M$ knows Competition, not Standards
“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”
December 21st, 2005 at 11:10 pm
but wait… isn’t more than one better? that’s your argument right… microsoft shouldn’t be the only one. so, let them make their own, argue if they don’t keep to their word and keep it open, and let the market decide which open standard is better. “open” is a lot better than what we’ve been used to, no?
January 14th, 2006 at 4:23 pm
M$ constantly creates their “own” standards for things, all this does is “lock in” their customers to “their” way of managing their data (e.g. blu-ray and hd-dvd discs coming out). The OpenDocument format has been developed by the standard international body for defining file formats… now that M$ has sought ECMA approval it’s really a last ditch effort which does not provide for the level of freedom as ODT does (can still be licensing charges and such). From Eweek article –
and Onlamp.com –