Opera Claims Microsoft Has Poor Interoperability 316
Noksagt writes "Opera CTO Hakon Lie has countered the claims that Bill Gates made regarding Microsoft's superior interoperability last week. He points out their invalid webpages, MS's unwillingness to serve the same content to different browsers, IE's poor CSS support, tardy documentation and limitations of their XML format, and more." From the article: "You say you believe in interoperability. Why then, did you terminate the Web Core Fonts initiative you started in 1996? You deserve credit for starting it, but why close down a project which could have given you yet much good will? (Verdana sucks, but Georgia is beautiful!)"
You Dad Sucks Syndrome (Score:5, Interesting)
It's just so much easier, and more importantly cheaper, to attack competitors like this.
LMAO, AGAIN (Score:4, Interesting)
I have to say, i really wasn't expecting that hostel of a letter to be put out by opera, but its funny as hell.
This is almost as bad as when Microsoft made IE part of your operating system. before (in win98 ) you could remove IE and get it to still work, now, if you remove it you virtually kiss your OS goodbye.
Its all part of their strategy, like donating computers to schools, your not being nice, your getting kids hooked on MS word at age 8! I have to say, Microsoft is one of the best companies ever if you just look at what they do as a business, but their products are crap.
unfortunetly, its the only crap that will play half life 2 ^_^
Opera Compatibility (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:I speak for people *everywhere* when I say ... (Score:1, Interesting)
MS vs /. (Score:5, Interesting)
It looks like MSN's markup [htmlhelp.com] is more valid then Slashdot's [htmlhelp.com] is.
Microsoft has 'McInteroperability' (Score:4, Interesting)
Good one! (Score:3, Interesting)
The Word 97 fiasco. (Score:5, Interesting)
Thing about Word 97 is that it was unwilling to save in word 5/95 format. This is something that MS refused to fix for the better part of a year.
In the meantime, any company that bought a new PC was only offered word 97 for the new machine. This meant that, the first time they saved a document that needed to be read anywhere else in the company, all recipients needed to buy the '97 version to read it (much less to edit it). You could save your document in RTF format, but the '97 RTF format was sadly broken.... Back to plan A.
MS did, in time, release an official plugin that allowed you to save in word'95 format (as long as you were willing to work your way thru the warning messages), but I don't believe that it was possible to set '95 as the default save format, so -- sooner or later you'd accidently just 'save', and the next thing you know, your recipients can't read your document.
The end result of this is that MS raked in Billions of dollars in spurious sales by forcing people to abandon all older versions of their word processors. This is part of the way that they cemented their monopoly on the office software market.
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Then of course, there's the NT filesystem [sourceforge.net] that is sorely short on public documentation, and almost impossible to figure out. As far as I can tell, Microsoft is entirely uninterested in letting others interoperate with it. In fact, I'm guessing that they put in some strange land-mines just to piss off people trying to use it other than from inside of the most recent versions of Windows.
Re:LMAO, AGAIN (Score:4, Interesting)
At the time, My roommate (who did a lot of windows stuff) figured out that you could use the IE3 uninstaller to uninstall IE4, and you'd be fine.
For me this simply proved that MS was, in fact capable of safely removing IE4, but they chose not to --- and, in fact, they willfully broke the OS of any customer impertinent enough to remove Microsoft's browser from their system.
Re:MS interoperability (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows is totally interoperable! (Score:0, Interesting)
Microsoft Windows XP is compatible with a huge number of OSes: it will play nice almost 90% of the time with any Microsoft Windows 2000 installation and even works with some Microsoft Windows NT, ME, 98 and 95 installations if you are very careful about your configuration.
And who's complaining about Microsoft's Office suite compatibility? Heck, documents written in Microsoft Office 2003 can be read (on a good day) with versions of Microsoft Office running back at least 3 years. If you are extremely careful it can even be made to work with most text editors.
Re:Response from Microsoft's PR blogger (Score:2, Interesting)
Sigh. Here's the excerpt:
"I invite Håkon to watch Channel 9 too. In about a week we have an interview with Scott Guthrie, who heads up the IIS and ASP.NET teams. I gave Scott crap about just this problem in that interview and he says that they are working hard to fix it in IIS 7.0 and the next version of ASP.NET. Not exactly the answer that Lie will want to hear, but demonstrates that we are working to fix this problem company-wide (the Web teams here rely heavily on ASP.NET and IIS to generate their HTML and CSS)."
So it's not directly related to IE. But neither is Hakon's letter -- it's about interoperability in general.
Re:Response from Microsoft's PR blogger (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, call me a skeptic, though I'll believe that when they actually implement security properly (by default -- not the theoretical after the fact kind) and don't stab business partners in the back on a regular basis. Long established habbits tend to be the hardest to break -- though I don't think there's much will or intent to change. Why should they?
Hergee berger snooger bork (Score:3, Interesting)