[PLUG] Windows Apps for Unix?

[A Braunsdorf]

In message <200008170423.e7H4NEI14192@lore.cs.purdue.edu>, Daniel Brian Czerwon
ky writes:
>
> It may be crap to you, but who can argue with the success of the product?

It's too dangerous to trust your livelihood to, and from your other
comments you know that too.  You just haven't thought it through
yet. :-)

> I've done thousands of spreadsheets in my 10+ years as an accountant,
> and I was always pretty impressed by what could be accomplished with
> Excel.  No, it's not perfect, but neither do it's users have the capacity
> or need to use even 10 percent of it's capability.

I'm not saying they aren't good products as far as features and
user interface go, I'm saying...

> An even bigger problem exists though, and you've somewhat aluded to
> it with your comments about file formats - the business world simply
> cannot manage information efficiently - there is too much of it, and not
> enough people with the ability to do it.

When you use, say, MS Excel, you are converting your business data
from a form everyone can use and understand (formulas and columns
of numbers) into a format that no one outside of Microsoft knows
or understands.  Microsoft has your data held hostage- without
their software, all your files are useless.  This is bad.

Furthermore, Microsoft can (has, and probably will again) change
those formats- sometimes to new ones that are not completely
compatible.  (Powerpoint 98 on MacOS, for example.)

It is a really bad move to keep the only copy of anything valuable
(your thesis, the books for your comapny, an important presentation)
in an undocumented format.  There's no guarantee you'll ever see
that data again.  There's certainly low confidence it'll be useful
in ten years.

> I think issue of file formats is completely lost on the average user - 
> all they care about is saving their data for later.  They can already
> copy and paste between spreadsheets, right?  To a user the endproduct
> of a spreadsheet is the printed document and a file that can later be
> modified, not the formatted file.

Not if Microsoft changes the rules.  Then you're screwed.

"But they won't," you say, "Big Bill Gates is my friend."

Well, tell your friend Bill to publish and widely distribute the
file formats his company is using.  Then if they go south, we can
write our own programs to get >our< data back.  It's ours, not
theirs, and it's dangerous to hand it all over to them with no
assurance we can get it back.

I've heard rumor that the next version of Office is going to work
exclusively in XML.  Here's to hoping it's true and they don't try
to (as they have in the past) bend the standards to not be standard
so other people still can't compete with them.

ab