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Microsoft Opposing California Open Doc Bill

Posted by kdawson on from the write-fax-or-email dept.

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."

2 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Well, of course they are... by lord_mike · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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

  2. Re:Allow Me to Summarize by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.