[IxDA Discuss] Microsoft to license Office 2007 UI system

[pauric]

Jared said " We'll see how much you'll like the better UI if you end up
losing your job because customers buy from the cheaper developer. That's why
IP protection was put into place. "

With all due respect Jared a UI does not have a great impact on sales in the
enterprise.  Explain to me why Notes is still around?
One only needs to look at previous iterations of Office to see this too. The
people who purchase enterprise class products rarely take usage in to
consideration. Its pricing, vendor reputation, interoperability, tco and
many other things I know little about.

While protecting IP is important, when it gets to the level of restrictive
practices as detailed in this license I think its gone beyond the realm of
protecting investments and in to the murky world of anti-competitive
behavior.  Something MS is very familiar with.

I am not 'throwing the baby out with the bath water' when questioning MS
intentions here. They are using practices on the UI that they have applied
to other parts of their product distribution. But I'm repeating myself and
taking up bandwidth on this list that is somewhat off-topic.

I will sign-off on this with one final counter to a couple of statements you
made that have me hot under the collar (o;
Jared said "But I see no reason to complain when others choose to protect
their hard work." & "And don't worry when someone just copies all the hard
work and investment you've made for 1/100th the cost, thereby giving them
the ability to sell the same product as you for greater margins."

Hard work? If MS had designed the flippin thing right in the first place
they wouldnt have spent millions researching how users click around trying
to find a feature, then to develop a better way to let them access features
in Office.  And that is all this is, a rehash of the same featureset.  This
isnt really Design Investement, its a patch up job correcting earlier
mistakes.  Now, one aspect of good design it a ground up approach to the
entire system, the presentation layer being the icing on the cake.  Yes, a
vendor from taiwan can copy my interface designs but if they are in the
business of copying you can be very sure the underlying structure is buggy
and the engineers have a hard time incrementing the source on to the next
product on the roadmap.   I see this all the time.

There's a saying, if you're not the lead dog the scenery never changes.  So,
good luck to them, if you're copying me you're already a step behind.