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Two Open Document Standards Better Than One?
tsa writes "Microsoft says that the consumers should have the choice between multiple open standards for documents." From the article: "Microsoft's Yates said that OpenDocument and Open XML come from very different design points. 'In the future at some point there will be convergence,' he said. In the near term, the transition period from proprietary document formats to Open XML-based ones will be 'messy and complex,' he added. 'Competition between standards we believe is a very good thing.'"
I got a new laptop and it had MS works installed. I used Word until the trial period expired then when I could no longer open documents I downloaded OpenOffice. Lo and behold when I try to open an MS document now it does open using Word except it does ask me to license the product.
I get the impression that Word looks for OpenOffice and if it finds it decides to go ahead and open the document!!!!
The only competition was dos vs. Dr.Dos. And they had to cheat to win that.
It was PC vs. Apple, which means that Apple competed against all the PC manufacuers. As to the office stuff, MS gave away office forever until they had. It was all subsidized by MS's owning the DOS/Windows monopoly.
So, no, MS is not a competitive company.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Most MS critics are not upset because MS is winning, but because MS is using unfair and illegal means in order to win.
People have chosen to use MS software and they have chosen to give MS a majority market share.
You mean: PC manufacturers have chosen to bundle Windows and Office on every system they sell, not giving a rebate to consumers who want a new PC without Windows+Office. Having Windows+Office preinstalled on every new system gave MS a majority market share.
Joe Average will reason that, having already paid for the pre-installed software, he is going to use that software instead of buying and installing alternative software - after all, the only software Joe Average installs on his PC is the software that get's automatically installed when you surf to the wrong websites with IE as your browser.
Please stop parroting the MS marketing speak; MS Office isn't running on most PC's because the consumers chose to use it, but because the PC manufactures preinstalled it.
Actually, this is pretty standard for Microsoft. They always say that choice is good when it allows someone to choose Microsoft (i.e., if there was no choice they wouldn't get business) and that choice is bad when it allows someone to choose someone other than Microsoft (i.e., Linux, OpenOffice where ODF isn't a big push). Microsoft is all about choice in the areas that it doesn't have a monopoly.
And while it's somewhat hypocrical, it does make sense from the "we want all the money" point of view.
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
Take for example Betamax vs VHS. That was very good thing. Oh wait, no, the other thing. A major catastorphy. It caused consumers tons of pain, cost everyone tons of money and set the industry back years.
Competition is good. Standards are good. Competition between standards: very bad.
"And we go round and round and round in the circle game."
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