RJB said:
OK, got that. Except "Word" and "WordPerfect" (and, oh, heck, even
"WordStar") are all special programs called - wait, it's coming to
me - oh,
yeah WORD Processing programs.
But they don't have the same menus, don't have the same feature set,
don't have the same UI, don't have the same extensions for filetypes,
don't have the same spelling and grammar features, don't have ... .
There are dozens of word processor programs. There are dozens of e-mail
programs. There are thousands of games. Just because they perform some
overlapping functions doesn't make them related products.
So I think you can understand my confusion on two remarkably similar
programs, both sold by the same company,
Yep, and that's why most companies that have DIFFERENT products do not
confuse those product lines by using common words in their product
titles. But the guy with the gun wins the fight over the guy with a
stick.
that use the same commands,
File, Help, View, and so on are common across thousands of programs.
Once you start navigating through the menus, they are not the same other
than the commonality shared amongst the majority of Windows-based
software. Ease-of-use means making similar functions look similar in
different programs.
share sigificantly remarkable amounts of code
Huh? Well, yeah, about as much as do Word and WordPerfect. None of the
code in Outlook is duplicated by paring it down into Outlook Express.
There are DLLs that get used by them to make system calls for similar
functions, like writing to a file, but those are also shared by every
Windows-based program that also want to do the same functions. If every
program had to provide its own complete set of files for every function,
you wouldn't need Windows. You'd be back in DOS, well, actually you
wouldn't need DOS, either, if the application did everything.
Where in Outlook Express do you see a Journal, Notes, Calendar, or
Tasks? Where in Outlook do you see it doing NNTP (network news transfer
protocol). Outlook is a PIM (personal information manager) that
includes e-mail functionality. Outlook Express includes e-mail and
newsgroups support. The only function they share is e-mail and and they
only have to *behave* similarly because they have to communicate with
POP3 and SMTP servers by complying to standards that Microsoft did not
author. Outlook also supports Exchange as the mail server but not
Outlook Express.
that have the same word in the title, might somehow be related to each
other.
I'm not apologizing for Microsoft's lack of foresight in realizing that
there was no need to rename Internet Mail & News to something similar to
a wholly different product simply because it shared some minimally
overlapping functionality. There was probably some marketing excuse,
er, rationale for deciding back so many years ago of why to rename the
product to confuse it with another product.
The executable for Outlook is called outlook.exe. Note that the
executable for Outlook Express is still called MSIMN.exe (MicroSoft
Internet Mail and News).
Live and burn, burn and learn, learn or stagnate, stagnate and die.
The only constant is change.
Existence does not mandate intelligence.
All that work to create a world of challenge and you want to be bored?
If the world spun a little faster, exit the less tenacious.
