[WEB4LIB] Re: Imminent Netscape demise

[Raymond Wood]

On Fri, Jun 08, 2001 at 03:58:00PM -0700, Richard L. Goerwitz III wrote:
> Darryl Friesen wrote:
> 
> > Interesting.  I have the exact opposite feeling.  To me IE seems more
> > feature rich, more stable, with a better user interface, better "look" to
> > rendered pages, and it seems much faster.  I was sold 10 minutes after I
> > installed IE 3.whatever, and have been waiting for Netscape to shrivel up
> > and die ever since.
> 
> Remember that IE only runs on Windows platforms (you can also get
> it for MacOS).  That means that the increasing number of academics
> and library technologists who use OSs like Linux would be left out
> in the cold if it weren't for Netscape.

That is really such a key point.  And it's not just Linux specifically,
it's the whole principle of the thing: how anyone could advocate a
single-platform browser over one that was cross-platform compatible in
this day and age is beyond me.  And yet many people are so
Windows-centric that they aren't even aware of, or can't conceive of,
anything beyond 'that other operating system' and it's 'my way or the
highway' browser ;>

> But more to the point it's also generally just silly to wish for
> competition on any industry to die.  

Indeed.

> Part of the reason many of us are going from being annoyingly nickeled
> and dimed to being really drained by Microsoft is that, for office
> productivity software, there aren't many decent competitors.

I am shying away from wordprocessors more and more, but I realize that
many people still seem to have to use the darn things.  There are
certainly free software wordprocessors in development, so eventually
this won't be a real problem.  In the meantime, I don't understand what
part of 'StarOffice' people don't get.  Sure it's a horribly bloated
application, but it does do the job pretty well from all accounts.  And
a free download for an Office Suite - it's almost laughable that people
would continue to *pay* for Office.

Why?

Raymond