File extensions, was: Re: [Coco] Portal-9 bug report

[Theodore Evans (Alex)]

On Oct 18, 2004, at 7:43 PM, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:

> At 07:23 PM 10/18/04 -0700, Alex wrote:
>> There were enough systems with better methods that predated Win 95 
>> that
>> it didn't take a crystal ball see that MS was putting forth a really
>> poor solution.
>
> Just because something existed doesn't mean it mattered. In latter-day
> consumer products, only Mac and PC ever really mattered. And in that 
> world,
> precedent was all internal (or stolen from each other).

It does mean that they needed a crystal ball.  They could have seen the 
problems without a crystal ball, if they had only bothered to look.

> So with perfect hindsight, you find it easy to see what MS did wrong. 
> Too
> bad nobody *except* Apple or MS ever did anything right enough to 
> succeed
> as consumer products, eh? Their crystal balls were so doggone cloudy, 
> they
> perfected themselves into insignificance.

I could see it in '95 when MS did it, hardly hindsight.  MS got a 
foothold because they rode the coattails of IBM, and IBM had so much 
influence because they were already big in the mainframe and business 
machine market that everyone feared big blue.

> By and large, such retrospective criticism tends more toward envy. ;)

More like the horror that the quality of products and systems never 
mattered much.  The simple fact is that MS has never made any changes 
to their products with the aim to improve real functionality, merely to 
make them more marketable.

-- 
Theodore (Alex) Evans | 2B v ~2B = ?