Popularity ≠ superiority. Proprietary text document formats is yet another proof of Microsoft’s crookedness—their subpar products only able to stay afloat by unethical anti-competitive behaviour.
Popularity ≠ superiority. Proprietary text document formats is yet another proof of Microsoft’s crookedness—their subpar products only able to stay afloat by unethical anti-competitive behaviour.
The author would do well to look up SGML; Markdown is fundamentally about sugaring the syntax for tag-oriented markup and is defined as a superset of HTML, so mistaking it for something like TeX or Word really demonstrates a failure to engage with Markdown per se. I suppose that the author can be forgiven somewhat, considering that they are talking to writers, but it’s yet another example of how writers really only do research up to the point where they can emit a plausible article and get paid.
So close to a real insight! The correct lesson is that Microsoft, like Blizzard, is skilled at imitating what’s popular in the market; like magpies, they don’t need to have a culture of software design as long as they have a culture of software sales. In particular, Microsoft didn’t create Word or Excel, but ripped off WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.