MS sets standards (as if)

[Simon Bowring]

>English is the language of the Internet not simply because the 
>Americans invented the Internet and there are more American users 
>than any other nationality, but because it is by far the most popular 
>second language. 
>
>Word is the most commonly used format for the exchange of business 
>documents not because anybody has said it is a standard but because 
>Windows is the dominant operating system and most people have got 
>Word. 
>
>Outlook Express is the most widely used mail client and while it has yet 
>to achieve the dominance of Word it is well on the way to becoming a 
>de facto standard. 
>
>It is argued that unless "standards" are enforced (by whom?) then the 
>Internet will turn into the Tower of Babel. No chance. English is the 
>"standard" language of the Internet because more people can 
>understand it than any other language. 
>
>Like it or not Windows and Windows applications are becoming 
>"standards" for the same reason. 

You do not appear to understand what a standard is in the
context of the internet (or computer protocols in general):

Basically a standard is simply a complete written specification 
of how something must work. Internet standards are "open" 
meaning that they do not belong to anyone, and anyone can 
read them.  Often such standards are very complex.

Using such a standard, programmers are able to write software that
works with other programs written to the same standard (generally 
written by other programmers in other companies).

There are no public written standrads for ms's embrace-and-extend
broken software (there may be private one's within MS, but they 
are not in the public domain), so you can't write a program that 
conforms to their "standards".  You might argue that this doesn't
matter, you should just use MS, but you'd be wrong!

Microsoft Apps can only run on PCs (ok, some versions of some apps 
are available on Macs too), so the users of all other computers 
(you know the ones that do the serious work of running things, the 
Mainframes, Unix boxes (Linux, NetBSB, FreeBSD, AIX, Solaris, 
HP/UX, and the tens of unxies) and dozens of other operating systems) 
can't run these broken MS apps, and there is no possibility of them 
ever doing so.

There are also many other computers made by individual national
suppliers and other device types like PDAs and iPhones that all
handle email now today.  None of these systems can run MS's
broken monoplolistic trash.

Human languages like French or English, can be understood
by all speakers and new words can easily be assimilated
regardless of source. There is no theoretical reason why an
Eygyption cannot speak English, but a MVS mainframe can't run an 
MS Windows app, neither can a programmer look at the (unpublished)
MS standards and write a MS standards conformat email program.

Human languages and dynamic almost living things, and humans
are able to extract the meaning of a word from it's context
simply by hearing it used a few times - a computer program 
isn't like this - its written to do a task (much of which is 
defined in standrads), and that's what it does!  My pmmail will 
never grow, learn and  evolve into a package that can understand 
whatever email-format-du-jour the latest version of MS-Outlook 
is using this week!

We have standards precisly to allow different suppliers and 
different computers to be able to interwork! MS don't want that, 
don't like that, and do their best to "spoil" the efforts of the 
standards bodies (consistently, over and over again).

But, who cares?  MS software is generally very pretty! 
That's the analogue of the con-man smiling you as he relieves 
you of your livelihood!

You were certainly taken in!

Simon