on Thu, Jan 20, 2005 at 06:05:13PM -0600, John Hasler (jhasler@debian.org) wrote:
> As to "Office", what is innovative about taking a bunch of
> applications and wadding them together in a huge blob?
Well, from a *business* model, it's pretty innovative, and paid off big
for Microsoft.
OT: In all fairness, one of the few real innovations in desktop
computing was the spreadsheet. First appearing as VisiCalc on the IBM
PC. Microsoft's introduction of Excel for the Mac was another major
landmark (though not an innovation).
And.... An argument I've been making for some years is that the office
suite is dead. If all your software is free and freely available,
there's no *competitive* advantage to tying it all together. Making it
work together, sure. But locking out other software? No.
While from a user-support perspective you might want to limit yourself
to a set of core apps, there's *no* sensible cost objection to having
OOo, Abiword, KOffice, and SIAG (as an example) installed on a system
and/or server. You're just apt-getting updates anyhow, it's trivial
whether you've got one or ten suites installed.
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Theres' some sort of cosmic synchronicity about telephones and plumbing.
- LRPD
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