Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 08:51:01 11/01/98
Go up one level in this thread
On November 01, 1998 at 09:51:00, Rajen Gupta wrote:
>more and more programmers are now shifting their allegience to chessbase and
>producing chessbase compatible engines-Fritz, Junior,Nimzo,Hiarsc, crafty,
>Comet, Exchess etc. a lot of people think that this is not a good thing but I
>think that this is a wonderful development for consumers- a uniform GUI in 32
>bit win NT compatible form; Learn once, learnt for all; huge amount of excellent
>features; engine vs engine matches can be played in the comfort of your home on
>a single computer. Minimum amount of bugs; no more DOS problems, huge savings in
>purchase of new programmes etc.
>
>for the programmers also a lot of benefit as evey one will be writing for and
>therefore will be supported by chessbase marketing muscle; they can now
>concentrate on producing the strongest possible engine and not bother about
>other factors like GUI, features etc. New or financially deficient or part time
>programmers can now have a good chance of releasing commercial versions of their
>engines
>
>What do people think/
>
>Rajen gupta
I think your title is right, ChessBase could become the Microsoft of chess, but
I attach a different meaning to this statement.
The chess market is small, and the worse thing that could happen is that one
company takes it all.
You don't realize what could happen then, as you certainly don't realize why it
is so dangerous that PC owners have no choice when they want to buy an operating
system.
I was very sad when I learned that OS/2 was dead. I am pleased to see that Linux
grows.
I don't use Internet Explorer. I use Netscape Communicator.
Because we need to support several software companies. We need all of them, not
just one "big brother".
You can buy ChessBase products, but don't forget to buy other chess programs
too.
You know what is my worse nightmare? That Microsoft releases a serious chess
program. And you know how they will do it: they will take the best programs,
disassemble them, and steal the algorithms to build their own program. Of course
you know that they have already done this with the Stacker Disk Compression
Utility. Don't you remember? The result is the "Microsoft" Dos and Windows disk
compression utility. They could do the same with chess programs.
The result would of course be a good program. Would you call this a "wonderful
development for consumers" ?
For the community of chess programmers, this would be the *last* development.
Christophe
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