Story: Microsoft must drop its Office politics

Posted by: Anonymous (Tuesday 4 October 2005, 6:26 AM)

That was very well said. This whole Microsoft tactic reminds me of the early Java support/war days. Microsoft is a company with some talented engineers. If they would have spent the effort to being the best platform to run Java on or even that their Java implementation was the best (compatible) implementation to run Java on, they would have been able to significantly take much of the Java platform market. Their early Java implementations were rather good - faster than the Sun version. The sad part is that they did not just compete on quality of product. They could have, and would have done well, if not won. But, insted, they tried their best to marginalize the Java platform and make their own "Microsoft-only" version.

They seem to be trying the same again with the Office file formats. Microsoft Office is, in many ways, the best office software for the Windows platform. If they supported OpenDocument much like they support other file formats such as WordPerfect, they would, most likely, easily become the leading OpenDocument producing product. In fact, with that leadership, they could end up becoming the "ruler" by which other OpenDocument supporting products are measured against. (Such as does it render like MS-Office, print like MS-Office, load as fast as MS-Office). And, if they got that leadership role, they could then help push the standard with newer features that others could not match as easily.

But that would mean competing, something that Microsoft's founder Bill Gates even wrote about (before the anti-trust trial) wanting to crush the competition since competing is costly.