Giving thanks to IBM and Microsoft

Wed 24 Nov 2004, 02:42 PM

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by Ben Langhinrichs
Here in the United States, we celebrate Thanksgiving Day tomorrow.  I thought I should offer up my thanks to the two behemoth corporations that have meant so much to me in recent years.

To IBM I offer somewhat mixed thanks.  Thanks for building a product as robust and durable and compelling as Lotus Notes and Domino so that ten years after starting to work with that software, I still make my living at it.  Thanks even more for refusing to take the time year after year after year to build in better rich text support, so that nine years after developing our first rich text manipulation extensions in our @YourCommand Toolkit, and seven years after developing our flagship Midas Rich Text LSX product, you still have nothing that really competes.  You have enabled me to send my daughter to a wonderful private college.

Likewise, to Microsoft I offer mixed thanks.  Thanks for building a compelling Outlook client which impels people to move away from Notes and a compellingly awful Exchange server which impels them back.  Thanks even more for providing the most lackluster support for your Exchange Notes Connector so that we would have a ready made market for our CoexLinks product.  Thanks as well for providing only the most minimal support possible for integration between .Net and Notes/Domino so that we would have such wondrous opportunities to provide better integration ourselves.  You have enabled me to fully fund our retirement and provide savings for my second two children to attend private colleges.

Thanks to IBM for removing even the poor excuse for a GenerateHTML method after the R5 betas, thus giving us free reign to create a whole business on high quality HTML generation.  This has enabled me to pay the mortgage and expenses for a number of years.

Thanks to Microsoft for refusing to support your Exchange Notes Connector even on your own Windows 2003 server, thus providing my wife and me with a wonderful impromptu vacation in London for our 20th anniversary.

Thanks to IBM for adding nested tables in R5, but still not supporting nested tables with your rich text classes even in the ND7 beta, much less ND6/6.5.  This has enabled me to provide a most wonderful digital camera for my daughter, and other cool electronics for those in the family who like such stuff.

The list goes on, but I must go spend some quality time with a bookcase that needs to be assembled, thanks perhaps to IBM's weak support for FindAndReplace.  

Life is good.  Thank you!

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