Hmm, I think the opposite would happen. Instead of everyone complying to standards I think every man and his dog would try to come up with their own "superior" format further fragmenting the industry and causing chaos.
I agree. Ordinary people are not concerned with technical supiriority and will buy just about anything that gets the job done -- or so the marketeers say.
Linux is just an OS core and does nothing interesting on its own. It's what people build on it that matters. So, it's entirely possible to have a really, really horrible Linux system. Fragmentation of standards will achieve that quite nicely.
Yes, but all the MSOffice dependents might realize that maybe a monopoly like Microsoft is a bad idea after all.
I'm more ticked off at the functionality of Office rather than the monopolization. Creating documents in Word is an interface nightmare. I just use Wordpad if I need something more flashy than plain text. Word is overkill for most stuff, and I don't understand what anyone sees in Excel and PowerPoint.
Most "business" software is purchased by executives. You can hardly blame Microsoft because Megacorp feels an integrated suite of software at a volume price is always better than letting employees choose whatever tools they
want to use.
Such is the horrible fact of life: the people who buy software are rarely the ones who use it. "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" is still very much true today, even though IBM is still super-expensive and not much more reliable than anything else.
"superior" doent mean its going to win
Depends on what is supirior. Ordinary people don't know jack about OS design, so they could care less if the core of the OS is good or not. If they want pushbuttons and Windows gives them pushbuttons, they're happy.
Frankly, I'm disgusted with GUI toolkits. Linux is still very much addicted to the CLI. That's what I liked most about Amiga. It was one of the very few machines -- ever -- to properly balance CLI and GUI interfaces together on the same platform.
Architecutally speaking, the Classic Mac is one of the worst systems ever made, but the GUIs were very consistent and attractive, thanks to Apple's interface guidelines. Right up to the end of MacOS 9, Apple fans were screaming about the supirior technology of the Mac.
Apple don't have Microsoft's killer instinct. They'd like to be Microsoft. IMO.
The big difference is that Microsoft knew software platforms are more valuable than hardware platforms. Apple hasn't grown out of that phase, yet, though having their OS core on BSD UNIX gives them a lot of flexibility to expand to new hardware markets whenever they want or must.
I'm probably the only person on the planet who would view the disappearance of Microsoft as a bad thing.
I'm number 2. A platform is just "a" platform until a strong central management steps in. Imagine what HTML would be without the W3C -- and I don't like the W3C at all.
Geeks can work in an ad-hoc world since they understand the technology and can shape it at will. Desktop computers must be fully designed for people who don't understand any of the guts -- and
don't want to. People buy Windows because they are willing to put up with a monopoly if it means they don't have to put up with geekdom. That's why I think Linux will never, ever be a real desktop system until someone just "steals" it and builds a proprietary system around it. Hence, the only truly successful version of UN*X in the destop world is MacOS X. Geeks don't understand how normal people think, and normal people don't know how geeks
or computers work.
The Amiga however, would never occupy higher than the #5 slot in the world of desktop computing, even with the disappearance of Microsoft.
Amiga needs to be fully modernized for that to happen. AmigaOS may have pushbuttons, but it has very old APIs and ways of thinking that are difficult for modern programmers to use, anymore. That's why I was hoping so much for DE instead of OS4. The DE idea was cool. OS4 is more like OS Forced.
I think a lot of chaos would occur in the software industry, but after a year or two, the number of software companies in existence would probably go up a thousandfold. Variety is a good thing.
But eventually, things would cool down and we'd have two or three mega corps to choose from. Variety doesn't last long in the OS market. Just look at cell phones and PDAs. The game console market works much the same way. I remember when practically every electronics company had a game machine. Today, SONY owns, what, 75%+ of the market?
The same dealer told schools that if they had an Amiga in the classroom they wouldn't get any donated computers and the big "Apple Education discount"..
That sounds typical, but what really burns me up is Apple's service life. MacOS 8 got, what, one update before you had to buy 8.5? Microsoft supported Win98 with updates and free, new software for
six years.
It's hard to look at Microsoft's support record and say they don't support their products. I can't say the same for Apple at all. If companies skimp on updates with all the competition from Microsoft, I doubt they'd do any better after MS disappeared without a trace.
audio formats have standardised nicely.
PC audio is still wholely inferior to anything in the home entertainment market. I think the SoundBlater monopoly
really hurt the PC market. Compared to the PC, the audio system in the PS/2 is simply incredible, and it bothers me that top-end cards like the Audigy still don't have compression and normalization as standard options -- which is mandatory for clip control. Don't even get me started on EAX, which is so horrible I
always turn off hardware acceleration with my Audigy.
They have? Then why hasn't someone told all the Audio equipment/software manufacturers
Audio has always been unimportant in the PC industry. People are still drooling over the addition of 7.1, which is very easy to do. I can't quit complaining evey time I slip on some headphones because the mixing and filtering standards are so poor.
Microsoftification, a word to add to the dictionaries ?
I find it disappointing that everyone complains Microsoft steals ideas and code from the Open Source scene, while at the same time, almost every Linux desktop looks just like a Windows machine -- sometimes even pixel-for-pixel.
Maybe they just feel safer cloning a monopoly that wouldn't dare dump on Open Source underdogs, as opposed to stealing designs from Apple. ;-)
MS has had people complaining since MS-DOS 5.0. Quarterdeck was mad because of the memory management and makers of defragmenters were mad because of the built in defragmenter.
Microsoft has a history of selling software they didn't write, and someone will always complain becuase their product wasn't chosen to be the Windows default. I doubt anyone realizes that the defragmenter in XP is actually a stripped-down Diskeeper. Symantec also wrote ScanDisk, but I heard there was some real controversy over that and MS and Symantec sued each other something awful.
