From: Jeff Bone (jbone@jump.net)
Date: Mon May 29 2000 - 19:41:00 PDT
At the risk of beating a dead horse...
I spent a fair bit of the weekend futzing around with the home network,
taking care of some items that have been languishing for months while
getting Clickfeed up and going. One of those items was to set up DAV
support on Apache on one of the Linux boxes, then set up Web Folders on
the Win* boxes. Despite my dislike of DAV from a protocol purist
perspective --- see previous rants, why clutter up a simple, beautiful
protocol when you could build same functionality on top of base
protocol? --- I have to acknowledge its utility. So...
Everything works great, but I've been fiddling with MS's Web Folders
implementation, and I'm steamed. It's one of the most subtle examples
of tying products together and sacrificing the customers' best interests
in favor of increased sales that I've ever seen. Either that, or it's
just plain stupidity on the part of MS, and I can't believe that's the
case: those guys are too smart for that.
Of course, what I'm talking about is the fact that the DAV client is
built into (a) Explorer and (b) Office 2000 directly, rather than being
integrated into the filesystem. Sure, you can do what *looks* like
mounting a remote DAV filesystem via Web Folders, but it's not really a
filesystem --- you can't save back directly to it, though you can DnD
items onto it to copy them there. Net effect: you can't use apps like
Notepad to edit files in a DAV tree directly; you have to edit, save
somewhere, and copy back in. Only apps like Office that are tooled out
specifically can use DAV. If you want to use DAV in a natural and
efficient way, you've got to use Office to do so.
Ask yourself: why integrate DAV support into the client apps, instead
of integrating into the filesystem directly? The only reasons I can
think of are (a) increase sales by pushing MS own "DAV enabled" apps, or
(b) they're just plain stupid, not as innovative as they think. I can't
believe (b) so it must be (a.)
Embracing, extending, smothering, and *absolutely* locking customers to
MS-specific shit in every possible way... that's why we love 'em,
right?
jb
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