George,

>snip<

>>I mean, isn't that what competition is all about??? *bg*

>The thing that gets me, Doug, is that part of the reason for the success has come through the competition falling on its face. I'm fairly familar with Lotus products. I hate them and here's why:

SO ABSOLUTELY TRUE!!

Have you seen the PBS show where Ballmer and Gates talk about how they sent IBM to see Gary Kildal at Digital Research and how they were dissed? I seem to recall that Gary's wife really insulted them or something, making them stand outside while waiting for Gary to get back.

IBM went back to Microsoft in desperation and they said they'd get the product done. Paid Seattle Computing 50,000 for the rights to their 8080 conversion of CP/M. Then, to topit off IBM really screwed up with respect to licensing of DOS. Apparently they thought the market would be so small they put no restrictions on Microsoft about selling the product to others.

I've got to think that there are some folks "out there" who would like to roll the clock back. <g>


>
>1. In WordPro (and AmiPro before it) you could not write a (old-style) Windows Help file. Why? Because neither supported custom characters for footnotes. They had plently of versions to rectify it, but never did.
>
>2. When WordPro first appeared, the default keystroke combinations weren't the same as the standard, which had been used in AmiPro.
>
>3. Prior to LotusScript (which appeared in SmartSuite '97), they (WordPro and 1-2-3) used different macro languages.
>
>4. When LotusScript appeared, some existing macros broke.
>
>5. With SmartSuite '97 they dropped DDE support. This broke any functionality with existing apps that utilized it.
>
>Notice I haven't even touch on their docs. The one for OLE automation with SmartSuite '97 is awful.
>
>Of course, this is just me< s >.

<g>

Right.. Just you... <g>

Not.....

Best,

DD