Microsoft Opposing California Open Doc Bill

ZJMX writes "Microsoft is going through its email and phone lists asking people to support their opposition to California A.B. 1668 — 'Open Document Format, Open Source' — by writing to the California Assemblymen involved in this bill (contact info in the link). Apparently they fear that California will join Massachusetts in wanting documents based on open standards in their government. Let's see if this community can raise as much support for the California ODF bill as Microsoft can raise opposition."

Comments

Why the govt? Why not the fortune 500 companies?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The benefits of avoiding vendor lock, true interoperability fostering competition among the software vendors etc will ulitmately benefit the consumers. No doubt about it. Among the consumers the biggest block is the corporate America and these big companies that spend billions of dollars. But they dont seem to care much for OpenDoc and are, persumably willingly, paying whatever MSFT is billing them. What is going on? Bigname PC vendors all compete on price and not single one of them is trying to differentiate themselves from rest of the pack by pre loading the windows boxes with OpenOffice or FireFox or Gimp. Corporate America is not demanding true interoperability and a level playing field for their vendors. Either there is some serious wrong doing by MSFT like bribing IT managers and giving kick backs to PC vendors. Or these people are really dumb. Still I think the time to celebrate is when corporate America decides not lock up their data in a format owned by someone else. Politicians are fickle. A few thousand in campaign contributions they will sing MSFT anthem and betray their voters.

Well, of course they are...

[lord_mike]

...Microsoft knows that the one and only thing that is preserving their monopoly is Microsoft Office as a standard. If that ever goes away, so does their monopoly. Anyone can run a Mac or Linux and have 75% of their needs happily met via these (or any other) operating system. The one piece missing is fully compatible office software. So, Microsoft needs to hold everyone hostage with proprietary Office formats.

Thanks,

Mike

"which exist for legacy purposes only"

[TERdON]

on the other hand, one might think there shouldn't be any need for the phrase "legacy purposes only" when discussing the first version of a new standard.

Any conversion of such things should reasonably be done in the tool doing the file conversion, not in the file format itself.

Re:Allow Me to Summarize

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a few tags which are not explicit in their implementation which exist for legacy purposes only, such as supporting defunct features found in Word 95.

And because the standard contains these tags but does not contain the information required to implement them, nobody but Microsoft can implement them. A standard that is designed in such a way that only one company can implement it fully is not an "open" standard in any conventional sense of the word.

Yes, an implementation that doesn't include these tags will not be disadvantaged in practical terms, but that doesn't mean it's not a big deal. Because what this means is that Microsoft will be able to say, quite truthfully, that only Microsoft can offer a 100%-compliant implementation of the standard. This is not how open standards should be - the whole purpose of open standards is to level the playing field and let products compete on their true merits. Being able to wrap Asian text in exactly the same way as Word 6.0 for Macintosh is not a big advantage for the average American consumer, but what average American consumer is going to understand that when Microsoft says "OpenOffice.org is not 100% compliant!", they're talking about crap like that? The sole purpose of these tags is to enable Microsoft to use misleading advertising. This is not what standards are for.