On Tue, 29 Nov 2005 21:21, Lee Begg wrote: > On Tue, 29 Nov 2005 08:38, dave wrote: > > Just read tonight an article in the Computerworld where MS are going to > > put their document formats up for ISO recognition (due to the > > Massachusetts city council saying they want their documents to be based > > on open standards). > > > > thus the formats of documents will be much more open a other developers > > wil be able to create and access these with less problems than in the > > past. And maybe this will see true compatibility with MS document formats > > with open office in the future. > > > > Me thinks that open/free standards have just won another battle against > > the monolith. > > > > And well really it could reduce reliance on the MS office suite too for > > small medium business. > > Several sites (groklaw for one) have been running articles on the MS > format, and universely agree that is it terrible. OpenDocument, that > Massachusetts *State* is requiring is much easer to understand, process, > transform to xhtml, update styles, etc. It's very much a cross between > latex and xhtml+css. Also uses DC (Dublin Core) for metadata. > > MS doc format might be public and standard, but don't mistake that for Free > or Open to all. Watch for patenets, non-standard changes and extentions, > etc, etc. > > Later > Lee
Last paragraph I'd agree with you but again if these Government / city councils stipulate and can point to another standard then MS could find it harder to change things at a whimp because of 1 simple fact these bodies of influence would and i think could say sorry it's unacceptable your dropped or we won't be signing up to another 3 years for licences of you office suite .... which will harm MS, and until MS can secure their future money generating revenue streams (x-box blah blah) they'll want to be careful. Also they're now looking at web based services too, They had a wee word into the David Cunliffe's ear about the state of boardband in NZ (another article in Computerworld).
