This is why new version of MS-Word have new file formats (you get New Word with New PC, folks in your company exchange documents and before you know it, you have to upgrade Old PC to New Word and, perhaps, New OS).

The latest spin, revealed by one of my best MS contacts, is terribly insidious, though on the surface it sounds almost innocent. The basic premise is: Microsoft is switching from their proprietary .HLP file format to HTML, and they're encouraging all developers to do so as well.

Now scratch the surface of that seemingly innocent move. You'll find the new document format isn't normal HTML, but HTML with some Microsoft proprietary format and compression, only read by Internet Explorer 4.something. You'll also see that Microsoft developer documentation no longer comes in paper, but only in this format. So every developer is forced to run IE4.x or, given all the bugs that entails, Windows 98.

But, you might think, couldn't developers opt for normal HTML? Right you are, they could, it would work. And it's well known just where in the Microsoft Certification Queue that'll land you. So it's impractical. So all new documentation sent out by all other companies on Windows will, sooner or later, adopt this new format. Which you can't read without IE4.0, which kills your system stability under Windows 95. So you're virtually forced to upgrade to Windows 98, without any "gun to the head" even implied here, since the program APIs (at least for a few months) are all still the same.

Those boys may be evil, but they do that part of it so well, it's like "car crash as an artform".


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