Why Redmond feels so threatened by ODF
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| As ODF has progressed, Microsoft's mouthpieces have been there each step
| of the way, to give the company's own contrarian spin on the topic. The
| ODF camp should probably thank the folks in Redmond for helping to make
| OpenDocument a household word ? assuming, that is, that they hold with
| the popular wisdom that there's no such thing as bad publicity. Because,
| if you've been paying attention, one fact becomes clear: Microsoft really
| has it in for ODF.
|
| Why? It's just a file format. Actually, Microsoft has never made any
| public statement disputing its merits. It's not that ODF is no good, we
| are told; Microsoft merely prefers having two standards instead of one.
|
| But if that's true, then one easy way to squash this whole hullabaloo
| would be to build ODF support into Microsoft Office. Presumably, that
| would be the easiest way to demonstrate the superiority of Microsoft's
| own XML-based file formats over ODF. What fool would go to the trouble of
| choosing ODF when there's an obvious better option, selected by default
| in the Save As box?
| It's not as if it would be technically difficult to do, either. In fact,
| the OpenDocument Foundation went ahead and wrote a plugin on its own,
| without any input from Microsoft.
|
| By now it should be clear where I'm going with this. It?s been said
| before, but it merits repeating: the reason Microsoft won't write any
| code to support ODF, and the reason it wants to block OpenDocument,
| is because OpenDocument is a threat to Microsoft's bottom line. Period.
| The revenue stream generated by locking customers into closely guarded
| proprietary file formats is the proverbial golden goose for Microsoft.
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http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/PrintDoc/CBE417F838EAB4A0CC25717A001A0EC9
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