Re: [school-discuss] Shocking news about Microsoft's ability to kill

["George D. Holmes" <gholmes@uark.edu>]

Absolutely right, Les.

A case in point, office suites. With licensing costs, migration costs,
security problems, etc., MS has made adoption of more recent versions of
Office difficult to stomach. Hence, MS hasn't been able to reach the
critical mass or "tipping point" (when folks decide they must upgrade in
order to be share files with others) as in years past.

So, with an opportunity created ... the "quirky" alternatives like
StarOffice 5.2, OpenOffice beta, etc. have seen continual development, and
now SO 6 OO.o 1.0, have helped grow that leak in the dam.


On Thu, 30 Oct 2003, Les Richardson wrote:

> Hi,
>
> So, I guess that begs the question... "What to do?".
>
> They're big. We're not. They have almost limitless resources. We don't.
> Can we "fight a war" on their terms? Nope.
>
> I would suggest:
>
> 1) Write good quality software that does solves the problems it's supposed
> to.
> 2) Make this available on the Internet under an open source license.
> 3) Goto 1.
>
> A very small hole in a dam.... can lead to very large results over time...
>
> Les
>
>
>
>

__________________________________________________________________
 George D. Holmes  Dept of Computer Science & Computer Engineering
 ENGR Hall 311,    University of Arkansas   Fayetteville, AR 72701
 479-575-6427 (FAX:5339)   gholmes@uark.edu   http://csce.uark.edu
__________________________________________________________________