Re: Philippe's Management of Microsoft (was: Re: Yoruba Keyboard)

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri May 07 2004 - 07:40:05 CDT


From: "Raymond Mercier" <RaymondM@compuserve.com>
> Kenneth Whistler writes, replying to Philippe
> > This kind of long-winded harangue about how Microsoft should manage its
> > business is OT for this list and is generally insulting to the Microsoft
> > participants as well. Please take it elsewhere and do not bother the
> > Unicode list with your management plans for Microsoft's internal
> > business.
>
> It is all very well to mock Philippe, but IE6 fails badly if it cannot even
> display CJK(A) in UTF8, something Mozilla does perfectly well. If there are
> Microsoft participants in this list perhaps they could explain this failure.
> Broadly speaking I am pro-Microsoft, but this behaviour in IE6 reflects
> badly on them.

And my comment here was not about Microsoft should manage its business but about
what it has done (or not done) since several years. The adoption of GB18030
should have been one additional motivation to add or correct the missing
support. Windows 2000 is already 5 years old, and Windows XP 3 years old, and
still nothing available there. Microsoft can choose whatever business strategies
it wants, but still users will just see what is missing since long in Windows,
and will blame Microsoft for not doing this for Windows.

In a world where IE represents more then 90% of browsers, this is a serious
issue for international website designers, and this does not favor the adoption
and use of characters out of the BMP. Microsoft could claim that this has no
immediate economical value, but for all web designers this absence of correct
support is a source of additional costs, and the source of costly heterogeneous
solutions, code incompatibilities, and costly support requests.



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