Quote:
Originally Posted by HardDrive
I was F*CKING SICK of Microsofts new product lines. Products that really are great on their own(Sharepoint comes to mind), but MS decides to spin together insane dependancys between the products, so that you can't get 'full functionality' unless you pony up for another bazillion dollars worth of ***** your organization doesn't need.
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I built my first web page using Notepad (HTML editors did not exist yet) in 1996.
Two years later (1998 I believe), FrontPage hit the market. I'm not quite sure why I did this, but I opened my HTML in FrontPage, made zero changes, saved it, and uploaded it to the server.
My web page stopped working. When I tried to open it, I got errors that said that I needed all sorts of server extensions. I was baffled. There was NOTHING fancy in this web page. Just some text and some images. That's it. I opened the HTML in NotePad, and saw that FrontPage had extensively modified my HTML--making calls to server extensions left and right. Upon further research, these server extensions were available from Microsoft for something like $50 a pop (more than I could afford as a college student). So simply by opening a previously-working HTML document in a Microsoft product, I now had to pay Microsoft something like $200 to make my web page work with Microsoft products.
Needless to say, I restored a backup copy of my web page and uninstalled FrontPage from my PC. I was so disgusted that Microsoft was trying to shake me down for something that could easily be done with standard HTML--no server extensions required.
I guess my point is that I've been seeing this "upsell" behavior from Microsoft for at least 10 years.