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Microsoft Lashes out at Massachusetts IT Decision
scoop writes "Infoweek is reporting that the plan to eliminate the use of Office by the Massachusetts state government (previously covered on Slashdot) has not gone over well with Microsoft. Microsoft's Yates said the company agrees with the adoption of XML but does not agree that the solution to "public records management is to force a single, less functional document format on all state agencies." Microsoft also states they will not support the OpenDocument format. Looks to me Microsoft is scared their biggest cash cow is in danger from a free alternative. Soon I'm sure we'll see a Microsoft funded comparison between Office and OpenOffice."
Sounds like the making of a third rate suite...
We can easily solve this dispute by stating that both interfaces are crap.
-- Cheers!
Further, he added, "this proposal acknowledges that Open Document does not address pictures, audio, video, charts, maps, voice, voice-over-IP, and other kinds of data our customers are increasingly putting in documents and archiving."
I can't believe that Open Document does not address pictures, but what I find even harder to believe is that anyone would want to put VOIP in a document.
-- Cheers!
Rumor has it that MA has been threatened with a chair...
Amazing the world didn't self destruct when it only had typewriters.
Yeah they will get a million monkeys typing away on word and a million monkeys typing away on open office and the monkey that actually figures out that it is doing something pointless will be the one who decides which word processor is best. Then microsoft will spank that monkey... forgive me Im tired and I have to go to bed now.
"what's the point of converting existing open formats into an xml representation of the same format?"
Interoperability?
...with other Microsoft products and nothing else?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
what's the point of converting existing open formats into an xml representation of the same format?
I dunno about the XML Office format, but with the good old binary .doc format, pasting a picture into a document typically had the effect of bloating the document by about 10 times the size of the image, while actually reducing the quality of the image.
Can OpenDocument do that?
Hey, did Ballmer throw a chair across the room and shout "I'm going to fucking nuke Massachusetts!!!"
Just sayin'.
No, what they meant was the OpenOffice doesn't have the little paperclip guy...
--Forest C. Adcock--
Looking at that video of Ballmer (again) led me to realize that he looks a lot like another famous, bald, overweight second-banana: Mussolini, Il Duce.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
It has every feature I need in a music player and it updates automatically with software update.
It doesn't play Vorbis files.
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hey, works for emacs....
Ok, that was written on papyrus but there really isn't all that much difference between papyrus and modern paper.
Sure there is... every try to use Liquid Paper on papyrus? And Liquid Papyrus is really hard to find nowdays.
Obscure Factoid: Liquid Papyrus was invented by the mother of the famous bard Homer.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target