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Four Misc Items Regarding Microsoft and software market
Here are 4 misc items of interest concerning Microsoft and the software
market:
1. ECCO is "Finished, kaput, tent folded without a fight." Note
(sender name removed) about Netmanage's decision to fold the highly rate
PIM Ecco, following Microsoft's decision to include outlook in Office
CD.
2. Richard Smith's note regarding problems of using MS's Active X while
browsing the Web, "ActiveX controls -- You just can't say no!"
3. Jordan Pollack's AM-INFO post regarding the Palmpilot
4. Richard Smith's note regarding Qualcom's license to use parts (and
only parts) of MSIE with Eurdora, despite Microsoft's claims that MSIE
can't be broken up.
Jamie
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1. Subject: Re: note about Dealth of ECCO
--------------------------------------------
(Name of sender withheld by request)
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At 06:09 PM 1/15/98 -0500, you wrote:
> When MS put Outlook into the MS Office, Ecco, the publisher of
> a highly rated Personal Information Manager, throw in the towel
> and put itself up for sale.
Actually, the situation with Ecco Pro is worse than that. Ecco Pro
wasn't just highly rated; it was rated THE BEST time and time again
in magazine reviews. (See
http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/special/bestof96/boy12.htm
http://www.zdnet.com/cshopper/top100/cshp0101.html
http://www.clico.krakow.pl/software/netmanag/pc-netman-ecco.htm
http://www.pcworld.com/reprints/netmanage.htm
and other reviews around the Net.)
While NetManage was hoping to sell Ecco Pro, they could not; no one
would buy a product for which Microsoft was giving away a competitive
offering. So, as you can see at
http://www.netmanage.com/products/eccopro/,
they were forced to dump it altogether. It was the best, acclaimed by
all, and it is gone; finished; kaput. Tent folded without a fight.
NetManage merely recognized that when Microsoft uses bundling to
enter a market, competitors are history.
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2. Subject: ActiveX controls -- You just can't say no!
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Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 23:54:01 -0500
From: "Richard M. Smith" <rms@pharlap.com>
To: James Love <love@cptech.org>
James,
Here is another message of mine that you might find interesting. It was
published in comp.risks last week. Microsoft makes the claim that
people don't have to run ActiveX controls while browsing the Web with
IE4 if they choose not to. The reality is a bit different........
Richard
===========================================================
I have had a glimpse of the ActiveX future and it is not a pretty
picture. The MSNBC Web site (www.msnbc.com) uses an ActiveX control
called the MSNBC NewsBrowser. Because of this control, going to this
site in Internet Explorer is hell. The problem is that NewsBrowser
control is present on almost every HTML page of the site. If you make
the choice of not installing the NewBroswer control on your PC, Internet
Explorer will redownload the control and ask you to accept it every time
you go to a new page on the site! On a 28.8K modem that means a page
takes a minimum of 1 minute to load and IE keeps bugging you to take the
control. The cynical side of me wonders if Microsoft isn't trying to
force everyone to accept ActiveX controls whether they like them or not.
The problem here is a design flaw in ActiveX Authenticode system. It
shouldn't keep asking over and over again to accept a control that has
been rejected in the past. Worse yet, it shouldn't keep downloading
rejected controls. It's just plain silly.
There is a simple solution to this problem in the ActiveX Authenticode
system. Simply use Netscape Navigator which doesn't support ActiveX
controls. Ironically, www.msnbc.com is a Web site best viewed by
Netscape Navigator!
Richard M. Smith
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3. Note on the palmpilot
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Subject: Death of Ecco and the palmpilot.
Date: Thu, 22 Jan 1998 12:00:41 -0500 (EST)
From: Jordan Pollack <pollack@cs.brandeis.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <am-info@essential.org>
Jamie wrote about ecco pro death
Given that the law doesnt prevent microsoft from leveraging its utility
monopoly to absorb successful appliance markets, the
battle to watch next is the palmpilot/wince competition.
I dont use a pilot, which is a handheld pim with a hotsync feature, but
have many friends who love them. WINCE is the pim "executive" (thats a
barebones operating system) microsoft has been trying to establish as a
standard by making it look and feel like a Windows gui. I dont use that
either, but have been subjected to immense PR effort tho i have no
friends who use velos or cassiopieas.
In last month's WINDOWSNT magazine, there was a full page advertisement
from a company selling an add-on to help palmpilot's syncronize
correctly with microsoft OUTLOOK on windows NT.
In fact, a search finds 3 such products compared:
http://www.chapura.com/3compare.html
Microsoft uses its windows releases to break other people's software and
adds secret functionality to the win API to favor their
own entry into other markets.
Since Microsoft is eating the PIM market with OUTLOOK included "free" in
Office, it can (and for its stockholders it MUST) use its
traditional tweaking of proprietary file formats to disrupt the
palmpilot's syncronization ability, and hence destroy its market, in
favor of WINCE2 models which can use insider information for syncing.
Now would be a good time for 3com to sue over the market confusion
caused by microsoft choosing the name "palmpc," for wince handhelds,
and to ask DOJ to help it get a decree requireing 12 months warning on
any changes to the full "microsoft experience" of windows or office
products which impact its ability to interoperate. (But they won't
because their real meat and potato business is in network cards and
they need to get along with microsoft.)
Professor Jordan B. Pollack DEMO Laboratory, Volen Center for Complex
Systems
Computer Science Dept, MS018 Phone (617) 736-2713/Lab x3366/Fax x2741
Brandeis University website: http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu
Waltham, MA 02254 email: pollack@cs.brandeis.edu
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4. Qualcomm License for parts of MSIE4.0
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Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 21:39:26 -0500
From: "Richard M. Smith" <rms@pharlap.com>
Subject: Eudora 4, IE4, and the DOJ
==============================================================
Here is an interesting story that might be relavent to DOJ cases against
Microsoft.
I just upgraded my Email reader from Eudora 3 to Eudroa 4. The big new
feature in Eudora 4 is support for HTML-based Email messages. To view
HTML messages, Eudora uses the HTML display engine from Microsoft's
IE4.
Eudora 4 will use an existing copy of IE4 to get the HTML display
engine. Not everyone, of course, has IE4 installed on the computer.
Therefore Eudora cooked up a licensing deal with Microsoft to ship IE4
on the Eudora 4 CD-ROM. The interesting thing is that the full version
of IE4 doesn't come with Eudora 4. The reason is obvious. Usually
bundled with IE4 is Microsoft's Outlook Express mail reader which is
direct competition to Eudora. The last thing in the world that Qualcomm,
the makers of Eudora, would want to do is have a competitive product on
their CD-ROM. So Qualcomm apparently has gotten Microsoft to create a
stripped down version of IE4 without Outlook Express. In addition, this
stripped-down version also is missing the ActiveDesktop, NetMeeting,
and the special IE4 ActiveX controls.
Given that Microsoft easily took apart IE4 for Qualcomm, a competitor,
why can't they do the samething for the DOJ and the Judge Jackson?
I find that the fact that ActiveDesktop can be split from IE4 the most
interesting thing.
Richard