RE: Slow Down Development, NO; Speed up Minds, YES

[Dan Emory <danemory -at- primenet -dot- com>]

At 06:30 PM 4/28/00 EDT, SteveFJong -at- aol -dot- com wrote:
>----------------------Snip------------------------
>I think the lesson for software vendors is blindingly obvious: no matter how 
>successful they are, they are vulnerable to competitors who make better 
>products (which is as it should be). And what constitutes "better"? Just what 
>you'd expect: more usable, fewer bugs, and, yes, accessible, accurate, 
>effective documentation.
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But MS-Word fails on all those counts (most of all it fails on the quality
and completeness of the documentation), yet its dominance goes unchallenged.
I doubt if more than 10% of knowledge workers would use MS-Weird for long
technical documents if they weren't forced to do so by either their
management or their customers. There are competing products (e.g.,
FrameMaker) that are superior in all respects to that piece of crap. Name
one that has even a remote chance of mounting a successful challenge to its
dominance.

No, there is something much more involved here than the "lesson" you
describe above. There is only one way to break the stranglehold of MS-Weird,
and that's an international standard----one that assures the interchange of
information independent of the authoring software. Such a standard exists.
It's called XML.
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     | Nullius in Verba |
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Dan Emory, Dan Emory & Associates
FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
Voice/Fax: 949-722-8971 E-Mail: danemory -at- primenet -dot- com
10044 Adams Ave. #208, Huntington Beach, CA 92646
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