Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Windows and MacOS are both almost entirely document-centric. In Windows, if someone e-mails you an Excel spreadsheet or a Word document, you don't have to worry about what application to use to run it - you just open the document and the o/s decides what to open it with.
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Precisely so. And they are moving away from that in favor of apps rather than documents in the new wave of truly personal computing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
That "just open the excel document" isn't what you guys are cracking it up to be. It's taken YEARS for competitors to come up with halfway decent abilities to work with Msft's office formats. And none of them are perfect...particularly with excel.
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Precisely so too. And they've taken years because they were *DAMNED* proprietary formats with no documentation about them whatsoever -- it is a miracle of reverse engineering (and courage to do it because the vendors explicitely prohibit it) for it to work at all so you could read .docs people sent you without using Microsoft software.
It's taken years with the web and html and xml-based data and big open-source projects based on the idea of open-standards for document formats to make people and governments aware of the perils of vendor lock-in. And here we are looking at it again: most native apps could in all honesty be written as plain html page, specially as version 5 rolls on, and proprietary formats all over again.