It's sad so many people instantly think "corruption" when the government makes a decision they don't agree with. Isn't it possible Microsoft made a better case for their standard? A decision like this is like a civil court case, the person with the best argument wins.
Of the top of my head, I can think of a few reasons lawmakers (from their perspective) might want to use Microsoft's standard before any others:
1. Microsoft is a very large, very well known company. They will be around for a very long time to support any of their formats.
And, of course, ODF will dissappear tomorrow. Anyone with experience with different versions of MS Office knows that MS doesn't have a great track record with format backwards-compatibility. Will their standard change this? Who knows?
2. Microsoft creates a lot of jobs. Oh really? How many? Where? Do you have corroborating evidence for this, or are you just guessing?
3. Most government offices use Microsoft Office on Microsoft Windows for word processing, so Microsoft is the best format to use since the government is already integrated with their products. I.e. vendor lock in. Standards are meant to allow competition by preventing lock-in, not encouraging it.
You may be right in that this may have indeed been what the politicians are thinking, but to me it's more a cry to educate our politicians (I'll allow the "negotiated instead of bought" for the sake of argument, but it's a crock), it has nothing to do with MS being the better choice.
A question (and apologies if this has been covered):
The recent "Let It Be... Naked" CD has some sort of copy protection on it that, under XP at least, it wont play except through a piece of software the CD installs for you. It plays on most regular CD players, and the tracks extract to MP3 fine, but no CD burner I've tried has worked, nor will WinAmp/WMP/iTunes/etc. play it. I don't know much about the technology, but could this be a precursor to the Longhorn technology?
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Of the top of my head, I can think of a few reasons lawmakers (from their perspective) might want to use Microsoft's standard before any others:
1. Microsoft is a very large, very well known company. They will be around for a very long time to support any of their formats.
And, of course, ODF will dissappear tomorrow. Anyone with experience with different versions of MS Office knows that MS doesn't have a great track record with format backwards-compatibility. Will their standard change this? Who knows? 2. Microsoft creates a lot of jobs.
Oh really? How many? Where? Do you have corroborating evidence for this, or are you just guessing? 3. Most government offices use Microsoft Office on Microsoft Windows for word processing, so Microsoft is the best format to use since the government is already integrated with their products.
I.e. vendor lock in. Standards are meant to allow competition by preventing lock-in, not encouraging it. You may be right in that this may have indeed been what the politicians are thinking, but to me it's more a cry to educate our politicians (I'll allow the "negotiated instead of bought" for the sake of argument, but it's a crock), it has nothing to do with MS being the better choice.
A question (and apologies if this has been covered): The recent "Let It Be ... Naked" CD has some sort of copy protection on it that, under XP at least, it wont play except through a piece of software the CD installs for you. It plays on most regular CD players, and the tracks extract to MP3 fine, but no CD burner I've tried has worked, nor will WinAmp/WMP/iTunes/etc. play it. I don't know much about the technology, but could this be a precursor to the Longhorn technology?