My personal experience is that when vendors say that there is no customer
demand, what they really mean is that whatever is being requested does not
currently fit the vendor's agenda for the foreseeable future.
One incident that gave a strong impression on me was when I visited or
corresponded with many sites, who turned out to be customers of a
particular vendor. They all had been very interested in a particular
feature and had all been negotiating for a few years to get that feature,
yet the vendors representative tried to tell me that there was "no
customer demand" for that feature. When presented with a list of their
customers interested in that feature, they countered with "no customer
requests". When presented with a list of customers and the dates on which
they had requested the feature, the vendor still denied it.
If MS Office can support XML-based formats, then it should easily be able
to support OpenDocument. Perhaps the grounds for defensiveness is that
the MS product *cannot* really support non-MS schemas and there is fear
that it would be known that it can't. It would not be the first time that
features and functions listed in the MS ads and brochures failed to work
or even exist in the shipped version of the product. MS has a long track
record of leveraging vaporware to disadvantage competitors. It would be
no surprise if one of the contributing factors[1] was the inability for MS
Office to support non-MS based XML schemas.
-Lars
[1] Aside from losing the monopoly of file formats for MS Office
Lars Nooden ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Patents are wrong for software but right for inventions. Write:
http://wwwdb.europarl.eu.int/ep6/owa/p_meps2.repartition?ilg=EN
On Tue, 4 Oct 2005, Ian Lynch wrote:
On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 12:41 +0300, Nicu Buculei wrote:
On Mon, 2005-10-03 at 21:54 -0700, Gary Edwards wrote:
Since Sinofsky indicates, based on the threshold
he set for PDF adoption, we need 120,000 demands for ODF before
Microsoft will concede to our demands, is there anyone else willing to
join the demand line for ODF? If Microsoft wants to position themselves
as a company that responds to the demands of the marketplace, let us
shout loudly. Start by posting a comment to the Zdnet talk back. Put it
right in Sinofsky's face.
should we start setting cron jobs to submit requests for ODF support and
searches for ODF on the Microsoft website? ;)
Why not? If they are so stupid to use that as their only market reseach
method they get what they deserve.
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