The Company Everyone Loves To Hate

In honor of Microsoft's 30th year, Epeeist writes "The BBC is running a Have Your Say article on Microsoft at 30." From that article: "Microsoft will always adapt and buy into other areas to keep themselves at the top. They're the company everyone loves to hate." While they're reflecting, most people are focusing on the now. teslatug writes "Brian Jones, a Microsoft PM on the Office team, has just confirmed that the new default XML format of Office 12 is not compatible with the GPL. Brian believes that LGPL may be compatible, but others have raised issues about the ability to redistribute." Relatedly, shades66 writes "Microsoft's Alan Yates tripped over his own words in responding to the Massachusetts Information Technology Division's late-August declaration for OpenDocument and other open software standards." For some more colourful commentary, smooth wombat writes "John Dvorak has written an article for MarketWatch in which he postulates that the reorganization by Microsoft is actually a prelude to its breakup into three separate entities."

Comments

ummm...what?

[solomonrex]

Is this really relevant? You think left-leaning news orgs are more intelligent ... BECAUSE they are left-leaning? Well, "like it or not" I don't agree.

The BBC thing is a non-issue, who cares about feedback boards?

The verbal gaffe, who cares?

The Dvorak thing will be linked to again tomorrow - with more biting commentary, no doubt.

Re:I can imagine that...

[jeblucas]

an IPO of the Xbox division would generate a metric ton of revenue

How much is that exactly? A single note of US currency weighs abut a gram. A metric ton is 1,000,000 grams, so they would stand to make somewhere between $1M USD (if a metric ton of $1 dollar bills to $100M USD assuming they are limited to bills in common circulation.) That's not very much. I think they'd want more something in the kiloton/gigagram range.