Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!oliveb!intelca!mipos3!omepd!psu-cs!reed!tektronix!tekig5!tekig4!bradn From: bradn@tekig4.LEN.TEK.COM (Bradford Needham) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Word format (proprietary formats in general) Summary: "Proprietary Standard" is an oxymoron Message-ID: <3685@tekig4.LEN.TEK.COM> Date: 2 Feb 89 21:13:47 GMT References: <347@microsoft.UUCP> <2354@ilium.cs.swarthmore.edu> Reply-To: bradn@tekig4.LEN.TEK.COM (Bradford Needham) Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton, OR. Lines: 28 The Word Format discussion brings a little story to mind. It's a true tale, but without the true names. Once upon a time, not too long ago, the WhizBang workstation company cooked up a network filesystem protocol. It was powerful, it was secure, but it was proprietary. Meanwhile, the BlindingLight workstation company cooked up a different protocol. It was public-domain. The folks at WhizBang scoffed at BlindingLight, believing that their own protocol would dominate the market because it was "better". As time passed, however, more and more workstations from more and more companies supported the BlindingLight protocol. WhizBang's protocol continued to be available only on WhizBang workstations. Eventually, even WhizBang grudgingly supported the BlindingLight protocol because it had become the de-facto standard. The moral here is that "proprietary standard" is an oxymoron. If you plan to dominate the market with a whiz-bang program, you had better give its file formats away to whoever asks for it. [In partial defense of Microsoft, it sounds like they do provide a publically-documented word processor data transfer format, the "Rich Text Format".] Brad Needham