Posted on 08/15/2003 10:30:34 AM PDT by HAL9000
Just days after announcing that it planned to halt development on Outlook Express, Microsoft has been forced to change its position following internal confusion and an outcry from customers.
As reported earlier this week on silicon.com Microsoft had planned to stop product development on Outlook Express, which forms part of the Internet Explorer code bundled with consumer versions of Windows.
At the time Dan Leach, Office product manager, said: "The technology doesn't go away, but no new work is being done."
Under that vision, consumers would have been directed towards the company's MSN software, while businesses would be encouraged to purchase Office, which includes the full Outlook client.
However, Leach has now distanced himself from his original comments, claiming that while Microsoft had originally planned to halt new work on Outlook Express, the situation has since changed.
"I sat down with the Windows team today, and they tell me my comments were inaccurate," Leach said Friday. "Outlook Express was in sustain engineering, but customers asked for continued improvement, and we are doing that. Microsoft will continue its innovation around the email experience in Windows."
Leach blamed communication problems for the confusion.
"The Outlook Express team has been in the process of making this change known inside Microsoft," he said. "They just hadn't reached me before I left for Asia."
The lack of internal communication underlines the growing challenge faced by Microsoft as it attempts to co-ordinate software development activities over an increasingly diverse range of markets.
And if Linux and other OSes aren't a threat, then why worry about them, right?
Reason?.... Because they have excellent technology and fine marketing....People buy their products as the best available.
"Best" is a very subjective and flexible term. A lot of people select software packages and operating systems because they are what they are used to or simply because they are #1, not because they have excellent technology. For the longest time, people wanted PCs so they could steal borrow software from work so they didn't have to pay for it. We'll see if Microsoft's activation makes a strong dent in this incentive. And once you've hired and trained staff to work on a certain operating system, there is certainly momentum to stick with what they know.
What I find particularly interesting is that Microsoft became dominant largely because the hardware it runs on was open. IBM built hardware that it was unable to maintain a proprietary hold on (it tried) but people cloned the BIOS and created their own non-IBM hardware that could run DOS. Because the hardware was open and any vendor could manufacture PCs, the prices dropped and the PC became the most affordable hardware platform available and competition in the OS sphere via work-alike DOS programs and other OSes kept the OS costs from skyrocketing.
In other words, the PC became the number one hardware platform because it was open and no one vendor controlled it. Being open kept it cheap. Keeping it cheap made it successful. There is a lesson somewhere in there for Microsoft advocates...
Hey, when it's all you've got to work with...
'Nuff said.
BAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW!!!
Best post I've seen allday!
I don't know. All I know is that it was a local exploit, not a remote one.
... like "gcc", the C compiler used to build the kernel and used to build most major server apps like Apache, etc...
In other words, Yikes!
...which has been verified to not have been trojaned.
Having an insider gather passwords from a download site used by lots of people is bad enough without adding unconfirmed, inaccurate or misleading information.
So that's why you call so may people liars.
What in my post was unconfirmed, inaccurate, or misleading?
It's in the context of your post.
The FSF site got hacked, some files were trojaned.
You then state that GCC is housed on that site.
...and leave it at that, thus implying that GCC has been trojaned.
The FSF put out a call for people to compare their software with MD5 sums from before the hack. There is no evidence that GCC was trojaned.
That makes your post both inaccurate and misleading.
Learn the whole story.
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