The War Of The Word 511
atari_kid writes "For who didn't know Microsoft has a internal blogging service, which is becoming popular with their employees. And even some of their high level managers have their own blog like Chris Pratley, a group program manager (GPM) for Word2002 (OfficeXP) project. Mr. Pratley just blogged on his 'personal philosophical' conversion from a Mac geek to a Microsoft devotee & his interesting perspective on the 'Word Processor' wars of the mid-90's and why Microsoft won."
Must be difficult... (Score:1, Insightful)
i guess it must be difficult read a blog which starts word to read any entry.
Sorry, couldn't resist ;-)
Martin
Digging his own grave? (Score:5, Insightful)
He admired Apple for its elegance and derided MS for its substandard products; he was rejected by Apple, but offered a job at MS.
Ouch.
It should be said that later, he comes to terms with MS not necessarily on the grounds that they make good product, but that they are a good business. Funny, that.
Tech support (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:He missed one point (Score:3, Insightful)
When was the last time you jammed a Quicktime into your TPS cover sheet?
Re:Get used to disappointment (Score:5, Insightful)
That's practically a selling point. (Score:5, Insightful)
Until printers can print animated printouts, I'll be happy with word processor programs that don't embed movies or music in documents. (in fact, after the fiasco of Clippy, I don't want ANYTHING animated in the presence of my word processor documents!)
That's the problem with blogs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Next thing you know, Ken Lay and Dick Cheney will have a blog about how their hearts are breaking for the poor unemployed, oppressed everyday Joe... and people will buy it because hey, it's on a blog.
Interpretation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Excuse my tinfoil hat, but wasn't that about the time that Windows finally stopped sucking utterly, and became a tool that everyone, including PHBs, could use? Isn't this the era of PC Magazine, and John Dvorak, and everyone's grandmother getting a PC?
Word was never technically superior, it merely appealed to a broader (and simpler) audience. There is a difference. Word won because it got reviews from trade rags. Word won due to a cultural shift - where document presentation became more important than its content, where a document's formatting is more important than its timely production. Word is the Guardent [guardent.com] of word processors.
In answer to the folks who claim WP was a lousy product, I have two words: Reveal Codes.
I only jumped to Word97 from PC Word 5, then only because it was a 32bit app. By then, WP was dead and buried. I made the jump to Word2000 at work, then to OOo, which I use under the radar to publish all of my documents, typically via PDF.
Reverse Engineering (Score:5, Insightful)
OEMs preinstalling Office (Score:5, Insightful)
Chris Pratley (Score:5, Insightful)
I rather like Microsoft's newfound interest in what they call "transparancy." I think that the blogging trend inside MS is a good thing-- it is surprising how little the company curtails the content on their employee's blogs.
--- JRJ
Re:He missed one point -- Yeah Like (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, like I do that every day.
Interesting Stuff Comes Out Late (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure more than a few of the bright employees at MS have some stories waiting to be told. OTOH, they're probably still grateful for the stock option wealth of the last 2 decades and feel some loyalty to the company that has done both good and bad.
Maybe Bob Woodward ought to interview some of them....
MS Office good enough (Score:1, Insightful)
You lost me... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but try as I may, you completely lost me after that comment.
Short sighted design gives M$ a bad name among developers - and by people who use computers more than the "average consumer", like say: at work.
Microsoft: Bottom line - push product - get money.
There's nothing "pure" what-so-ever about this statement. You may as well be writing about how you learned to appreciate McDonalds.
It is usually easier... (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/20/ms_history /
Re:It's over, so soon? (Score:4, Insightful)
They have also won the browser war, yes, alternatives exist, however the majority of web users still use IE.
Just because a war is over and is won doesn't mean that there is no more room for fighting. Just look at what's still going on in Iraq.
I call fake blog (Score:4, Insightful)
$5 says this "blog" is another such flake.
As much as it pains me (Score:3, Insightful)
I think this, despite what the slashdot techy/programmer crowd may think, is spot on. MS has a reputation for rushing stuff out the door and for selling borken software, but the fact is that most of their stuff was "good enough" where it counted. Then over time they hack away and hack away until they mostly get it right. Other software companies could learn for them on this strategy although perhaps things are a bit different today.
This is cute! (Score:5, Insightful)
How about remember when EULA's didn't prohibit benchmarking under threat of well-funded legal assault?
Yes, I remember when good vendors were proud to show the world what their products could do.
How about it, Chris? We all know you're reading /. today to see how your blog is being received. You're in the inside. How about doing your part to open up benchmarking of all MS products again?
Word is The Winner (Score:3, Insightful)
But I gotta note that Word drives me up the g.d. fscking wall with its habit of altering formats for no apparent reason. Indentions, fonts, everything just changes at random because I press spacebar, enter, backspace or delete. Sometimes half a page of prior paragraphs will change because I pressed a button while editing an entirely different paragraph.
The damn bloody thing does not behave. I could get better cooperation from a two-year-old child. Don't you tell me I must be doing something wrong, or that I must need to get an upgrade. Bah. It's been this way for years.
MacWrite never acted like this. StarOffice neither. This has nothing to do with Linux Zealotry or Open Source Fantacism - I could care less about any of that.
Yes, Microsoft is the winner: When it comes to pure teeth-splintering, hair-shredding frustration, Microsoft, congratulations, you've got 'em all beat, and you probably always will.
Bastards.
Re:Interpretation? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's important to remember that businesses used to run on personal secretaries and typing pools. WordPerfect had an "expert" blank-screen UI that appealed to these users. They could remember Ctrl+F7 (rather than a printer icon) because they really had few other professional responsibilities. Knowing the WP command set warranted a significantly higher pay for secretaries in those days.
The shift to GUI PCs and MS Word allowed companies to force their PHBs to type their own memos. They then could dismiss/reassign most of the admin staff for considerable cost savings. This wasn't so much a "cultural shift" but a matter of pure $$$.
The real reason Word "won": (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone remember Sprint by Borland? Of course you don't.
It's also the reason Access took over and not Paradox.
oh... It had more than a little to do with why no one uses Quattro by Borland also.
Borland's first line of Windows versions of their software had to be developed with VERY little knowledge of the Windows API.
It's funny that he doesn't mention any of the lawsuit wars that went on between MS and Borland when Windows first came out.
They sued Borland over having drop-down menus in their products... and won.
Re:Tech support (Score:4, Insightful)
IIRC so did M$. I remember calling M$ tech support a couple of times (actually never to actually get tech support though, I was in MIS and I was curious about their MIS system, which ran on Vaxen at the time).
Please... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like MS would rather have a half-baked product now than a great one later (or maybe ever). Nice. It does totally ring with the sense of their products in my experience, be they Mac or WIn platforms. They have to understand that they see things from the perspective of those who have been working with incremental versions of their stuff for so long - and you get this sense from the minutia in the blog - that they have no sense of an outsider, pulling up to a computer that they just unwrapped, and trying to get some plain old writing done by using Word. It's like being dropped into the cockpit of a plane and being told to drive. It does dozens of non-intuitive things before you even get to the annoying parts, and it's ALL design. They know this. Every so often that ship something that makes good design sense and does breakthru stuff - but mostly their work is fraught with details that get in the way rather than accellerate your work.
Re:Word is The Winner (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Too ironic - Definitely Irony +2 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:MS's blogging (Score:5, Insightful)
Excellent question. Maybe I've got my tinfoil hat on too tight, but I wouldn't put it past Microsoft's management to have a plan akin to this: "Hey, go out and make Microsoft look good. Speak as individuals. Tell the world that we're really NOT the Evil Empire."
Microsoft has tried to manipulate public opinion [informationweek.com] of them before. Maybe they're just getting more subtle. When the big money doesn't work, go soft-touch.
Very good article (Score:5, Insightful)
Half of software is marketing; half is engineering. Too bad some people still haven't realized it....
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Re:That's it -- version 7 (Score:4, Insightful)
And at Version 7 we change the entire file structure to demolish the compeition and force a new upgrade cycle, after seeding the CIO with a free copy.
You'd better bet the whole company will upgrade after said CIO finds out no one else in the company can open his memos saved in the new default format.
Re:You lost me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's method: Design a product usable by the maximum amount of people that has enough functionality to keep most people using it.
Better than: design the perfect feature-laden product which will be impossible for 90% of people to learn.
Remember microsoft gets paid per unit sold, regardless of how much you use the software.
Re:Interpretation? (Score:4, Insightful)
two words: Reveal Codes
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I always have my Word set up to show all hidden characters but it still doesn't show all codes.
I use it mostly for amusement to look at the documents that I receive from other people and see the inane and repetitious page formatting marks that they set, unset, reset, and move. It gives me a sense of how much extra trouble everyone else has constructing a document when their problems could be solved if they would plan their page formatting ahead of time.
Re:As much as it pains me (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not saying that Microsoft was wrong or they were using a bad business model. They made some very good strategic decisions. But IMHO the business model only worked so well because they are Microsoft.
Interesting, but what about the paranoid ranting? (Score:4, Insightful)
With respect, there are certainly plenty of lower-than-the-common-denominator internet users willing to throw an egg for no particularly good reason, but this writer is strikingly dishonest in his defense of his employer.
Microsoft is a monopolist who has profited tremendously from shipping user-antaganostic code under cover of standards-lock-in. This is hardly an "outrageous" accusation; rather, it's been established in the courts, but far more, it's common knowledge and indeed, a running joke.
The company's story is interesting because, when they see their monopoly threatened, they are capable of rising to the occasion and doing good work. But they are a classic victim of their success, indeed, at many times a classic monopolist, and they often have acted it. When there was no incentive for them to do a good job, they did a terrible one, smirking all the way to the bank.
And they are crystal clear in their mission - not to "provide better products faster" or whatever the PR materials say this week, but to enrich themselves. And if there is a choice between enriching themselves and providing better software faster, they make the "right" choice every time. But should Chris suggest I am a "thug" for saying so, I hope he will include the U.S. Department of Justice - who advanced the same idea, and prevailed in court.
Chris wants to breathlessly paint his company's critics with the straw-man tar brush - as he does so, he is being dishonest.
I did find his writing on his work to be fascinating, and I'd say he expresses himself well, and it's no surprise he's found the success he has within the company. But he curiously glosses over the role that OEM bundling played in the success of the Office franchise.
You see, as Microsoft sat on the backs of the computer manufacturers and twisted arms, it had an excellent position to "entice" bundling deals that would choke off a 3rd party software market like, say, office softawre, by making sure that their own products were conveniently already included on new computers for a reasonable price.
This is hardly as clear cut as what they did to control the browser or media player landscape, but does anyone (outside of a Microsoft manager with a certain proprietary interest in it being more about his own skill) have the audacity to suggest Word won the format war purely on its merits?
Re:Word is The Winner (Score:1, Insightful)
An example: I couldn't get a top margin to change. Turns out, WP requires you to place the cursor at the margin, above any text, before it will change the margin. Why? That's just fscking stupid. I'm on the PAGE, it should KNOW to change the margin on the PAGE I'm on.
See, Word at one time had a much more "object oriented" view of document creation that really fit a hell of a lot easier into most people's minds. You didn't work with a stream of characters and codes, you worked with pages and paragraphs and words and styles. It rocked.
But that was then. I completely agree that current incarnations of Word suck. All that "Auto" bullshit. I turn it all off to the greatest extent possible, and it becomes barely usable. But it WAS a good program a few versions back, at least for most uses. It was intuitive, discoverable, and yet still rather powerful.
Now it's just bloated with bullshit attempts to second guess and auto-reformat what you're typing as you type, and it seems incapable of getting it right.
Like I said, turn as much of that shit off as you can in the options, and you'll be much happier with it.
Re:Chris Pratley (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's over, so soon? (Score:3, Insightful)
Or, to sum up what you just said:
You switched back to Office because that's what you wanted in the first place?
You just "evaluated" Open Office based on the fact that you wanted to use Microsoft Office all along.... that's just wierd. It's not a load of frustration, you guys just weren't smart enough to evaluate your needs before you decided on your tool, that's all. You can't blame OOo for the fact that it's not Office. That's like blaming a Lincoln Continental for not being a Corvette. You can't just compare two things that happen to be in the same general category but do different things and then blame one of them for not being the other just because you didn't pick the one you really wanted to begin with.
Re:Interpretation? (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree totally.
I really hated to give up my reval codes, but I had to use something that wouldn't crash.
It wasn't that Word killed WP, it was WP commiting suicide.
Re:Interpretation? (Score:5, Insightful)
WP *and* Word were/are the wrong tool for that job.
Re:As much as it pains me (Score:3, Insightful)
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And of course it helps if they also make a strategic error because they are under so much pressure.
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To this:
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Details like great design were not critical to most customers, so that didn't really make it into the products, except where it mattered to the customer
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And it all makes perfect sense.
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but the fact is that most of their stuff was "good enough" where it counted
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Take for example the rush to beat OS/2 to market. "Good enough" was, at that time, any GUI OS that would be next on market shelves.
Is America so repressed that easy access to pr0n drove the whole WWW boom? I mean, really, if they're not technologically oriented, what are the majority of people doing with a GUI OS? Did we really need to supply the MS empire just to give Americans solitaire?
Windows isn't X. Windows is KDE or Gnome. Why wasn't some sort of WinX with a small window manager the next step above DOS? For the billions of dollars that have poured into Microsoft through direct sales or investing, and for all the pain of squelched competition, what did Microsoft really give us?
95% of people do six things with a computer: Browse the web, e-mail (often through an HTTP interface), (new) store camera photos, listen to music, maybe print a document, maybe type a letter. Firefox, pine, usb, mplayer, lpd, and easyedit. Those six core functionalities are worth a $50+ billion dollar empire?
Like most Americans, I'm barely hanging on... Where did I go wrong?
Re:Lie of Omission? (Score:4, Insightful)
Please.
Re:WP 5.1 - those were the days (Score:5, Insightful)
WordPerfect Corporation vs Microsoft Corporation
1) WP - promote senior assembly programmers as the new Windows programmers, MS - hire new graduates and put them to work under former assembly programmers.
2) WP - lights out at 5pm, MS - burn the midnight oil.
3) WP - bet the farm on OS/2, MS - bet the farm on Windows while paying lip service to OS/2.
4) WP - try to compete with traditional strengths, MS - Work with IBM to create a CUA, then change the CUA once everyone else adopts it.
5) WP - hated MS so much that they used Borland OWL, MS - made the compiler, made the dlls and APIs, didn't tell anyone about it if they could have an advantage for awhile.
6) WP - had incompetent management promoted from within including rampant nepotism, MS - hired management from outside, promoted from within when it identified talent.
The list goes on and on...
Re:The Old New Thing (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh? Ok, I read a good bit of his blog for the current month, and looked at the titles for March, and I have found absolutely nothing to link his blog to what you said.
That is, I don't get it. What are you talking about?
Cue the Clippy joke! (Score:3, Insightful)
OSS (Score:4, Insightful)
Kinda like how we come to terms with OSS not necessarily on the grounds that it makes good product, but that it's an idealistic philosophy. Funny that.
I'll tell you why WP lost (Score:3, Insightful)
Also contrary to this guys take it was NEVER about quality. If it was Word Perfect would have won out.
btw I'd still rather use WP 6.1 over any version of Word even today. Word is infuriating to work with as it constantly has to do things "its way". I just recently was updating my resume which hasn't been touched in years and the act of just adding a simple bullet point in line with the others made me want to smash my head into my monitor.
Windows. (Score:5, Insightful)
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS is still the best CUI based word processing program ever made. But they completely fucked themselves over with Windows.
WordPerfect Corp. lived in denial, claiming that their loyal customers would stick with them in the DOS world and not migrate to Windows. They didn't even think about making a Windows version until MS Word was eating their testicles.
Re:Word is The Winner (Score:1, Insightful)
The one thing I've still not figured out is the interaction between outline numbering and header numbering. Seems when I try to do one it screws up the other.
Consequently, I avoid numbered lists. Grumble, grumble, grumble.
Re:Interpretation? (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet as Tom De Marco in his excellent book "Slack" points out... what this means is PHBs (myself included) now spend huge amounts of time writing documents that previously we would have dictated to assistants and worrying about formating that they would have sorted for us.
The average sec gets what... $20,000 ? The average senior exec gets $100,000+... and if 25% of their time is in things that a sec could do.
Is it a real cost saving or has a perceived cost saving actually cost us more.
I propose going back to troff, perfect formating, perfect control....
And no sodding powerpoint
Except... (Score:4, Insightful)
We know there were undocumented Windows APIs. That wasn't the question.
Re:Lie of Omission? (Score:2, Insightful)
- Microsoft (not Dell, no) decided to bundle an application that did not work with the OS they were shipping with the box.
- All the Corel applications I've ever used in Windows run fine. But of course when it comes to "WP Lite" Corel somehow ran into the problem with the "hidden APIs" and "WP Lite" was diabolically disabled.
So this is your evidence that Microsoft deliberately "broke" WP. Correct?it's not about quality (Score:3, Insightful)
First, it is naive to think that there is a single "best" piece of software for everybody. Is there a single "best" car? A single "best" phone company? A single "best" suit of clothes? A single best food? They tried the one-size-fits-all in the planned economies of Russia and China, and you know how well that worked. It seems naive to think that there is any single word processor that works well for 90% of the people.
Second, the quality differences are irrelevant to most people. Lotus Smartsuite, StarOffice, WordPerfect, etc. were almost certainly all good enough for at least 90% of all users. But the fact is that no amount of lowering the prices of those other products made them competitive.
Today, people buy Microsoft Word even though they can get OpenOffice for free. Why? It's not because Microsoft Word has more buttons or more features, it is because the only way people can be sure that they can read Microsoft Word documents is by buying Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word may also happen to be a well-engineered word processor, but the need to read Word's proprietary format was the thing that assured Microsoft Word adoption half a dozen years ago, and it still is.
what a maroon (Score:2, Insightful)
Is it that hard to believe? Let's look at the Windows user base. The majority of the users are novices. MS markets their product to novices and people with business clout more than any other subgroups.
So how does he acertain that GUIs are indeed for power users? That's evidently what he's implying. Sounds like he's been thoroughly indoctrinated: it'd take roughly a year, I s'pose, to be brainwashed in an environment where you spend all your time, even if you're zealotous about your opposing stance - as he was.
Personally, I always get frustrated when I have to use a Windows machine. I used to think that Windows Explorer was an elegant and simplistic file manager, and I wanted something like it for Linux. Then I learned how to more effectively use BASH; I learned regexes, BASH scripting, and other such things that relate to CLI. And now? I'm constantly wishing for regexes in Windows when searching for files, listing files, or what have you. Yet there's no such functionality.
Even something as simple as file management is very un-powerful in Windows. It pisses me off thta he's got the gall to make such statements. Maybe he simply doesn't know?
History Repeating. (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder which company is jealously guarding their file formats now... I wonder how MS Word would have grown if the DMCA existed then.
Re:The Old New Thing (Score:3, Insightful)
OpenOffice.org, take note: (Score:3, Insightful)
For OpenOffice.org to achieve widespread adoption, this is something we need to start doing.
We need to take the most fucked-up Word
There should be an OOo team dedicated to just this.
In fact, if I were in charge of the OOo 2.0 project, I'd put the bulk of my resources into it, and make everything else secondary.
A secondary group will be feature-tracking. If Office has a feature, OOo is going to have it. It doesn't have to be easier to use; most of Office's features are difficult to use as it is.
Once people are using OOo as much or more than Office, then you can start futzing with aesthetic concerns, code beautification, and other issues you like.
I understand Microsoft itself works something like this. Of course, that's the real reason they dominate the market, more than anything else!
Re:Microsoft's most valuable soldier in Word Wars (Score:5, Insightful)
Much as I dislike alot of microsoft stuff, this is just over the top. There are two software areas that microsoft does fairly well - Office apps and RAD development (as opposed to high end server development enviroments).
My biggest gripe with microsoft is the abuse of monopoly powers - the fact that you cant for love nor money get office for linux (except via third party stuff like Wine projects). Thats abuse of a monopoly position of operating systems.
Office is, however, a reasonable suite. Its not the best at everything by any means, but you would be an idiot to suggest its the worst. In fact, some of the user interface stuff in office was genuinely innovative - like the background spell check with squiggly lines under misspelt words. Word 95 was the first to do this from memory, and certainly the first major word processor that could.
The killer app that microsoft makes is not windows, its office. And its with a good reason - its actually very good software. The number of people who run it under wine on linux or on OSX is a strong statement of its quality. If its an undocumented standard for file formats, well, thats because storing documents in HTML and then XML came way later than microsoft's office suite. It doesn't mean that its time to move to better standards for document storage, but at the time microsoft developed this software (Ie., in the days of word 3.0 onwards) pretty much nobody stored documents in XML (for space reasons alone - Hard drive capacities of 20-40 Megabytes were common).
Just my 2c worth, will be considered flamebait by some no doubt.
Michael
Re:That's the problem with blogs... (Score:3, Insightful)
Give me an example where the New York Times stated that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I don't think you understand how journalism works, or can work. Journalists frequently report statements by experts or interested parties. They try to accurately capture the words and affiliation of the person speaking or writing. It is up to the reader to assess the credibility of the source.
You seem to want journalists to decide who is right and who is wrong. The best they can do is dig up facts or statements supporting both sides and present them all to the reader.
If the President says that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, that is news. Reporting that statement does not mean the journalists think it's true, merely that it's newsworthy.
Re:Digging his own grave? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonetheless, what MS did is something that, essentially, would not have been nearly so illegal had it not been so successful; many who are not MS apologists might still admit that others who have been wronged by Microsoft have done just the same thing--Apple, RealNetworks, and Netscape. Never is this justification for illegal activities, but it should be noted, too, that what Microsoft did--the strictly illegal parts--were statutorily illegal, in the sense that speeding is statutorily illegal; I personally do not find much of it to be morally repugnant in the way that rape or murdur are morally repugnant (to get some perspective here). A corporation has no spirit, no ethos, and no criminal culpability (despite the claims of corporate criminal law). A corporation exists for the sole pursuit of profit.
As for morality, it's a tough call what morally is right. If Microsoft stimulates the economy, provides jobs, and pushes innovation, perhaps they aren't so bad. On the other hand, if they drive rivals out of business, crush competition, and stifle innovation, they seemingly leave a trail of broken enterpreneurs in their wake. In other words, I don't know.
Regardless, I was arguing initially that Microsoft aren't so stupid. Not that they are the ``good guys''. ;)
Re:It's over, so soon? (Score:3, Insightful)
Congratulations. You are now vendor locked. You may no longer choose to use other products that may have better/different features or cost less.
Have nice day and please continue to deposit money into our accounts on a regular basis.
Thank you
Management at MS.
Re:Save the children, please. (Score:3, Insightful)
$300K. Wow. Thats an astounding chunk of change. Let's see now, the LA Unified School District's 2003 budget [k12.ca.us] was $403 million dollars (out of just under $5 billion in revenue), while Microsoft's total revenue figures for the same year [microsoft.com] were $32 billion dollars.
Even ignoring (for your argument's sake) that it's legal to pirate and steal commercial software, and even assuming that the school district indeed paid $5M (which is not true [bsa.org]), $300K is equal to 4 hours of budget expenditures by the district and 1/29th of a day's revenue for Microsoft. So I have trouble reconciling this with your claim that "Microsoft is stealing from children", as if some kids in San Mateo were denied their lunch so Microsoft could pad their books.
BTW, just in case you fail to read the BSA press release, here's a relevant quote:
I suggest you send a nastygram to all these companies for their part in the "extortion" of "cash-strapped" schools.Thanks for the opening, I love looking up links like these.
Want some more, bugni man?
It's Bungi, please. And yes, sure. Hit me again.
That Microsoft has bullied cash strapped public schools over copying stupid stuff like M$ Word is a shameful matter of public record
I think we've taken care of the "cash strapped" part. That you consider "M$ Word" to be "stupid" is another matter, and I don't see how enforcement of a license is "shameful" or "bullying", except from your peculiar point of view. I suppose you also believe that "sharing" copyrighted music is A-OK. Do you regularly shoplift at Wal-Mart as well?
Free software, of course, comes with no such strings attached
Of course it doesn't! That's why the LA School District dumped "M$" and went to Free Software in 1998, right? They did that, right? I mean, since "M$" "bullied them" to the tune of "$5M" and essentially bankrupted them, they must have dumped "Windoze" and gone to Debian. In 1998. Right?
I'm happy people like you and him are bothered by my little posts.
No, not bothered. Merely amused. Entertained at seeing you trip all over your bogus arguments, certainly.