Why the INQ is not so good

SUBJECT: Vole shafts Brits with Office pricing

"Vole shafts Brits with Office pricing" You should have put a link to openoffice at the end of the article, or some other alternative(s).

There's no need to be nice in these circumstances.

W.

Subject: VOLE

As a newbie to this site, can you explain how the "VOLE" name came to be?

le.quoc

Subject: inq and stocks

Whoever said that the Inq can be a guide to stocks is absolutely right. After reading all of your coverage of the daamit aquisition, it was pretty obvious to me that on the morning of the announcement, ATI would open substatially higher than the previous day. And it did- it went from something like 16 dollars to 19.. someone could have made a lot of money off of that, because apparently no one on wall street reads the Inq.

ZaBahamas

Subject: Why is the INQ so good?

I beg to disagree if there are the likes of Fudo being overly biased towards (ex-ATI)AMD. He gives the INQ a very bad light in favor of just being provocative (and of course being biased). I dare ask him, where's Rydermark now?

Anonymous Tosser

Subject: 1st spreadsheet

Hi there,

While this wasn't the first, it surely was an early one. "Enable" for dos was one of the best WP/SS and overall productivity suites of the 1980's. They pretty much sank when they were late to release the windows version. The Box that I have in storage has the following info on it.

Enable, copyright 1984 by The Software Group

Thank you for your time,
Frank Russo

Subject: Why the Inquirer is not so good

Given fast often to the moment coverage:

1. Mispellings
2. Misleading story intros.
3. Often quote Euro costs without Dollar costs
4. Seldom link Anandtech important articles.
5. Humor is sometimes off base
6. Clicable links seldom lead you to what you might expect.

Canmir

Subject: Microsoft "hadn't invented the spreadsheet" in 1989

Microsoft hasn't invented anything at all.

Nor was Visicalc the first.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet

Greetz,

Bas.

Subject: Why is INQ so good?

Charlie Demerjian, that's why. The rest of you pukes are just winging it.

Sparks

Subject: office

Wow, i can't believe MS are charging customers in the UK almost 70% more for MS Office... God bless Newsgroups.

leon

Subject: MS and spreadsheet

I believe Microsoft won the Office arena because they had a good products for the Mac with excel and word. When Windows 3.1 came out Wordperfect dropped the ball and their windows offering was terrible. MS on the otherhand I bet just ported their Mac version over to the PC, same with Excel. Personally I thought Amipro was the best windows word processor. I think the story with Lotus 123 spreadsheet was the same.

I do think that Powerpoint was the first good presentation software. Obviously by tightly coupling all three MS had enough of an advantage to dominate the office market.

jls

Subject: Word 2

Dear Mr Magee,

Many thanks for a great 'newspaper', I get 'withdrawal' symtons if I can't catch up with industry news through the Inquirer!

I was amused to read your article about Microsoft and who invented the spreadsheet. I am old enough to remember running VisiCalc on the HP87 desktop machine around 1982 or 1993. I remember first seeing Windows v1.03 when my office got an Apricot XEN. By 1987 we were writing our product data sheets and manuals on Windows 2.1 and Windows Write, and drawing with Micrografx In*A*Vision, we never looked back!

You mention you still use Word 2. I purchased Word 2 when it launched in 1992. Today I have Office XP (2002) however I have used Word 2 for my small business invoices and quotations since 1993. With several thousand documents the file sizes are far smaller than with later versions of Word, also the print envelope feature works so simply with HP LaserJet's. Of course for larger documents I use Word XP (2002).

My copy of Word 2 has a word counter in menu File-Summary Info... Statistics button, it shows Pages, Words and Characters.

I renamed my Word 2 executable WINWORD.EXE to WINWORD2.EXE so no clash with Word XP (2002)

My Word 2 'Help-About' says 2.0c
Winword.exe File Version says 2.0b
Winword.exe Product Version says 2.0b

Opening the file with a hex editor I see both references several times, the 2.0c reference as "....2.0c 11/10/92 ARNOLD1 11/10/92 2.0c..." i.e. 19 Oct 1992, the exe is dated 13/9/1992 (UK notation) and the other files are dated 13/9/1992. If you're interested in the 'update' I can email you the file Zipped (850Kb).

kind regards
Tony

Subject: AMD Price Cuts

Any idiot can announce price cuts when they don't have any product to sell. Maybe they're hoping Intel (who has an actual inventory) will follow suit and lose real dollars. As Scrooge said: "Bah! Humbug!"

Charles Greene

Subject: Microsoft "hadn't invented the spreadsheet" in 1989

Real pity that the real multitasking OSes of those days are forgotten. Still remember running a Mac emulation on my Amiga and was real quite disappointed by the Apple OS.If the Amiga OS felt simple, Apples one was plainly dumb :-D And Microsoft ?!

Hell, why should anyone have used it those days? Windows was buggy like hell and it would not even multitask, DOS was nice for some games but even then, there were alternatives which were a whole lot better.

Wasn't even PTS-DOS and DR.DOS with multitasking ? Remember that Linux could do some stuffe like that then, but stil, all except Apple and Amiga was shell and no fancy "click&play".

Real pity what great inovations of those times got lost (anyone remember BE-OS?!) and how long it takes till they are (re)invented.

Woenk

Subject: AMD price cuts

Sorry but you are wrong AGAIN...

There ain't no "emergency price cuts at AMD" despite the hype and false claims.

In addition this gem is foolishness too:

"According to recent roadmaps seen by the INQUIRER, Intel is keeping its prices steady, underlining problems of both allocation and process switching for AMD. µ"

You DON'T price discount products if you have an "allocation and process switching issue". Obviously you've never managed a product business...

The reason for the discounts will become pretty obvious in a few weeks and it isn't a negative at all for AMD or it's customers. AMD is offering additional discounts to the channel to the benefit of all except Intel, who continues to build excess inventory on weak sales.

Randy

Subject: Vole shafts Brits with Office pricing

Maybe the UK Government will think twice about the next time they want to ridiculously fine and extort money from a successful company.

Reality the Lawyers win again, Consumers and Businesses lose, and Microsoft will recoup the courtroom losses with the price increase.

Mike

Subject: Porsche owners not as upmarket as you suppose!

Hi Mike,

"The INQ would be personally wary of upsetting a group of 1,000 Porsche users. Never mind their obvious disposable incomes, what companies do they run?"

You are - or whomever wrote this piece is - evidently not a Porsche enthusiast. The 924 was a design exercise carried out by Porsche for Audi, who then decided they couldn't afford to proceed. So Porsche put the car into production themselves, rather than write off the work. True Porsche enthusiasts consider this to be a rebadged Audi, and those who buy it have not 'joined the club' as they say.

Real Porsches have their engines at the rear, and have prices - new and used - which are several multiples of what a 924 costs. The owners of 924s are nothing special. There is a somewhat analogous situation with small-engined BMW 3 series.

My Porsche - now long gone - was a 2.4 litre 911S, at the time (1970s) one of the top models of that marque. My current BMW is an E28 series M5 from 1986. And I'm not, and have never been, among that top echelon of whom you hint!

Cheers,

Mike

µ