use. And they knew it and created their OS dependent standard based on file formatting. It has been only in the last 8 or so years that Windows based apps have been data portable because the marketplace demanded it. Quickbooks is still a great offender. If this had been the case from the beginning who knows where we would be today. It certainly would've been better than the reality of today. Data portability is the great leveler. Then the marketplace could have gone to work for the business or consumer based end user. Walt Mossberg, of the Wall Street Journal, is absolutely correct when he states that MS, and the Windows based OEMs could care less about the end user or the consumer. Dell even dropped their consumer division. What you have to deal with are Geeks telling their 500 node network customer Geeks what they want to hear and vice versa. Stuff is then plugged in for the corporate Geeks and Voila the problems that Window users have to endure at all user levels. Remember, you cannot turn a sow's ear into a silk purse! BBS