Author: Christopher R. Dorr
Date: 07:35:53 01/06/99
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On January 05, 1999 at 23:08:07, Richard Heldmann wrote: >Microsoft is not innovative, never has been, never will be. Please tell me when >M$ had an original idea, not stolen/bought from someone else? If you don't want >chess to take two steps backward, pray they do not buy out Fritz, Junior or >Rebel. M$ does not write new code when it doesn't have to. They never start >from the ground up. They would simply BUY out Fritz or Junior or Rebel, add >their own standard crummy MS interface, put their name on it and rave how great >it will be in the next future release. Same old story. > >Richard Heldmann Dang! I hate to defend Microsoft...fortunately I rarely end up doing so. It would be interesting if MS got into the chess market (I know of course that they never would). MS has a history or making OK products. Generally not best-of-breed (except for Excel, some truly great development tools, and NT as an application server), but competitive, and backed by fabulous markting, often not to the IT folks (like me, who really know the score), but to end-users and executives who might not. For example, when I got to my current job (IT manager for a bank), one of the first things I heard was that a MS guy had been talking with the CFO about switching our primary server OS from NetWare to NT. He was really convincing. Fortunately, my boss (the CFO) listened to all the technical reasons why NetWare was better, and why we shouldn't switch, and we stayed with Novell (Than God!). But there are many companies out there not so lucky. Competitive products, great marketing. That's MS. But they help the general level of the software in some subtle ways. WordPerfect had to get *better* to compete with Word. Novell had to get *better* to stay competitive with NT. NT made NetWare a better product. If MS started developing chess software, then Rebel and ChessBase would simply have to get better than they are already. having a better product would be the only way they could hang against a good MS product, and great MS marketing. It's kind of funny...MS Chess wouldn't be the best on the market anytime soon, probably because they (by their very presence in the market) would make the others better. Chris Dorr
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