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IBM Beats Microsoft Over the Head With Their Own Code
bednarz writes "IBM has added a twist to its new commitment to help OpenOffice.org battle Microsoft Office by donating code that was originally derived in part from a Microsoft-developed technology. IBM's iAccessible2, code-named Project Missouri, is a specification for technology used to help the visually impaired interact with Open Document Format (ODF)-compliant applications and was developed in part using Microsoft Active Accessibility (MAA). 'When the specification was donated to the Linux Foundation, Oracle, Sun, and SAP committed to help with future development. Mozilla is committed to incorporating it into its Firefox browser, and vendors GW Micro and Freedom Scientific will also use it in their own screen reader products. In addition, Project Missouri has won accolades from the American Association of People with Disabilities, the American Foundation for the Blind, and the National Federation of the Blind in Computer Science.'"
Why will people adopt ODF, when the software used to support that format, pretty much sucks compared to the competition?
Office is WIDELY used, and it *is* the standard. If you want to break adoption of the MS standard, you have to produce products that are better. Open Office is great for students and such, but in ANY financial institution, Excel is a *requirement*. Break the stranglehold on Excel, and the format will follow. Until then, corporations are going to keep using the format that allows them to keep using Excel, without having to 'convert' thousands of spreadsheets they have worked so tirelessly on.
ODF already has a habit of garbling the VBA code in a LOT of Excel files -- no business in this world will touch it with a ten foot pole. And since MS Office is a surprisingly good piece of software, IBM has their work cut out for them. Maybe next format war, they can win... this one they won't. And it's not because MS is paying off vendors to support them, but rather because it makes more business sense to stick with what works -- and that is Microsoft Office, not Open Office, which sucks horribly in comparison.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
So, in other words, the FOSS community is formalizing the fact that they are chasing MS's tail lights, and attesting to the superiority of Microsoft code?
Sounds like a pretty limp "beating" to me. The FOSS community is telegraphing their own incompetence, and proclaiming it a virtue. If they "beat Microsoft over the head" any more, Bill Gates will essentially own teh Lunix.
Hmm... and not only that, but aren't the FOSSies kind of damaging their claims that none of Microsoft's code is in teh Lunix? Just looking at this instance, it seems to me that FOSSies are all too eager to lay their hands on any and all MS-created code.