The Software Revolution Part 1

Imagine that to read this magazine, you needed a special program for the text, another program to view the photographs, and yet another to look at the charts. Or, to watch your favorite TV shows, you needed a CBS viewer to watch David Letterman and an NBC viewer to watch Seinfeld. Oh, yes--you'd also wind up buying a new, "upgraded" viewer every year or two. And to make sure that viewer does its best, you'd buy a new TV, too.

You wouldn't stand for it. But this is precisely what computer users have been doing for years. At the root of this situation is the way that software is created, distributed, and consumed. Programs such as spreadsheets or word processing packages are written for a particular type of hardware and operating system--so your Windows Excel spreadsheet won't work on your Macintosh. And even if they're written for the same operating system, programs from different software makers won't work easily together. Worse, programs from the same suppliers don't necessarily work easily together because data must be arranged in a particular way for each: Your spreadsheet package can't deal with the text from your word processing package, and vice versa.