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[News] Exit Route from Microsoft Lockin Revisited, New Microsoft Lockin in the Making

  • Subject: [News] Exit Route from Microsoft Lockin Revisited, New Microsoft Lockin in the Making
  • From: Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sun, 01 Jul 2007 06:15:39 +0100
  • Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
  • Organization: Netscape / schestowitz.com
  • User-agent: KNode/0.10.4
mso2ooo - Batch Convert Microsoft Office Documents to OpenOffice Documents

,----[ Quote ]
| OpenOffice.org has become more and more suited for replacing Microsoft 
| Office. Sadly, porting lots of Microsoft Office documents to OpenOffice 
| format (aka OpenDocument Format) is not easy. If you have only one, five, 
| or ten files you could just open them one by one and resave in 
| OpenOffice.org, but how about hundreds or thousands of multi-megabyte 
| documents in a corporate environment?
`----

http://leon.info.tm/en/mso2ooo-batch-convert-microsoft-office-documents-openoffice-documents

Ecma to create standard out of Microsoft's PDF rival

,----[ Quote ]
| XPS is one of many file formats natively supported in Microsoft's Office 
| 2007 productivity suite and was developed internally by the company. 
| Currently, Microsoft has the only implementation of XPS. 
|
| [...]
|
| "If [Open XML], and now Microsoft XML Paper Specification, each sail through 
| Ecma, and are then adopted by ISO/IEC JTC1, then I think that we might as 
| well declare 'game over' for open standards," said Andrew Updegrove, an 
| intellectual property attorney and outspoken open-standards and ODF advocate 
| on his blog. "It's time for the national bodies to draw a line in the sand 
| and reject Ecma 376 -- before it's too late."     
`----

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/06/29/Ecma-to-create-standard-from-Microsoft-PDF-rival_1.html


Related:

A File Format Timeline

,----[ Quote ]
| Like any durable goods monopoly (and few things are as durable as 
| software) Microsoft's largest competitor is their own install base. 
| Microsoft has made many attempts at moving beyond the binary formats 
| in the past, with Office 2000, Office XP and Office 2003. But in each 
| case it failed. These were all false starts and abandoned attempts. So
| we should look for signs that OOXML is actually Microsoft's real 
| direction and not another false start or dead end.
`----

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/06/file-format-timeline.html


Microsoft and ECMA: Together again, doing it again

,----[ Quote ]
| If you loved OOXML and the way that ECMA did exactly what Microsoft 
| wanted, you’ll love the new working group around XPS, Microsoft’s home 
| grown competitor to PDF.
| 
| [...]
| 
| The standard must be compatible with Microsoft’s implementation, which 
| is the only implementation. How open. How independent. How collaborative. 
| What do you think? Should we just save time and money and let Microsoft 
| simply define international standards for us based on what they put 
| in their products?
| 
| [...]
| 
| OOXML was not an anomaly, we now have a pattern. You can either object 
| and do something about this, and that includes helping to stop OOXML, or 
| else you can wake up one morning and find “international standard” 
| being increasingly synonymous with “defined in Redmond, WA.” You have 
| a choice.
`----

http://www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/?p=1699


Windows Vista Product Guide: Free to Download, $149 to Read

,----[ Quote ]
| 'Windows Vista Product Guide' was released in two formats:
|
| Microsoft Office Word 2007
| The standard .doc format isn't good enough, you need to be able to
| read a .docx file, so all those users of Office XP are just plain
| out of luck on
| this one.
|
| XPS
| What the heck is XPS? I hadn't heard of it before now, (a quick
| Google tells me XPS is Microsoft's proprietary rival to PDF)
| but apparently you need a special reader for it (which is
| kindly enough built into Vista, but nothing else).
`----

http://itsvista.com/2006/12/windows-vista-product-guide-free-to-download-149-to-read/


Adobe could still sue Microsoft: paper

,----[ Quote ]
| Microsoft's new Vista software, due to be released early next
| year, contains a version of fixed document formats which would
| compete with Adobe's PDF format. Microsoft has pledged to make
| changes to its version.
`----

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061118/tc_nm/adobe_microsoft_dc

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