Tom Watson wrote:

IMHO the single best thing that Gates & Co. did was make everyone
speak the same language.

No, that's not what he did. He did make most people, particularly the
most vulnerable people use the worlds worst OS to run their programs on
(horrible memory protection) and store their files on (horrible file
systems) His operating shell (windows) is a horrible interface that is
hard to work with, hard to analyze, and simply sucks.

Anyone who remembers trying to pass business files back and forth
before de facto standardization by msft doesn't miss those days even a
little bit.

Please email me if you disagree and I will get back to you with an
attachment - written in WordStar 1.

I disagree completely. The only compatible files amongst applications
are text files. If you think MS Word files are compatible, or Excel
files are compatible with other applications you would be wrong. If you
think things are great because EVERYONE is pretty much stuck using Word,
then you probably think the world would have been better off if Hitler
won the war and we were are forced to drive Volkswagens.

A good example of compatibility is what this very thread is about.
Usenet, email, HTML is all open source where anyone can write an
application such as Thunderbird, Firefox, OE, IE. When they write the
apps, they are expected to meet the protocols so everything works.
Gates has always SCREWED up his code to NOT conform to the standards
hoping to force everyone to use his crap, just like everyone is forced
to use his OS's.

Yes, Gates has gone a long way to make EVERYTHING incompatible and
forcing everyone to speak HIS language. This is BAD in itself, but
whats even more grating is his language sucks and barely works.

--
Jack
http://jbstein.com