Suggestions please for what POP or IMAP servers to use

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Schwartz [mailto:davids at webmaster.com]
> Sent: Monday, December 17, 2007 11:17 PM
> To: tedm at toybox.placo.com
> Cc: Rob; FreeBSD Chat; Andrew Falanga
> Subject: RE: Suggestions please for what POP or IMAP servers to use
> 
> 
> 
> > Do you really not understand it?  I'll try one more time.  Anyone
> > who writes a browser that grabs major market share has a guarenteed
> > stream of cash from the root certificate authorities.  Netscape
> > figured this out first, then when MS caught on, they pushed them out
> > of business to grab that revenue stream.
> 
> Do you have any evidence to suggest that this revenue stream 
> motivated MS's
> browser push? I've cited quite a bit of evidence that supports other
> motivations.
> 

No you haven't.  You have cited what MS has claimed.  As I already
stated, MS isn't going to tell the general public the truth about
what they are doing.  No company does.

Strategy is always regarded as competitive data and
trade secrets and NEVER voluntararily disclosed.

You will find that in some instances it's even illegal for a
corporation to do so.  Such as during mergers and acquisitions.

> > > More likely, Microsoft was afraid that a portable browser could
> > > become the
> > > platform of the future, making the operating system on longer
> > > particularly
> > > important. If that was going to happen, they had better be the
> > > market leader
> > > in the browser business.
> 
> > Rubbish.  We have had portable browsers, we have a portable
> > language (Java)
> > and nothing has come of that "platform of the future" hogwash.
> 
> Nevertheless, this is what motivated Microsoft's decision. Perhaps had
> Microsoft left the market alone, that would have happened. 
> Perhaps not. But
> there's quite a bit of evidence to suggest that Microsoft feared that
> technologies such as the web and Java would make the OS 
> irrelevent and acted
> to protect their cash cow.

There's evidence that Microsoft SAID that they feared this.  But there
is no proof that they ACTUALLY feared it.

As so many other people OUTSIDE of Microsoft at the time were saying
that the "platform of the future" was a load of hogwash, it seems to
me to be rediculous to claim that there was any consensus in the
industry that the "platform of the future" would actually happen,
much less within Microsoft.

It is only the very young and naieve, people new to an industry, who
are swayed by such things.  Those who have worked for many years in a
business have seen initatives come and go.  During the beginnings of
the commercialization of the Internet, a large number of people who
had never worked in computers or networking were climbing into it.
It is understandable to expect that most of them would be starry eyed,
ready to believe anything told to them.

The same people that were believing Netscape would upset the industry
were the folks dumping millions into pets.com and we know where
that ended up.

By contrast if you review the more boring writings of the established
players in the industry at the time, you will find that few of them
believed this nonsense.  In fact, most of them were busy cashing out
their patents, businesses, and ideas to the young and stupid - recognizing
that the money wagon was in town full of people with money burning
holes in their pocket ready to spend on anything.

Didn't you ever stop and wonder why BSDI and cdrom.com merged and
sold out to WindRiver?  The people running that were smart - they
knew when cash-rich idiots were vastly overvaluing an idea, and
they took the money and ran like hell.

> 
> I'm not sure which of two arguments you are now making:
>

Pretty understandable since you apparently have no grasp of business.
 
> 1) Microsoft didn't see the Netscape/Java threat to their OS at the time.
> 
> 2) Microsoft did see the threat, but still acted to get root key revnue.
> 
> 1 has been refuted by evidence. Many MS employees voiced precisely this
> fear.

MS employees say what their bosses tell them to say.  You apparently
have never worked in a large company and do not understand how internal
corporate propaganda works.

> As for 2, do you have any evidence this motivated anyone to do
> anything?
> 

The evidence for 2 is obvious.  If there is one thing that characterizes
Microsoft it is that they continually add to their portfolio of
money-getting products and never keep a money-losing product line going.
They understand business, you see.  MS would never pull an IBM-OS/2
thing where IBM propped up OS/2 Warp for years and years after it was
obvious it would never be profitable.

If IE, as you (or someone) was claiming was nothing more than Microsoft
spending a huge amount of money for the good of the users, and getting
nothing in return, MS would have killed it years ago, just like they
killed IE for MacOS X.

MS dumped a pile of money into development of IE7 because it gets a
pile of money in return from the root certificate authorities.  Just
like MS dumps a pile of money into development of operating systems
because they get a pile of money in return from the PC companies
that sell PC's with Windows preloaded.  All of this rubbish about
MS positioning IE so they can "take over" the Internet (ie: html and
browser standards) is a pile of nonsense, it is nothing more than
smokescreen mostly from Microsoft, designed to keep customers from
understanding how they -really- make money.

MS kills projects like Windows Services for UNIX, (Server for NFS
was deleted from Vista Enterprise & Ultimate, plus several other
things) Microsoft Bob, and a host of others, because they tried,
and got less in return than the cost of development.

Get it?  After all it is extremly simple and basic business.  You
make a product you think people might like, market the shit out of
it, and if people don't buy it, you emotionlessly kill it and move
on.  What you don't do is crap like what, for example, General Motors
did, which is make a product that doesen't make money (ie: Saturn)
then after a decade of marketing the shit out of it, when the beancounters
tell you it's still not making money, you pour another couple billion
bucks into it.

(Or even better, make a product that people are screaming to buy - ie:
the EV-1, then don't let anyone buy it, and then kill the project a
few years later claiming nobody wanted one - then claim a few years
after that that you don't understand why everyone is buying your
strongest competitors version of the exact same thing you killed off -
ie: the Prius)

Ted