Opera Claims Microsoft Has Poor Interoperability

Noksagt writes "Opera CTO Hakon Lie has countered the claims that Bill Gates made regarding Microsoft's superior interoperability last week. He points out their invalid webpages, MS's unwillingness to serve the same content to different browsers, IE's poor CSS support, tardy documentation and limitations of their XML format, and more." From the article: "You say you believe in interoperability. Why then, did you terminate the Web Core Fonts initiative you started in 1996? You deserve credit for starting it, but why close down a project which could have given you yet much good will? (Verdana sucks, but Georgia is beautiful!)"

Comments

You Dad Sucks Syndrome

[fembots]

After .Net sucks and Solaris, JVM suck too, I believe we're entering a new era in 2005, where litigation is a past tense.

It's just so much easier, and more importantly cheaper, to attack competitors like this.

MS vs /.

[the_mighty_$]

...He points out their invalid webpages...

It looks like MSN's markup is more valid then Slashdot's is.

The Word 97 fiasco.

[Stephen Samuel]

Then, of course, there was the Word 97 fiasdo. Word 97 was incompatible with Word 95. Now this wasn't nasty in, and of itself -- there will almost always be new features that won't work in older versions, and sometimes there are good reasons to sometimes switch to newer formats when you have a major sea change in how you're doing things (like Open Office's move to the Open Document Format, along with KOffice and most of the rest of the Open Source word processors).

Thing about Word 97 is that it was unwilling to save in word 5/95 format. This is something that MS refused to fix for the better part of a year.

In the meantime, any company that bought a new PC was only offered word 97 for the new machine. This meant that, the first time they saved a document that needed to be read anywhere else in the company, all recipients needed to buy the '97 version to read it (much less to edit it). You could save your document in RTF format, but the '97 RTF format was sadly broken.... Back to plan A.

MS did, in time, release an official plugin that allowed you to save in word'95 format (as long as you were willing to work your way thru the warning messages), but I don't believe that it was possible to set '95 as the default save format, so -- sooner or later you'd accidently just 'save', and the next thing you know, your recipients can't read your document.

The end result of this is that MS raked in Billions of dollars in spurious sales by forcing people to abandon all older versions of their word processors. This is part of the way that they cemented their monopoly on the office software market.
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Then of course, there's the NT filesystem that is sorely short on public documentation, and almost impossible to figure out. As far as I can tell, Microsoft is entirely uninterested in letting others interoperate with it. In fact, I'm guessing that they put in some strange land-mines just to piss off people trying to use it other than from inside of the most recent versions of Windows.