Brian’s Blog

“Standards are great — there’s just so many of them to choose from!”

To me, that its a joke, but to Micro$oft – it just seems that is how they think. The largest software company on the planet has a long running history of not going with the standards, but rather making up their own, and inviting others to ‘conform to their standards’. The Massachusetts OpenDocument debate is just the latest example:

“Competition between standards we believe is a very good thing.” — Microsofts Alan Yates, general manager, business strategy with Microsoft’s information worker group

It appears M$ will never learn, and as long as they have such a dominance in the market and an ability to force consumers to “stick with their products” millions will continue to be forced into the Micro$oft Lock-In. M$ knows competition, this is what they do best, but they don’t like to play along in the ‘standards’ game. M$ fails to acknowledge that technological competition should be based on the product applications and services offered, not by cheating the system to see how much of the customers data they can lock up – so that it only works “right” with their own application.

“Microsoft believes a future with more than one open document standard is preferable to a single standard… It’ll be up to third-party vendors to supply the necessary converters and filters so that users can move between Microsoft’s proposed Open XML specification and the OpenDocument standard”

I’ve been meaning to write about a couple of my recent activities and adventures lately, but just haven’t had the time to sit down and write it all up (even though I’ve gotten pretty good at using the Dvorak keyboard layout now)! Unfortunately, I’m not any faster than I was at using the Qwerty yet – but it has only been about a month, and I’ve gotten quite proficient (need to run a speed test sometime) but have not been practicing any more than my regular necessary typing.

I’ll admit, it is very difficult going back to the Qwerty layout now – I have to look for every key I type! For the first 2 weeks, I could “switch on/switch off” between Dvorak and Qwerty, because I was still thinking for a split second “where” the key is located on Dvorak. Now it is all intuitive – a natural response – but every so often a nerve will still think Qwerty on me and go astray!

So, a quick summary of latest activities that I haven’t had time to write about, but could add a full page or blog post about each:

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