[extropy-chat] Microsoft (was: singularity conference at stanford)

[KAZ]

----- Original Message ----

> Outlook Express is showing up decades late to the game with a  
> defective implementation of old standards.  No one can require any  
[...]
> Since when did you start making arguments from popularity,  
> particularly the modest popularity of something unambiguously  
> defective?  Are you a devout Christian yet?

The "it shouldn't be popular because it's technologically inferior" myth is something people should have outgrown after the well-deserved failure of Beta.
 
What is best is rarely what is most cutting-edge, or most satisfying to we who are tech-savvy.
 
This is an example of why the free market works so much better than socialism and ivory-tower planning.
 
Sure, Beta had slightly higher audio and video reproduction quality versus VHS, but even VHS was better than broadcast TV, and most people used their VCRs to record TV, not buy massive catalogues of commercially printed movies. So when Beta was 30 minutes long and VHS was two hours AND cost half as much, the superior product was VHS.
 
Back when OS/2 was trying to compete with Windows and DOS, it required 8 to 16 megs or RAM and most computers came with 2 to 4 megs. This alone was sufficient to make Windows the superior product, preemptive multithreading and object-oriented OS not holding a candle to being accessible to the common computer owner.
 
Outlook clearly contains features, including "comes with the machine and works well enough", which make it superior to whatever you wish people used instead.
 
Just as they did not feel the great need to have preemptive multitasking, microscopically better video, et cetera, they don't care about...what is it you're complaining that Outlook doesn't do? Some kind of object embedding? 
 
Personally, I prefer to use pine on my linux box...I've been using Linux since 1993...but I end up mostly using Yahoo Mail beta, because it's more universally accessible.
 
But Outlook works just fine for most people, most of the time.

> No one is going to make you switch email clients, but it is asinine  
> to suggest that the rest of the world should accommodate your  
> trivially fixable defect.  How this is plausibly Eugen's problem is  
> beyond me.

It is reasonable for him to suggest...not demand...that people accomodate Outlook, because by your own admission it's as used as all other mail clients combined. If someone on this list starts spouting German or Latin, /I/ can read it, but the majority of Internet users cannot, so it would be reasonable to suggest using English, though German has been "rationalized", with a perfectly consistent spelling and grammar and English is such a hodge-podge, disdained by the ivory tower language theorists. 
 
This would be true even if the guy was writing in Esperanto or Loglang, or some other language thought to be technologically "superior" to all natural languages.
 
Any time the "experts" find that the masses aren't adopting their "smarter" standards, there's probably a good reason. 
--
Words of the Sentient:
That government is best which governs the least,
because its people discipline themselves. -- Thomas Jefferson

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