Thomas wrote:
That's not how I remember it. ASCII, the first standard, is open source. WordPerfect, [La]TeX, and RTF were reasonably easy-to-parse, reasonably open standards built on top of ASCII. The social cost of writing import and export filters for the formats would have been trivial to the social cost of MS's proprietary binary standards. I don't see how MS solved any problem greater than the ones they created.
Thomas, if I say that I think open source standards are the best I really do mean it.
And yes, I agree with both what youa nd fishin' said in that MS could have easily opened up their standards for their programs.
But to me that's irrelevant. They, and many other proprietary software manufacturers did not.
And in this regard, I like when one proprietary closed standard beats the others out of business.
My criteria: universal interoperability.
My Preferred means to achieve this: Open source and publically owned standards.
My second most preferred means to achieve this: open proprietary standards.
What I'll settle for: An 800 pound gorilla who can forge standards through sheer size of monopoly
What many here simply do not seem to take note of is that nowhere did I claim "Monopolies are the best".
I claimed that "monopolies are good" and restricted it to forging standards in computing.
So to reiterate, when no standard is winning, I like when one wins. I have my preferences for how it is won but if it takes a monopoly I prefer that to lacking interoperability.
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Fair enough. I'd be interested in hearing which consequences you suggest, based on this observation?
Consequences of...?