Microsoft Prepares Office Lock-in

An anonymous reader writes "NEWS.COM has an article describing Office 2003's DRM features for documents. This will not only coerce those running older versions of Office to upgrade, which has been a problem for MS in the last few years, but it will also shut out competing software, such as OpenOffice. Now think about this for a second. Even if the developers of a competing office suite could figure out how to get their software to open an Office 2003 document, doing so would be a DMCA violation, since they'd be bypassing an anti-circumvention device. I certainly hope the OpenOffice team will kick development into high gear. If there was a time we need a viable competitor to Office, it's now."

Comments

There is no problem but Slashdot

[Overly Critical Guy]

Of course it's not a problem. And it's not even on by default, like you said.

But look at the Slashdot headline! "Microsoft Prepares Office Lock-In." Unbiased? Ha. Talk about spinning facts.

Egads

[radsoft]

Just what we needed. More evidence of why Gates is so loved world-wide. I hope those who think this little exercise will backfire are right, but looking back at MS's sordid history is not encouraging. The problem might be that ordinary people don't have the devious minds of Gates and his friends.

FUD... er... SCO?

[VEGx]

So, M$ wanna make sure the memos discussing how they fun SCO to FUD open source community will stay secret?!?

Re:DMCA woes: wrong!

[SuiteSisterMary]

Exactly. This is intended to allow you to protect *your* docuements; not to force you to use MS stuff.

Or is using an encrypted filesystem suddenly a ploy to 'lock you in' to using that OS? No, of course not. You want to move your data, you save it somewhere else.

Well, guess what. Want to use your docs in another program? You save them to RTF or CSV or whatever the hell is appropriate.

But, of course, it's Microsoft, so there MUST BE an eeeeeevil ulterior motive.