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December 20, 1997
News
Giveaway: 3 copies of SegaSoft Lose Your Marbles; 1 Microsoft Gift Certificate
Live appearance today from 2 until 4 at In-Direct Electronics Wholesale in Newark. The
store’s address is 5748 Mowry School Road and you can get there by taking the
Stevenson Exit East off of 880 and making a right on Balentine Drive. You’ll find it
in the small shopping center immediately on your left.
I can’t help but talk some more about this incredible MS-DOJ case. As you probably
recall, the DOJ issued a preliminary injunction last week preventing MS from forcing OEM
system vendors to install MS Internet Explorer as a condition of getting Windows 95.
Microsoft’s response—which I found incredible—was to say that they will
offer three options: one is the same as they’re currently offering, with IE as the
standard browser, the second is an unbootable version of Windows 95 with all IE 4.0 files
removed, and the third is the original version of Windows 95, complete with all the bugs
and other problems that have been fixed in subsequent versions. The company is trying to
claim that you can’t remove IE without destroying Windows, but that is a bald,
unadulterated lie, pure and simple. In fact, ironically Judge Penfield himself said he was
able to remove IE 3.0 himself in 90 seconds. DOJ had responded to MS’ offerings by
saying that the $1 million/day penalty should be reinstated and now the company has until
next Tuesday to respond. In the meantime, several states attorney generals, including here
in California, apparently met secretly over the last few weeks to put together yet another
antitrust suit against Microsoft.
The arrogance of Microsoft’s response has led its opponents, particularly Netscape,
to jump in with answers on how easy it is to uninstall IE 3.0. In fact, the company
received all kinds of press for its new Freedom of Choice campaign, which includes a link
to a page with instructions on how to remove. In addition, all kinds of grass-roots
efforts have popped up with info on how to quickly and cleanly remove IE 3.0. The easiest
way, of course, is to just use Windows 95’s Add/Remove Software Control Panel, which
is literally a single button-click operation.
Just prior to all these developments, Microsoft had released to OEM system vendors
Windows 95 OSR 2.5, which includes Internet Explorer 4.01 as part of the OS, as well as
some additional bug fixes. Expect to see it on new systems purchased in January. And in
other Microsoft OS news, the company just released the third and supposedly final major
beta of Windows 98 last week.
Electronic commerce on the web is a hot topic. Of course there’s lots of
predictions and reports about how it’s going to play such an important role in the
future, and while it’s taking off more slowly than many people (though not I)
expected, I think those reports will prove to be true some day. In the mean time, there
are lots of little efforts going on to try and make the web profitable for all the
companies who are still losing lots of money offering free services and information.
Several electronic magazines have begun to announce they will start charging for their
content, for example. Most interesting of all, though, are the development of mechanisms
for microtransactions, where you would essentially pay a few pennies, or even less, to get
access to certain info, such as individual articles in a magazine. One of the most
developed of these is the Digital Millicent E-Commerce System http://www.millicent.digital.com, which just
went into beta this week. [explain] While these developments are inevitable—after
all, somebody’s got to pay for all this stuff—I think it signals the beginning
the end of the totally free Internet as we know it today.
Speaking of having to pay (and I hate to bring this up around the holidays), the final
versions of most tax packages, including Intuit’s popular TurboTax are now available.
The new versions incorporate all the latest tax law changes and you can be used to file
your income tax returns electronically.
It’s not often that someone can come up with a completely new category of software
anymore, but the folks at Trellix software have. The company, which was started by the guy
who invented spreadsheets, is offering their $99 Trellix document generating app, which is
kind of like a cross between a word processor and a HTML layout program. The program is
specifically designed for creating visually rich, structured documents for web pages and
intranets. If you’re curious, you can find out more at the company’s web site
www.trellix.com, or just go to mine and click on This Week’s Links.
Speaking of structured documents, at the recent Internet World show, Microsoft announced
that the next version of Office for Windows 95/98 and NT will use HTML as one of its
standard file formats. Right now you can save Word and Excel files as HTML, but you
typically lose formatting or other details in the process. The next version of Office will
use HTML and XML, or Extensible Markup Language, as one of its native formats, which means
you won’t lose any data in the process and which should make it much easier to
generate content for web sites and corporate intranets.
And speaking of HTML, the latest version, HTML 4.0, was formally approved by the World
Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, the organization that maintains many web standards, this past
week. HTML 4.0 adds support for cascading style sheets, which gives web designers more
control over the look of their pages. Unfortunately, both Netscape and MS have each
implemented their own proprietary versions of cascading style sheets in the current
iterations of their browser software. That means that web sites that conform exactly to
the HTML 4.0 standard may not work properly with either Navigator or Explorer right now.
I’m sure that will be addressed in the future. By the way, if you want to know if
your site uses valid HTML, the W3C has set up a new validating site called the W3C HTML
Validation Service that will go through and look at the HTML in your site and tell you
whether or not it conforms to the spec or not. The site is located at validator.w3.org.
There’s yet more interesting developments in portables we can look forward to over
the next few months. First off, early in January, Intel is expected to announce a 266 MHz
version of the Mobile Pentium MMX processor [explain]. In addition, some clone
manufacturers, including LEK Technologies and Wedge Technology will apparently be offering
15" screens for notebooks. It turns out they’re actually made of two smaller
screens seamlessly joined together. Another even more interesting development is that Umax
and several other notebook vendors are planning to offer low cost portables, several under
$1,500 and a few even under $1,000, in the first part of 1998. Just as the low-cost
desktop arena has taken off this year, it’s expected that the low-end notebook market
could take off next year. As with the desktops, many of the low-cost notebooks will use
non-Intel processors, including mobile versions of Cyrix’ MediaGX and AMD’s K6
chips.
If you’re a MS Office 97 user who’s fed up with the dog-slow performance of
the Outlook e-mail package and information manager, you should be pleased to hear that
Microsoft has released a second beta release of Outlook 98, which apparently offers major
improvements in speed. The final version of Outlook 98, which will apparently be free to
any Office 97 user, is not due until the spring, but you can grab a copy of the beta now
at www.microsoft.com/outlook or via my site.
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