[cw-discuss] (no subject)

[Rob]

On Wednesday 06 September 2006 16:53, James E. LaBarre wrote:
> In *theory*, government agencies cannot "endorse" a particular
> product, and forcing the usage of Windows & MSIE is equivalent
> to such.  England is certainly much stricter on this than the
> USA is.

I assume that they have outsourced some of these sites to third 
parties, and have less control over them.  (This is America, and 
we'll outsource anything, even our prisons and schools.)  But I 
can think of at least one federal entity that requires certain 
kinds of business to run their ActiveX control in IE on a 
dedicated Windows PC which is connected to both your internal 
network and the Internet.  Yeah, I'm aghast as well.

I can also think of a number of regulatory entities who require 
certain kinds of business to run some software that does very 
specific and unique things, and there are only two vendors 
making that kind of software, both Windows-only despite one of 
them being written in Java.  A free as in freedom solution 
would not be acceptable to TPTB (the patriots that be), in this 
case.  Hopefully I have been vague enough here to avoid being 
arrested while also helping you understand.

Ignoring the government, though, there are private corporations 
with whom my clients must do business whether they like it or 
not, to a far greater extent than they're beholden to Microsoft.  
For example, in order for their customers to be able to use 
anyone else's ATM's or use their debit cards at the supermarket 
or gas pump, a bank must sign up with an ATM network like STAR 
or Pulse.  One such network, not named here, has a B2B site 
that's absolutely hideous, will roll over and die if you're 
using a too-old or too-new version of IE, never mind a real 
browser, and is the dominant network in our area, meaning 
everyone has to deal with them or their customers' ATM cards are 
basically useless.

Their position is much closer to that of Intuit (who's never been 
shy about making their customers realize they have no choice) 
than Microsoft (who has at least been sued for their 
monopolistic actions and tread a bit more lightly nowadays.)

Anyway, one of my clients actually did try using cxoffice and IE 
to access that site a few years ago, and the ActiveX control 
prevented it from working.  They've been resistant to the idea 
of Wine-based products ever since.  Their philosophy -- and more 
and more, mine as well -- is that we don't need the office suite 
or the browser because Openoffice and Firefox are good enough 
for us to make individual users justify MSoffice and IE, and the 
Windows to run them on, as business expenses.  ("Tell us why 
it's worth $600 to the company for you to view that site/run 
that macro."  Sometimes they can, usually they back off.)

No, what we need is support for all these vertical market, legacy 
applications, and those are going to be the hardest nuts to 
crack.  And where Office and IE present two huge targets that 
cxoffice largely has covered, there are thousands and thousands 
of legacy apps out there, each doing stupider API tricks than 
the last.

Well, thousands of legacy apps plus Visio.  They really need 
those little pictures of actual Cisco boxes on their network 
diagrams.

Rob