[Am-info] query about MS "Innovations"

[John Bryan]

Get your Joo-janta Rant Protective Eyewear ready....

On Friday, March 29, 2002, at 01:40  PM, Felmon Davis wrote:
>
> It sounds like the answer is not very clear-cut. Recall the original
> question: Has MS 'innovated' in 'interoperability' in office suites
> either in the sense of (a) inventing new functionality (the 'whole
> idea' of an office suite, so to speak) or (b) inventing new plumbing
> (OLE, DDE, whatever).
>

If an 'office suite' suite is an innovation, it is in that it was just 
another way for MS to do the same thing as they've always done.  The 
part of the apps working together was not a part of it in the beginning.

My take on the Office Suite thing was that they included all the 'office 
type' apps in a bundle for the same cost as just one of them 
separately.  That is, one of the apps bought seprately would be about 
the same price as buying them all in one box.  The result is that people 
would by Word, (a supposed 'must have' app), and then think, might as 
well buy the bundle since it is about the same price as I am paying for 
just Word.  Then they are disinclined from buying any Excel competitor 
(1-2-3, et al.), or any PowerPoint competitor, (Harvard Graphics, et 
al.).  I think that was the original reason for having office 'suites'.  
Just another application of bundle an also-ran product with a 'must 
have' basically for free so as to gain share in the market for an app 
type market, eg. spreadsheets, word processors, presentations, etc.  If 
all a company makes is spreadsheet software or at least that is their 
principal money maker product, then how do they compete when MS starts 
giving their own version away for free?  The same with Word and 
WordPerfect.  MS also has the position to have these 'suites' further 
bundled for 'free' with OEM machines.  Other software competitors would 
not have such an ability.  Sure, no one is stopping them from trying to 
make deals with OEMs to include their apps with PC sales, but we have 
seen MS coercive licensing, and exclusive deals with OEMs.


> The sense I'm getting from the replies are:
>
> ad (a): maybe but perhaps more a matter of 'great minds thinking
> alike' since NeXT and Apple ('Publish and Subscribe') had similar
> designs at the same time. but - perhaps - even OLE and DDE are IBM
> inventions. so this is all unclear until I can do some historical
> research.
>

People keep forgetting OpenDoc, which IMO is the tech that MS' reacted 
to with OLE, (which was called something else before that, it has 
undergone several name changes, eg. now it is ".Net", bascially 
OLE++).   OpenDoc was document centered, not application centered.  With 
OLE, yeah, you can bring in an Excel spreadsheet into your Word doc, but 
you had to then open two big fat apps.  With OpenDoc you basically have 
small, single purpose components, from which you can pick and choose.  
Maybe a Greek spell checker component, for example.  That is a weak 
explanation but it has been awhile.

This is not so much having big, feature-fat apps, requiring megs and 
megs of RAM, interoperating. What is the big gain in that?  You now have 
2 or 3 or more software manatees (no offense to the Manatee!) all 
running at once to work on a SINGLE document.  Rather OpenDoc proposed a 
different approach, a document-centric versus application-centric 
approach. You don't have a single app that does everything you would 
ever and never want to do with a 'text' document, or with a 
'spreadsheet' document, and so on.  You just have a document, and you 
can put whatever you want in it, using the different OpenDoc style 
spices in your spice rack.

JB