Re: IE4.0 and W3C Standards -Reply (fwd)

Thomas Reardon wrote:
> 
> Thanks for playing Erik.  Next?

Is this some sort of Micro$oft "tough-boy" talk?

> 
> I am gonna step in here and add one thing quickly: if some folks out
> there have pent up hostilities towards Microsoft, for whatever
> ill-educated reasons, pls continue to fire away.  Then you can add up
> all the email aliases and move them to a new "www-i-hate-msft" alias and
> leave the rest of us to address the real technology issues of the Web.

Why is it that a large portion of the educated on the net regard your
OS as a toy? Why is it that there is so much Micro$oft bashing? Is it
because all of these bright people are just jealous? Or is it because
your products are garbage?

Your company is dedicated to giving absolute trash to consumers and
making money on it. And the money is the bottom line.

Perhaps this excerpt from an interview with Bill Gates by Focus
Magazine (A German mag).

Focus: Fact is, when you buy a new version of a program in order to get 
  bug fixes, you automatically, without recourse, get more features and 
  need more memory. 

Gates: We have strong competition and only produce products that we
  believe we can sell. New versions aren't there to fix bugs. I have 
  never heard of such a twisted reason to bring a new version onto the
  market. 

Focus: There are always bugs in programs. 

Gates: No. There are no bugs of note in our software that any
noteworthy   
  number of people would like to have fixed. 

Focus: Oh, c'mon. I always go nuts when my Macintosh Word 5.1 hides my 
  page numbers under my text. 

Gates: Maybe you're making a mistake, have you ever considered that? It 
  is often the case that "Machinensturmer" hardware jocks don't know how 
  to deal with software. We put in new features because we're asked to.
  Nobody would buy a new version because of bugs in the old one. 

Focus: Whenever I call the hotline or a dealer to complain about a 
  problem I hear: "Get the upgrade to version 6." Everyone goes through
  this. This is how the system works. 

Gates: We spend 500 million dollars a year for telephone support. Less
  than one percent of the calls we get have to do with bugs. Most want
  help. You're welcome to sit down and listen to the millions of calls.
  You'd have to wait for weeks until someone complained about a bug. 

Focus: Where then, does this feeling of frustration come from that
unites
  all PC users? We're all confronted daily with the fact that these
don't
  work the way they should. 

Gates: That's just talking "cool", after the motto "Yeah, I've come
across
  that bug too". I understand this to be a sociological problem, not a
  technical one. 

> 
> As for the substance of Scott's post, that the CRN article is completely
> WRONG, well you can imagine that for those of us who've been busting
> butt and sweating the hard work of standards, the article hurt.  I've
> personally spent an enormous amount of time on HTML and related issues,
> Scott has spent his whole life for the last year on it.  Its hard in
> this environment to get any credit at all, typically thats fine, but I
> refuse to let one terribly false article destroy the hard-won progress
> we've made so far in opening up HTML and creating a real standard.

Maybe you should spend a little of that time thinking, and less toting
the Micro$oft line.

> 
> I stand by our track record on Web standards.  We are a leading
> implementor of open Web protocols&standards: HTTP, PPP, HTML, CSS,
> COM/DCOM, etc.  These are huge investments and ones we take very
> seriously.

Please... like OLE? (oh wait, that's not standard, and was developed 
in spite of already existing and better standards)... or... ActiveX?
(oh wait, that's not standard either, not to mention buggy and 
insecure)...or...I KNOW! Micro$oft developed the "RUN ANY APPLICATION
REMOTELY BY JUST CLICKING A .URL LINK" standard! woohoo! Brilliant!

> 
> -Thomas Reardon
> Microsoft

You and your company should go back and crawl in a cave in Redmond, and
let those of us with integrity and ability do the real work.

Received on Friday, 7 March 1997 00:19:55 UTC