[extropy-chat] Microsoft

[John K Clark]

"J. Andrew Rogers" <andrew at ceruleansystems.com>

> Since when did you start making arguments from popularity

If you're talking about communication standards, and I mean real standards,
I mean what people actually use not what a bunch of Linux snobs say they
should use, then I've always thought popularity was very important. If you
live in the western world English will tend to be more useful than
Serbo-Croatian or Esperanto most of the time.

Obviously if you were starting from scratch lots of people could and did
make more elegant mail programs than Outlook Express, but Microsoft didn't
have that luxury. Everything they made had to be compatible with everything
they made before, and they had to do it during a time when computer hardware
became thousands of times more powerful.

It's in the nature of things that real standards are resistant to change,
but that's OK because that is exactly the way a standard should be, changing
a standard is difficult and not worth doing unless there is a huge
improvement. The market has decided that Outlook Express works pretty well
and so it is not worth the time and hassle in changing over to an alternate
program if it were only a little bit better, it needs to be enormously
better. The market has decided those other programs are not enormously
better, it is possible that the market is wrong about that but I think it
has a better chance of being right than you do. And in the meantime it would
be foolish to pretend that you would never want to communicate with anyone
who used the most common mail program on the planet.

> How this is plausibly Eugen's problem is beyond me.

How is it plausible he is conforming to standards, real standards, if of all
the thousands of messages I read on all the lists I'm on Eugen's is the ONLY
one I have a problem with, the only one the most common mail program on
planet Earth has a problem with? I don't know what program Eugen is using
but I'll bet the help menu is in Esperanto. But if Eugen doesn't want me to
read his stuff that is certainly his right.

 > Are you a devout Christian yet?

Bless you my child, you've discovered my secret.

  John K Clark