Enterprise applications Toolkit

Story: Microsoft wins latest round in OpenDocument battle

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Let's see if we have this correctly.

We have OpenDocument, an open, public, published standard with absolutely no restrictive Nondisclosure agreements, and at least one implementation available as Open Source code. The cost, nominal to none, and it's available today.

We have Microsoft, a company known for ignoring even it's own so-called "standards" whenever it's convenient or might generate additional revenue, offering unspecified documentation, to a very small committee, for a product which, as a function of it's license agreements, can only be implemented by Microsoft, for Windows. And something, nobody knows exactly what, will be available by the end of 2006, before or after the release of Vista and long after the release and marketing push for Office 2005.

Microsoft isn't promising anything in terms of industry standard support, but expects corporations, government agencies, educational institutions, and nonprofit organizations to pony up tens of billions of dollars/euros on Windows 2005, instead of using their existing Office 2000 applications and "upgrading" in the form of software suites compliant with OpenDocument such as Open Office.

Open Office has been downloaded by over 100 million computers, and may have been cloned to many millions more.

But Microsoft wants governments and major corporations to cling to Microsoft's proprietary document formats for another 2-3 years until their "Open" XML document product becomes available in some future and unannounced version of Microsoft Office.

Wanna buy a bridge?

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