We have M$ Office and their stupid .doc format. I recommend that we come up with a 3rd-party word processing format, get Borland, Open Office, Star Office, and Lotus, to accept it. Then we write a free plugin for Office to allow you to export and import these files into Word!
What would you get? Microsoft sabotage!!!!
There would be NO way for Microsoft to hold their Office application monopoly in the face of that!
We'd need to do it for powerpoint and excel too.
Free yourself from the illusion. The heart of a dragon is pure love, honor and truth. The dragon's power is meant to protect the weak and uphold love and honor.
Well, we need to get people together to do this, sort of "Cross Platform Document Consortium" (much like W3C). But this kind of thing will effectively limit competition to the word processing market, though, since everyone needs to use the same standards and features. But down to .doc files!!!
If you can write and maintain the currency of such a plug in, good luck. It seems one of the failings of Lotus Ami Pro was that it couldn't keep up with Word and the current formats.
Yeaah, it seems to be happening, at least the first part. Both OpenOffice and Koffice will AFAIK use oasis as their standard file format. If WordPerfect would jump on the wagon as well, all major non-MS Office suites would follow the same standard. Now, if they can get an oasis plug-in to work on MS Office, then everything would be golden indeed.
In my view, this is also the direction the EU commision should take in its anti competitive case against MS: Force the company to follow open standards. MS Office should support the oasis standard and IE should accept the standards set by the W3C. These arrangements alone would go a long way in restoring competition in the crucial markets for operating systems and office productivity tools.
MagicT wrote:In my view, this is also the direction the EU commision should take in its anti competitive case against MS: Force the company to follow open standards. MS Office should support the oasis standard and IE should accept the standards set by the W3C. These arrangements alone would go a long way in restoring competition in the crucial markets for operating systems and office productivity tools.
Word is that MSIE Win32's rendering engine might be replaced by Tasman. In that case, it might follow standards better than Mozilla.
Free yourself from the illusion. The heart of a dragon is pure love, honor and truth. The dragon's power is meant to protect the weak and uphold love and honor.
The problem is that monopolists can control the market by doing something. Minorities do not have this option. Even if Microsoft Word directly or indirectly supports some open document format standard, they will probably use TCPA/trusted computing to further tie end users to their software.
The only way to go is for administrations and other entities to setup clear rules what a software must support and allow (e.g. EU-wide regulations requiring the possible use of open-standard formats for citizen-administration communication or communication within administrative entities)
berkut1337 wrote:I think the ruling for anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft forces them to open their protocols/standarts, but they are not very eager at doing so.
I think it does not - have you evidence or proof for this - and what is the exact specification of what "opening standards" means?
mozillaZine is an independent Mozilla community and advocacy site. We're not affiliated or endorsed by the Mozilla Corporation but we love them just the same.
The product is essentially dead.