EU Opens Two New Investigations Against Microsoft – One Involving OOXML
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Regulators in the EU today announced that they are opening two new investigations against Microsoft, this time focusing not on peripheral functionalities such as media players, but on the core of Microsoft's business: its operating and office suite software. Both investigations focus on the benefits that Microsoft gains by combining features, such as search and Windows Live, into its operating system. But the investigations will also look into whether Microsoft has failed to adequately open OOXML, or to take adequate measures to ensure that Office is "sufficiently interoperable" with competing products
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This would seem to indicate that Microsoft's strategy of offering OOXML to Ecma, and then ISO/IEC JTC1, may fail to achieve its objective, whether or not OOXML is finally approved as a global standard.
Why? Perhaps because of Microsoft's heavy-handed actions during the review period that ended – unsuccessfully – on September 2. And perhaps also because Microsoft has refused to implement ODF, consigning the marketplace to a web of imperfect converters and translators that are likely to always result in more complex Office documents being slightly less than perfect when converted into other word processing suites.
Microsoft has been pursuing a high-risk, high-wire act strategy since ODF was first adopted by Massachusetts in 2005. Today that strategy just grew riskier.
Further details and commentary are here: Full Story |
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