Re: Way OT: Adam Smith and Software Markets

["Marin David Condic" <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org>]

That's a good example of customer demand eventually driving a market. I
absolutely agree that open data formats are a very important thing for
customers. For something like a word processor, this is especially important
because documents may have to be dealt with over a long stretch of time or
be shared on a variety of hardware & OS's. ASCII is excellent for that - if
limited in capability. You see an example of it with HTML, although that has
flaws with respect to incompatibilities in different implementations. I
share Dr. Leif's enthusiasm for XML in this regard and I think it would be a
fine format for storage of lots of things. If someone were contemplating
building an Ada-Office product, storing word processor, spreadsheet, rolodex
data, etc in XML would leave the door open for lots of other players to
utilize the data in some form. That would make it an attractive choice for
individuals and organizations to adopt.

MDC
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Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jsf.mil/

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Preben Randhol <randhol+news@pvv.org> wrote in message
news:slrnb6bvai.4h4.randhol+news@kiuk0152.chembio.ntnu.no...
>
> One evidence of this is that more and more governments are getting aware
> of the problem of locking their information in to one propitarian format
> which requires a certain software to access. The Peru vs Microsoft story
> shows this quite clearly. If one had a format which was accessable by
> any software (as its spec was not hidden) would lead to more
> competition. It wouldn't matter if I wrote my document in say AdaOrd [*]
> and you wrote it in Word as long as both where fully compliant with the
> format. Then it would be how well this program worked with other
> products that counted more. Say AdaOrd was excellent in Linux while Word
> was still the best for Windows, then matter of plattform would not
> count. This is also why you won't see a MS Office for Linux until
> Microsoft gives up in the OS department.
>