Re: Libtool 1.4.3

[Eric Siegerman]

On Tue, Oct 08, 2002 at 01:30:37PM -0400, Thomas E. Dickey wrote:
> Deliberately introducing design incompatibilities simply encourages people
> to use other tools.

Then why's MS Office so popular? :-)

Seriously, so can failing to introduce them, if the price of
compatibility is to avoid making essential changes for the
better.

(I once read that a few decades back, companies like Zenith and
Electrohome chose not to make solid-state TV sets, because they
wanted to protect the demand for the output of their vacuum-tube
plants.  Japanese companies, lacking a domestic tube industry,
were more willing to adopt the new, radically incompatible
technology  Of course we lost the tube industry after all ... and
gave away the TV-set industry along with it.)

I'm sure there are many examples on both sides, both in the
software domain and otherwise.  Which just goes to show, neither
adapt-or-die nor compatibility-at-all-costs is a reasonable
attitude.  In practice, it's often a tradeoff.

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        address@hidden
|  |  /
The acronym for "the powers that be" differs by only one letter
from that for "the pointy-haired boss".