On Sunday 07 September 2003 00:10, Jason wrote: > ... > > > The compatibility problems with both Open Office or Star Office and > > M$ Word go far deeper than that. Nearly all of the VBS stuff failed > > for us one way or another. I do understand that the more > > politically correct portion of Linux world finds this stuff > > distasteful, and I don't agree, but when a customer sends you a > > document full of it, it's not a money making proposition to tell > > them 'Fix your document so I can do business with you'. That leads > > them to another vendor and you're at a disadvantage. > > ... > > So where were we, the Linux community, during remedy phases of the M$ > anti-trust trials/lawsuits! I very disappointed that all the focus > was about what was/not incorporated into the OS when the fact of the > matter is that the real problem is M$ has a monopoly on business > document formats. A real remedy would be to force M$ to use the OO > format as its native document format for the next, say, 10 years. > Then we’d really be competing on the merits of functionality. > > Not only that, but Office 11 will use a bran new file format, perhaps > part of this is truly innovation, but I'm sure they are not too upset > about throwing OO compatibility off-balance for a year or two. > > All I wanted was something like Word 4 that didn't crash when I > opened a document larger than 20 pages. OO is great on that point, > but I too have to work in the real world where all the lemmings > choose Office.
This is quite sad that expecially small companies have to suffer from the MS hell. As an example I have a friend who uses some MS office tools to keep his invoices etc in electronic form, but newer versions of MS own tools can't handle them correctly so he has to use the older software. He also needs the newer software so that he can read the newer documents etc, but he can't completely use that one tool set, because he couldn't use the older stuff with it. So what hapens when that product doesn't work in the 'current' windows OS? He will need two windows machines to do the busines efectively. But because big companies go on and because they are his most important clients he have to cope with it. And sadly small businesses doesn't have a choice before big companies really can't take no more MS shit and picks an alternative. The current MS strategy will eventually lead to situations where the big clients simply doesn't cope with the shit but want something more and then MS either changes it's tactic or dies (sadly I think that there is too much brains in there to them die, but maybe I get lucky ;). -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
