Little progress in states' ODF considerations
,----[ Quote ]
| In extrapolating the dangers posed by the continued use of Microsoft's
| formats the expert cited issues that rescue workers faced in accessing
| records maintained by local government entities when aiding in the relief of
| victims of the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, in which an estimated
| 300,000 people were killed,.
`----
http://www.infoworld.nl/idgns/bericht.phtml?id=002570DE00740E18002573300079DCFE
The following article discusses OOXML, as well as Windows-only SOA protocols
(see references).
IBM chides Microsoft over SOA
,----[ Quote ]
| Mills provided further contrast between IBM and Microsoft, saying that, in
| SOA, IBM takes vertical approaches to automation around inventory management
| and transaction control, and makes these horizontal processes.
|
| "We want to be frictionless in transactions as we rethink business-processes
| models," said Mills. "Transaction integrity requires sustained access flow,
| and Microsoft doesn't do that. Microsoft is about passing messages from one
| Windows-based system to another, not about involving the transaction
| function.
`----
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6201511.html
Related:
Microsoft absent from open standards movement around SOA
,----[ Quote ]
| Now, a new series of SOA standards is headed to OASIS, ones that could
| create a whole market segment around SOA common programmatic principles,
| but Microsoft is nowhere in sight. The absence of Microsoft from the
| Service Component Architecture (SCA), and its sibling Service Data
| Objects (SDO), definitions process can mean one thing: Microsoft will
| pursue its proprietary approach of baking pseudo-SOA into its
| operating system stack as long as it can.
`----
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gardner/?p=2483
Microsoft needs REST
,----[ Quote ]
| Yaron Goland defended his Microsoft colleague, Dare Objasanjo, as a poor
| sitting duck. He justifies the decision to scrap APP as tactical and not
| strategic. He states: “We considered this option but the changes needed to
| make APP work for our scenarios were so fundamental that it wasn’t clear if
| the resulting protocol would still be APP… I also have to admit that I was
| deathly afraid of the political implications of Microsoft messing around with
| APP.” According to Goland, “we couldn’t figure out how to use APP without
| putting an unacceptable implementation and performance burden on both our
| customers and ourselves.”
|
| The implications for this APP vs. Web3S debate can potentially be enormous.
| Just as we are on the brink of creating simple architectures that are
| interoperable using simple standards, the industry risks splitting into
| separate, incompatible camps again. It is probably no coincidence that we
| have Microsoft on one side and Google, IBM and Sun on the other. This will be
| a fundamental problem for enterprise customers if Microsoft extends this
| strategy into any REST architectures that it introduces into the enterprise.
| Any enterprise systems that expose their data using APP, which is likely in
| the near future, will be incompatible with any Microsoft system that expose
| their data with Web3S.
`----
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Newton/?p=14
Halloween Memo I Confirmed and Microsoft's History on Standards
,----[ Quote ]
| By the way, if you are by any chance trying to figure out Microsoft's policy
| toward standards, particularly in the context of ODF-EOXML, that same
| Microsoft page is revelatory, Microsoft's answer to what the memo meant when
| it said that Microsoft could extend standard protocols so as to deny
| Linux "entry into the market":
|
| Q: The first document talked about extending standard protocols as a way
| to "deny OSS projects entry into the market." What does this mean?
|
| A: To better serve customers, Microsoft needs to innovate above standard
| protocols. By innovating above the base protocol, we are able to deliver
| advanced functionality to users. An example of this is adding
| transactional support for DTC over HTTP. This would be a value-add and
| would in no way break the standard or undermine the concept of standards,
| of which Microsoft is a significant supporter. Yet it would allow us to
| solve a class of problems in value chain integration for our Web-based
| customers that are not solved by any public standard today. Microsoft
| recognizes that customers are not served by implementations that are
| different without adding value; we therefore support standards as the
| foundation on which further innovation can be based.
`----
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070127202224445
A File Format Timeline
,----[ Quote ]
| Like any durable goods monopoly (and few things are as durable as
| software) Microsoft's largest competitor is their own install base.
| Microsoft has made many attempts at moving beyond the binary formats
| in the past, with Office 2000, Office XP and Office 2003. But in each
| case it failed. These were all false starts and abandoned attempts. So
| we should look for signs that OOXML is actually Microsoft's real
| direction and not another false start or dead end.
`----
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/06/file-format-timeline.html
Microsoft used undocumented Windows APIs - Iowa testimony
,----[ Quote ]
| 'All I can say is holy API batman...I'm not kidding...we are talking
| about literally 500-800 APIs here, no joke,' he wrote.
|
| Alepin had earlier claimed that Microsoft ran special demonstration
| programs whose sole purpose was to crash rival products and alleged
| that the company had subverted developers who used Microsoft's
| version of Java 'thinking they were developing multi-platform
| applications, but were actually developing Windows-specific
| applications'.
`----
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/101947/microsoft-used-undocumented-windows-apis-iowa-testimony.html
CIS Accuses Microsoft of Plotting HTML Hijack
,----[ Quote ]
| An industry coalition that has represented competitors of Microsoft
| in European markets before the European Commission stepped up its
| public relations offensive this morning, this time accusing
| Microsoft of scheming to upset HTML's place in the fabric of
| the Internet with XAML, an XML-based layout lexicon forn
| etwork applications.
`----
http://www.betanews.com/article/ECIS_Accuses_Microsoft_of_Plotting_HTML_Hijack/1169824569
|
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