RE: RE: Portable GUI (was Re: Future with Ada)

["Robert C. Leif, Ph.D." <rleif@rleif.com>]

From: Bob Leif
To: Ted Dennison et al.
From my experience in business, managerial incompetence and stupidity are
the cause of many disasters. This is one of the main reasons Dilbert is very
successful. IBM did not understand the PC revolution and tried to use OS/2
as a means to sell their proprietary hardware, the microchannel. This killed
O/S2 and greatly helped Microsoft. WordPerfect switched to Windows,
abandoned their very successful look and feel, and did a poor job
implementing their code. That helped make Word. Lotus junked Improv and
never incorporated any of its functionality into 123. That greatly helped
Excel. It took literally years to rewrite Dbase in C++ for Windows. That
helped Access. I do not know of any well designed reliable Office type
products.

No one has tried to market a well engineered office suite base on an
international standard. An XML security blanket should provide sufficient
risk reduction to permit the adoption of a new technology. Even Microsoft
provides XML output for Excel and other products.
-----Original Message-----
From: comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org
[mailto:comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org]On Behalf Of Ted Dennison
Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2001 12:54 PM
To: comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
Subject: Re: RE: Portable GUI (was Re: Future with Ada)


In article <mailman.1008747421.26661.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org>, Robert C.
Leif,
Ph.D. says...
>One of the major reasons for Microsoft's success is the technical
>incompetence of its competitors. First they were dumb enough to try to beat

Microsoft certainly likes to spread this story (check their anti-trust
arguments
sometimes). But I'm not really enamored of any theory that depends on there
being some kind of mass incompetence between large amounts of diverse
organizations and individuals who have no connection to each other
(according to
the theory) but coincidental ones. For one thing, it doesn't make a very
good
theory, scientificly, as there are no predictions one can make from it to
test
it.

For instance, lets take the alternative theory that everyone is equally
(in)compentent, but that everything's basicly a crap shoot. Whenever you
talk
about gambling, in the long run the odds favor the party with the most
money.
This theory would predict that if any software company were to get in a
dominant
financial position, it could just outlast anyone it competes with because it
will have the resources to survive blunders that will take down the lesser
companies. This theory may not be fully correct, but at least it explains
*why*
the winners and losers are who they are, and gives you something you can
draw
testable conculsions from.

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html

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