![]() It’s a way of Microsoft saying “OK, you can have this much compatibility, but not all of it, and you’re going to need a massive team of people to even get that”.Īnd people wonder why it took them so long to get Vista out the door. And surely backwards compatibility is something that MS Office should worry about, and not the open format? Good luck finding out what all that XML means, and just how much compatibility you will have when Windows specific Office components or older Office binary information is embedded in for backwards compatibility. ![]() The reason for that is that they’ve simply taken their binary Office formats and dumped it all into some incomprehensible XML schema in a hurry, in order to try and get ahead of ODF and get it seen as a standard. If this isn’t a piece of software suffering from featuritis, I don’t know what is. This means there are 1100 XML handlers that have to be implemented to read this format. And what you will pay for, is to get permission to access your own data. The more anti-piracy measures we have, the more effective and intrusive WGA and similar stuff becomes, the more Trusted Computing pervades, the more you will pay. As people have said on other threads, if you don’t, you’ll end up paying. So in order of importance, the first thing to do is get away from OpenXML and onto ODF. We are also at a point where from the point of view of information autonomy, the difference between MacOS and Windows is negligible. We are actually at the point where the threat to your information autonomy is not so much Windows, as it is Office. The stroke of genius on the part of Apple and MS is to get this situation accepted by regulators everywhere as effective competition – the one thing that it is not – and to get the entry barriers ratified as a standard.Ĭonfronted with this, anyone with his eyes open will move his company’s and his personal data away from MS standards as fast as he reasonably can. The function of the so called ‘standard’ of OpenXML is simply to make sure anyone trying to get over this outer fence has prohibitive costs for any but the largest company, and even then, if they can afford the financial costs, probably cannot do the work in the timescales required to compete. Apple is allowed in here but no further by being given a business-disabled version of Office, and in this area we have limited and token competition for Windows. It is called OpenXML and it tries to keep out everyone except Apple, who has entered a cosy relationship with MS and is allowed to play in the area between the fences. The outer fence is very high, as you can see from the 1100 handlers. So this inner fortification runs around Windows, and while it keeps out everyone, its main purpose is to keep out Apple in particular, because Apple is the only one allowed over the outer fence. You have to have this for the business environment, and guess what, only Windows will provide the full end to end integrated experience. ![]() The very high inner one is the full Office functionality with Exchange and Access. We have really two levels of fortification one inside the other. This is about entry barriers, which is what it has always been about, and it is great for Apple and for Microsoft.
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