Re: [Evolution] Re: title encoding

[Rick DeNatale <rick denhaven2 homeip net>]

On Thu, 2004-06-17 at 10:23 -0400, Frank Burough wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-06-17 at 09:43, Michael Wever wrote:
> > Here here. I agree with reading the specs and that m$ is total crap.
> > But... when the mail comes in and the title is all junk (yes it happens to
> > me alot) and m$ users, who have no idea about specs or code, see
> > this then their response is to laugh and comment on what a piece of sh%t
> > linux and evolution is. "It doesn't happen in outlook!" i hear them say.
> >
> > Evolution's lack of acceptance to m$ sh%t makes evolution look bad not
> > outlook! Simple but true.
> > Mick.
> Mick is exactly right. We must remember that Microsoft is much more
> interested in maintaining (or increasing) market share and forcing users
> to be locked in to their products than in being standards compliant.
> Whatever Microsoft implements, be it compliant or not, is a 'standard'
> just due to their market penetration.

One more vote in favor of accepting this reality. Sometimes you just
have to deal with the effects of market share.

At the last local LUG meeting, we had one of the gaim developers. During
the Q&A session, someone asked why the open source community couldn't
develop a good enough instant messaging server so that clients like gaim
wouldn't have to be continuously adapting when AOL changed protocols.

The answer was that there are orders of magnitude more users of AOL
instant messaging than the alternatives, and since the whole point of
instant messaging was communications, you can't just cut out the
majority.

Reality can sometimes be hard to deal with, but on the other hand it's
real!