Subject: Re: Are you working with the StarOffice/OpenOffice ppl on fileformat?
From: Tomasz Wegrzanowski (maniek@beer.com)
Date: Thu Aug 03 2000 - 16:07:47 CDT
On Thu, Aug 03, 2000 at 03:52:49PM -0500, sam th wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Aug 2000, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>
> > Pay attention on MS. They can accept such standard format, add many windows
> > and ms-office specific features (they will have to anyway, as they will
> > have different feature set than Abi, Star, Corel or K) and you all may
> > end having to implement much such crap just to stay compatible. :-(
> > This has happened to Web standards, and Office area is way more profitable
> > and imortant for them, so they can do it again.
>
> Well, if they just want features to support their features, that could
> easily be accopmlished in the standard. If they want to 'embrace and
> extend', they would have to contend with the combined market share of
> every app that used the standard format. And even some interoperability
> with MS would be better than the current situation.
They would probably first put as much Word-specific bloat as they can
into standards (standards comittee will have to agree on some compromise
with them, or MS will ignore standards completely), and then they
will add even more Word-specific bloat and ``forget'' to add many central
features. See IE-JavaScript and CSS for reference.
Combined market share of altercnatives is about 5-10% of whole userbase.
If they will ever make Office for Linux (plus probably Solaris),
they could even stop other alternatives from gaining much bigger market-share.
Otoh, if this will be XML, we will probably be able to re-perl-script it to
usable form, so not all hope lost.
Or they can ignore this until it's too late, as they did with Internet.
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