Comment Formats and Formats (Score 4) 152
Yes. It's slow.
1. I know that many of the JavaSoft division used StarOffice on the evaluation license because of Scott McNealy's directives to avoid MicroSoft Office. The file import and export routines worked well, and this allowed Sun employees to exchange Word files with the rest of the universe. It worked adequately on Solaris and various Windows platforms. The speed issues kept getting killed by Moore's law as we upgraded machines. It was unusable on the old Mr.Coffee Javastations, but so was everything.
2. One idea floating around Sun that never picked up steam was to help the industry formalize file formats. Remember that this was at the time that JavaSoft was the only group being able to pound out a working standard with reference code and conformance tests in under a year. The goal would be to work to disrupt the MicroSoft cash flow by creating a consortium of Lotus, Novell, Corel, StarOffice, Adobe, Oracle, and others to make a standardized, testable, and brandable file format that would allow new add on products and to cut of the monopoly profits from Office. There were a lot of fish frying, and this one never picked up steam.
3. Notice that the lack of standardized formats does kill innovation. Oracle has had some cool doucment summarizing technology for a long time. Other companies really understand how to manage change logs. None of these companies can afford changing file import formats everytime Microsoft has a whim.
4. The MicroSoft Office monopoloy grinds out long feature creep lists, and it works on the incredibly complex file formats. There are a couple companies doing reasonable business who spend their life reverse engineering the MicroSoft Office file format. I actually read an early draft of a paper describing the likely proprietary moves that Microsoft could make with XML and patent protection as part of the file structure. It's fairly nasty.
5. If Sun finally does buy these people out, Scott will probably make it free for individual users. The basic rule doesn't change; Sun wants you to use a Unix workstation instead of a PC.
1. I know that many of the JavaSoft division used StarOffice on the evaluation license because of Scott McNealy's directives to avoid MicroSoft Office. The file import and export routines worked well, and this allowed Sun employees to exchange Word files with the rest of the universe. It worked adequately on Solaris and various Windows platforms. The speed issues kept getting killed by Moore's law as we upgraded machines. It was unusable on the old Mr.Coffee Javastations, but so was everything.
2. One idea floating around Sun that never picked up steam was to help the industry formalize file formats. Remember that this was at the time that JavaSoft was the only group being able to pound out a working standard with reference code and conformance tests in under a year. The goal would be to work to disrupt the MicroSoft cash flow by creating a consortium of Lotus, Novell, Corel, StarOffice, Adobe, Oracle, and others to make a standardized, testable, and brandable file format that would allow new add on products and to cut of the monopoly profits from Office. There were a lot of fish frying, and this one never picked up steam.
3. Notice that the lack of standardized formats does kill innovation. Oracle has had some cool doucment summarizing technology for a long time. Other companies really understand how to manage change logs. None of these companies can afford changing file import formats everytime Microsoft has a whim.
4. The MicroSoft Office monopoloy grinds out long feature creep lists, and it works on the incredibly complex file formats. There are a couple companies doing reasonable business who spend their life reverse engineering the MicroSoft Office file format. I actually read an early draft of a paper describing the likely proprietary moves that Microsoft could make with XML and patent protection as part of the file structure. It's fairly nasty.
5. If Sun finally does buy these people out, Scott will probably make it free for individual users. The basic rule doesn't change; Sun wants you to use a Unix workstation instead of a PC.
