Slashdot Mirror
EU's Anti-Trust Investigation of OOXML Continues
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Since January, the EU has been investigating whether Microsoft broke anti-trust laws while advocating OOXML. That investigation continues following its passage as a standard. Meanwhile, the ISO approval of OOXML is being appealed, so Microsoft hasn't won just yet."
I mean really , who gives a rats arse about document formatting standards. Who the hell cares about XML? Not real geeks thats for sure. Must be yet another slow news day...
Good perspective for people that only exist from the US side of things.
Microsoft holds an additional problem, as being an American company, the EU in general does not like the influence they have in the IT markets.
So the EU tries to shove MS around based on 'possible' outcomes and 'possible' non-EU activities more than they would a EU based company. And from this it becomes a economic political issue more than having anything directly to do with Microsoft other than the size of their influence.
Any non-EU based company with potential economic impact is going to be treated almost as harshly as Microsoft based on the scale of influence in their markets.
The EU hasn't actually proved that MS did anything wrong, and even with the N versions of Windows, MS fully complied even with their most outlandish requests, even government level source code access, which the US government should have stepped in and STOPPED to protect the American company from this level of handing over their internal corporate secrets.
I know it is fashionable to hate Microsoft on here, and even OOXML, but in reality MS isn't killing people in the streets of the EU and are forced to take tons of extra steps that are almost ridiculous at times.
Even the proponents of the competing OOXML standards for ISO certification don't oppose OOXML for ISO certification, and yet the SlashDot world acts like they are on the same side by hating OOXML.
Personally, until an open standard comes along that handles today's current document technologies we have NO CHOICE but OOXML. Right now any other standard would basterize content a lot of companies take for granted.
TabletPC is highly used in many markets, let's use medical institutions as an example, and they would be hit on the head, as all their stored INK content would be lost or converted to dead images.
And stuff like this is a major impact on a large sector of the Medical community, even though 99.9% of the people on SlashDot don't use or even realize that Ink technology is so widely used in many corporate markets. Any why the need for its preservation in documents is highly needed.
Anyone that has used Ink technology with a Wacom tablet or a TabletPC on Vista knows why it is going to grow even bigger, as the technology is dead on, being virtually 100% accurate even with Doctor's handwriting.
Go to YouTube and search for Vista TabletPC to see this in action if you think it is a joke technology like the Inking capables of OS X are. And XP TabletPC wasn't much behind Vista...
Then come back here and tell the world how much you hate OOXML even though your own personal medical records will be fubar if a non-INK format becomes standard.