Re: Re: [vox-tech] Pasting From Netscape

[Bill Broadley <bill@MAPSmath.ucdavis.edu>]

On Wed, Feb 21, 2001 at 11:33:50PM -0800, Deja User wrote:
> Which product will be around in 5 years? (Corel, at this moment) WordPerfect for 
>Linux, or Star Office? If I'm going to spend a lot of time learning something, I want 
>to be able to stick with it (hence my yearning to be a *nix sysadmin!). UA (25 years 
>to retirement!).

Guess I'm just a simplistic user, I can usually learn all I'd want
to know about a word processor in a afternoon or so.  Then again
I probably only use 0.5% of the available functionality.

In anycase for such a heavy weight application I think expecting
it to be around in any similar form in 5 years is a bit much to
expect.  

If you want something that will still be useful in 5 years learn LaTeX,
and/or Lyx (a front end for LaTeX).  Between application "renting",
java (or any other platform indepedent language), possible splitting
up of Microsoft (I heard they are hiring linux programmers recently),
increasing size of the market, migration to setop/pda/embedded apps
etc. I wouldn't expect the document processing landscape under linux
(or whatever the popular/similar os is of the time) to look very similar.

My recommendation is find the best fit today, learn it, use it till you
find something so much better (I.e. AI + voice recognition or whatever)
that it's worth the time to retrain.  The market/industry is just to
dynamic to see who's going to dominate in 5 years.  

Intel's learning that the hard way today (in danger of losing the
lead in the desktop space), Microsoft is still king by a large margin
but less so then 2-3 year ago.

--
Bill