Tim Bray on Microsoft Office

jgeelan writes "The co-inventor of XML, Tim Bray, has been talking about the newly XML-enabled version of Microsoft Office, code-named 'Office 11' and tells XML-Journal that 'when the huge universe of MS Office documents becomes available for processing by any programmer with a Perl script and a bit of intelligence, all sorts of wonderful new things can be invented that you and I can't imagine.'"

Comments

Too good to be true

[trustno_one]

Why the fuck would MS give up their MS Office file format monopoly?

Re:Historical turningpoint?

[Bud]

MEEP! Wrong! Phoenix Tech was first to license their reverse-engineered BIOS, opening up the PC-clone market.

http://oufcnt5.open.ac.uk/~richard_lawton/Sectio n% 206%20Notes.html
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulp it/pulpit19990930. html

To address the point in your post, Microsoft has a huge penetration in the Office market and no amount of XML fidgetry is going to kick them out. Rather, they'll love it if a small sub-industry grows up around the MS Office XML standard. Then they will release the Office Document XML standard v1.1, then 1.2, then 2.0 and so on, releasing that information only to "trusted partners". No chance the StarOffice team is going to see the next version before it hits the market.

THAT's what you learn if you look at history. (Which you apparently didn't do. Duh. You lose...)

--Bud

MS-standards (oxymoron?)

[billybob2001]

There appears to be some confusion surrounding M$ using the acronym XML.

Rather than assuming this relates to eXtensible Markup Language, consider the following insider information:

M$ have been basing their business model on XML for years.

It stands for Kiss My License!

X

Re:What will be the default save format?

[Rupert]

I forget who said it, but I liked this quote: "XML is that subset of SGML that Microsoft could understand".