[ale] RTF

[Jim Kinney]

So M$ did what Linux does now? They gave it away for free? Hmm.....

I'm not 100% that that's correct. Yes, early Word was bundled with early
windows and distributed by hardware sellers. But RTF was created to be a
common document interchange language so Word could interact (i.e. - have a
chance against WordPerfect) with other document platforms. WordPerfect was
the defacto word processing tool.

And yes, hardware makers were steamrolled into including the new M$ apps.
But they didn't just get bowled over. They went along willingly because
their machine came with foo and bar and...  and thus was easier to sell even
though it cost a tad more.

I still giggle that Redmond creates a "standard" that gets adopted because
it's a good idea and fairly well implemented and then abandons their own
standard. Of course, they argue that .doc is also a "standard" but a rigged
election is not always a good thing. :-)

2008/11/26 Jeff Lightner <jlightner at water.com>

>   What crap!
>
>
>
> MS Word took off for one reason – They gave it away along with Excel and
> Access because the people PAYING for software new Word sucked compared to
> WordPerfect and Excel sucked compared to Lotus 123.   Not only did they give
> it away – they forced PC manufacturers to bundle in on new PCs with the
> threat of NOT being allowed to include DOS/Windows.   Once MS Office became
> the defacto standard they quit giving it away.
>
>
>  ------------------------------
>
> *From:* ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] *On Behalf Of *Jim
> Kinney
> *Sent:* Wednesday, November 26, 2008 8:19 AM
> *To:* ale at ale.org
> *Subject:* Re: [ale] RTF
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 10:34 PM, aaron <aaron at pd.org> wrote:
>
> Open Office will deal with rtf.
>
> A lot of web browsers will accept it too.
>
> Gmail uses it for their "fancy" formatted
> email option.
>
> It was just a Mafia$oft attempt to undermine
> HTML formatting with their own published
> sub-standard.
>
>
> -GONG- !!
>
> RTF was Microsofts answer to WordPerfect's  document format being closed.
> They wanted to get a leg up in the office suite market and couldn't get
> moving (as Word was an "also ran" at that time and Word Perfect was 95:1
> market share).
>
> RTF succeeded wildly and Microsoft gained much traction in thatmarket. So
> they had to slowly get rid of RTF (which I think got the "standard" stamp of
> approval at one point) as other word processing competitors  began to use
> it. So now we have the 4 bazillion versions of .doc, .docx mess and Word
> barely can export to RTF any more.
>
> Yay! ASCII !
>
>
>
> peace
> aaron
>
>
>
> On 2008, Nov, 25, , at 10:15 PM, Sean wrote:
>
> > I'm running FC7 with  all the normal aps.  Just got a file in
> > rtf format (Rich Text Format?).  OO and Scribus can't deal with
> > it.  Suggestions would be helpful.
> >
> > Sean
> >
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> --
> James P. Kinney III
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
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