Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> ____/ John Locke on Tuesday 24 July 2007 17:34 : \____
>
>> On Tue, 24 Jul 2007 13:25:28 +0100, Roy Schestowitz
>> <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>>Now It's Spain and OOXML - More Standards Highjinks?
>>>
>>>,----[ Quote ]
>>>| It seems there may have been more games played by Microsoft in the OOXML
>>>| saga, or at the very least some confusion spread, and this time our story
>>>| comes from Spain, where the government of Andalusia has now sent an
>>>| official letter of protest [PDF, Spanish] to the president of the technical
>>>| committee deciding whether or not to accept OOXML as an ISO standard,
>>>| denouncing what it called an attempt by Microsoft to manipulate the process
>>>| by selectively quoting from a letter from the Andalusian government back in
>>>| January as if it were an endorsement of OOXML as an ISO standard today.
>>>| That January letter, Andalusia says, was not intended to indicate that it
>>>| felt there should be an acceptance of OOXML by the technical committee.
>>>`----
>>>
>>>http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070723235113424
>>>
>>>There's a lot of Microsoft ugliness at this stage. I'm just trying to catch
>>>up...
>>
>> You haven't seen anything yet. Its gonna get real interesting...they're
>> starting to shows signs of the "cornered rat" syndrome.
>
> Nobody likes rats.
>
> Microsoft Faces EU Probe on Word, Excel Dominance, People Say
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
>| Microsoft Corp., the world's largest software maker, is facing deeper
>| scrutiny from European regulators on whether it is abusing its dominance in
>| word processing and spreadsheets, three people with direct knowledge of the
>| case said.
> `----
>
> http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aR9bHOp5bm3A&refer=europe
>
> This could get ugly. They won't get away with it, trust me.
>
I suspect that they'll manage to do an enormous amount of damage whilst
they fail to get away with it, though.
For example, imagine what it will cost to get the BBC off Microsfot and
onto standard formats? Who will pay? We, the licence-fee payers, of
course. Same for the national archives - they'll lock everything into
some version of OOXML, and then we'll have to pay a fortune to get it
converted back into ODF so that everyone can actually read it. And
*then* there'll be people complaining about the coversion process. Same
again for the British Library - they'll spend a fortune moving
everything onto Microsoft formats, and then have to spend another
fortune moving it onto something standard.
--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
| Cola faq: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/linux/advocacy/faq-and-primer/ |
| Cola trolls: http://colatrolls.blogspot.com/ |
| My (new) blog: http://www.thereisnomagic.org |
|
|
