Re: CSS is doomed (10 years per version ?!?)

> incremental updates or feature revisions to take that long. Office
> comes out with a new version every 1-3 years. While I agree that

I seem to remember that one of Microsoft's current marketing problems
is that too many businesses are sticking with Office 97 (because
they don't even use all the features in that).  That's certainly
true of the development department where I work, although
the marketing department have a slightly newer version.

That means that you must target Word documents for an 8 year old
product if sending them to a destination whose capabilities are
unknown (actually you shouldn't send them to such a destination
at all, but more and more people do - I have to have Word Viewer
at home, although both that and Windows 98 WordPad have problems
with some multi-lingual documents, and have to reboot into 
Windows 98).

Although it is beginning to leak into home use, Office is mainly
a business tool.  When designing for the web, you need to account
for home users, many of whom are still running Windows 95 and
a significant number are running WebTV, or similar products
with limited free upgrade capability, and which they bought as
a one off investment with a possible 20 year lifetime.

The reason that Microsoft regularly bring out new versions is that they
need to sell software licences, even if they are only being sold as a
fashion buy, in order to maintain their revenue stream.

Received on Friday, 1 July 2005 06:49:30 UTC