Re: Bill Gates mentions Linux
Joachim Feise (jfeise@ICS.uci.edu)
Tue, 10 Mar 1998 21:14:47 -0800
spunkanado wrote:
>
> On Tue, 10 Mar 1998, Seth Golub wrote:
> > Bill Gates writes:
> >
> > > In other words, Microsoft gets no revenue except for innovation that
> > > goes so far beyond what they already have that it's worth the
> > > trouble to switch.
> > But most people I know who upgrade MS Word do so because they can no
> > longer read the files given to them by people who use the latest
> > version. As long as there are people setting up new systems, there
> > will be a market for whatever version MS chooses to sell.
>
> So the fact that word 6 has drivers to read word 97 and beyond files
> is something "most people" cant grasp? Or is it that "most people" are
> sheep and like to stand in fields all day and bleet?
You forget that these drivers only exist because people complained.
MS did not provide these drivers when Office 97 came out.
The same holds for the 'save as Word95' option in Word97. Files were *not* saved
in Word95 format, but in RTF, which caused some formatting to vanish. MS *had*
to provide the correct driver after people complained and threatened to switch
to the competitor's product, which (fortunately) still exists.
-JoeF