Microsoft responds to Google's EAS move, sidesteps issue
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 18th Dec 2012 00:03 UTC
Microsoft Microsoft has just responded to Google's move regarding Exchange ActiveSync. Sadly, instead of addressing the very real problems consumers are about to face, Microsoft starts talking about switching to Outlook.com.
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RE[5]: Comment by shmerl
by lucas_maximus on Tue 18th Dec 2012 14:47 UTC in reply to "RE[4]: Comment by shmerl"
lucas_maximus
Member since:
2009-08-18

You're now moving the goal posts as 'de facto standard' isn't the same as 'open standard'. You were arguing about open standards.


TBH I don't really care one way or another. I do care about people complaining about Microsoft supporting something that nobody uses and doesn't benefit their customers.

...and Google, IBM, KDE and plenty others I can't be bothered to list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument#Application_support


And? So you have the most popular document format in the world and they make their own competeting standard and it didn't work out well.

Why would Microsoft support such as move, I don't know.

If I made my own popular file format and someone told me I should support it and it isn't nearly as widely used, I wouldn't bother to support it either.

ODF support was one second to MS's own proprietary formats. So if Microsoft cared about open standards, then they'd have switched to an established and widely supported format instead of creating their own one from scratch.


Why would they do that? there is no motivation to do so.


Weird, I seem to recall that .NET v1 stank (and back then I was 100% a Windows user and developer). Though I'll grant you that things have improved massively over the years. I quite enjoy using .NET these days.


YES .NET 1.0 and 1.1 weren't great. C# != .NET.

However technical merits of C# aside, we're talking about open standards. C# was invented to break established standards.


How can something be invented to break standards? It doesn't make sense.

It like saying I am inventing PHP to break Python.

You're obviously too young to remember what life was like before MS's monopoly. Borland's IDEs used to be second to none. It's 'only' in 10 / 15 years that MS had overtaken Borland.


Their Java IDE was still rubbish.

However that's besides the point as you're now arguing about the quality of the IDE, which absolutely nothing to do with the open standards of languages.


I was just stating my preference.

I guess if you've only ever used MS technology then you're bound to be ignorant to the rest of the IT industry and their established standards ;)


There was nothing that was a dejure standard that everyone used.

You're hardly one to comment on the relevance of example given the number of times you've changed the argument to suit your bias.


To be honest I went down this road because of ASP.NET being open sourced recently.

TBH I don't really care about the rest.

Even IE7 lacked backed standards features that FF1 supported.


Yes IE7 was rubbish and had no excuse to be.

2009 was when IE8 got released and was the f
when talking about standard compliance, you can't just exclude figures that disprove your point, simply because of market share. That's just a whole new level of narrow-mindedness.


Well this is what a lot of developers are currently doing on Mobile. Webkit is king and anything that isn't Webkit is a second class citizen. Like it or Lump it that the way it is.

IE8 for CSS and XHTML was fine, If you whine about SVG and other things ... these simply aren't used by web developers.

What's more, you're just picking two arbitrary specifications chosen specifically because IE happened get there first. However when you look at the overall performance (eg using ACID as a benchmark), you'll see that IE was consistently one of the last browsers to meet standards (and that's even excluding Opera!)


Two arbitary specifications!! Only the most important 2.

Because I rate my browsing experience on whether something can pass the ACID test.

Reply Parent Score: 0

RE[6]: Comment by shmerl
by Laurence on Tue 18th Dec 2012 15:24 in reply to "RE[5]: Comment by shmerl"
Laurence Member since:
2007-03-26

TBH I don't really care one way or another. I do care about people complaining about Microsoft supporting something that nobody uses and doesn't benefit their customers.

We're talking about open standards, not MS supporting something that nobody uses

And? So you have the most popular document format in the world and they make their own competeting standard and it didn't work out well.

Why would Microsoft support such as move, I don't know.

If I made my own popular file format and someone told me I should support it and it isn't nearly as widely used, I wouldn't bother to support it either.

that doesn't even make sense.

Why would they do that? there is no motivation to do so.

You said MS support open standards. If that were true, then there would be motivation to do so. Ergo, you've just disproved your earlier statement.


YES .NET 1.0 and 1.1 weren't great. C# != .NET.

Languages are neither open nor closed nor even copyrighted (as proved with the Oracle vs Google case). It's their framework the decides the open nature of a language. Thus I'm discussing the crux of the matter when arguing about open standards.


How can something be invented to break standards? It doesn't make sense.

It like saying I am inventing PHP to break Python.

Now you're just arguing semantics. Clearly the context is talking about MS breaking from established standards rather than literally breaking the standards themselves.

Their Java IDE was still rubbish.

so you've basically used one IDE and feel you're qualified to make sweeping statements about an entire company? Well done.


There was nothing that was a dejure standard that everyone used.

Clearly there was, but such standards never made it into MS products. However there's a whole industry outside of Microsoft.

To be honest I went down this road because of ASP.NET being open sourced recently.

So, like with Borland, you're making a sweeping generalisation about a whole company based on one product.

Well this is what a lot of developers are currently doing on Mobile. Webkit is king and anything that isn't Webkit is a second class citizen. Like it or Lump it that the way it is.

Yeah. sad but true ;)


IE8 for CSS and XHTML was fine, If you whine about SVG and other things ... these simply aren't used by web developers.

Web developers weren't using advanced techniques because they'd lose a high percentage of Windows users (pretty much half the web). It wasn't a matter of choice, it was because MS forced their hand.

However IE was an improvement and IE9 is actually a fairly decent browser. So web developers are now adding advanced techniques they couldn't risk before.

Two arbitary specifications!! Only the most important 2.

You talk as if the other browsers didn't support everyday features. That wasn't true. Instead they used browser specific extensions because, up until then, W3C dragged their heals in formalising said specifications. (and to be honest, I blame the w3c as much as I blame MS for the fiasco we had in the 90s / early 00s).

Because I rate my browsing experience on whether something can pass the ACID test.

We're talking about support for open standards, not how well web developers got at writing IE-specific hacks to make your browsing experience tolerable.

Reply Parent Score: 3

RE[7]: Comment by shmerl
by lucas_maximus on Tue 18th Dec 2012 18:16 in reply to "RE[6]: Comment by shmerl"
lucas_maximus Member since:
2009-08-18

so you've basically used one IDE and feel you're qualified to make sweeping statements about an entire company? Well done.


That is what people say about Microsoft. I simply said I didn't like one of their IDEs nothing more.

Clearly there was, but such standards never made it into MS products. However there's a whole industry outside of Microsoft.


That far fewer people use.

So, like with Borland, you're making a sweeping generalisation about a whole company based on one product.


No I pointed out that it just simply isn't true for the whole company and Shmerl was making sweeping statements by saying so.

Web developers weren't using advanced techniques because they'd lose a high percentage of Windows users (pretty much half the web). It wasn't a matter of choice, it was because MS forced their hand.


Simply no, I haven't seen a need to use a lot of the "advanced features" other than CSS 3.0, and the browser should be allowed to fall back. If a web developer isn't using CSS 3.0 now and having appropriate fallbacks and polyfills ... they should be.

However IE was an improvement and IE9 is actually a fairly decent browser. So web developers are now adding advanced techniques they couldn't risk before.

You talk as if the other browsers didn't support everyday features. That wasn't true. Instead they used browser specific extensions because, up until then, W3C dragged their heals in formalising said specifications. (and to be honest, I blame the w3c as much as I blame MS for the fiasco we had in the 90s / early 00s).


Out of the two competing browsers in the 90s it was IE which innovated.

It is a testament to how good IE6 was ahead of everything else that is can still render pages decently today if the page is built correctly. Every single BBC webpage I have tried renders from IE6 to Latest Chrome perfectly.

IE4 had a massive number of downloads considering the bandwidth commonly available at the time (which nobody ever mentions).

We're talking about support for open standards, not how well web developers got at writing IE-specific hacks to make your browsing experience tolerable.


IE7 and IE8 require almost no hacks to render a page the same as any of the modern browsers. Those that exist are well documented and easily avoided.

Reply Parent Score: 2

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