Jack Cleaver

A member of the Philip Greenspun's Homepage community since January 26, 1999

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January 26, 1999, on Why Bill Gates is Richer than You:
There are facts about Microsoft's products that would support the DOJ case if they were more widely known. I know of two particularly annoying ones: 1) Visual Studio 6 is Microsoft's new integrated development environment (for Java, Visual Basic, C++). It provides context-sensitive help. The previous version, version 5, also provided context-sensitive help, but it worked much better. For example, in version 5, you could cut out sample code from the help, and paste it into your program. Why is version 6 worse? Because the help is stored as HTML - Microsoft HTML, not standard HTML. Therefore anyone using VS6 MUST install Internet Explorer 4.01. They get no benefit from it - the product is worse for it - but they do have to install Microsoft's browser (you even need it to INSTALL VS6!). That is not an open market. 2) Since Microsoft C version 6 (NOT Visual C++, I'm talking about ten years ago) Microsoft's C compilers have used code-generation strate...