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Massachusetts Likely To Approve OOXML
Ian Lamont writes "The IT department of the state government of Massachusetts has designated Microsoft's Office Open XML as an open document format, along with ODF, plain text, and HTML. It's only a draft policy, but it sets the stage for the format being given an official stamp of approval by state authorities — and weakens earlier Massachusetts support for the Open Document Format. Microsoft got a big boost at the end of 2006 when Ecma approved OOXML, and again this spring when pro-ODF legislation was being defeated or watered down in six states."
It's all about choice, and consumers and businesses overwhelmingly choose Microsoft.
It's amazingly hypocritical when FOSSies state they support the right of people to choose their own software, but constantly go out of their way to make excuses about why people choose Microsoft Products.
Despite the best propaganda of FOSSies and Apple users, the fact is that Microsoft applications (and operating systems) are more stable and better designed than their competition. People pine for the "good ol days" of using Word Perfect... but has anyone waxing nostalgic actually had to support WP? It was an extremely buggy trainwreck of an application: IT support staff were always the biggest driving force in converting their companies over to Microsoft Office. Why? Because it just worked, and it took less time to fix.
Also, where I work we still have WP, in addition to Word. And as far as the claim that WP is easier to use (which even I bought into at one time)... it's really not. WordPerfect has it's own strange quirks and a ton of very non-intuitive ways of doing stuff. The only reason people liked it was because they knew it. But compared side by side, MS Word is clearly superior in most respects.
And let's not even get into the horrors of what Netscape Navigator was like. OMG, you literally had people begging MS to make a web browser, Netscape was SO buggy. I also fail to see the virute in charging $45 for a web browser, $35 for the winsock required to use it, and (prior to Win95) $50 for a TCP/IP protocol stack. And once that cludge of applications was slammed into your computer, hopefully it would only take a few hours of tinkering to get it to work. Thank God for MS coming into the marketplace and saying since every computer user was buying this stuff, it should be part of the OS. Because... it SHOULD be part of the OS.
So FOSSies, next time you pule about the right to choose your own software... just remember that people can, and do, choose Microsoft despite what you consider "bettar".