[geeks] And The Linux Weenies Wonder Why They Aren't Mainstream...

[der Mouse]

>> It's Microsoft's fault that OpenOffice claims to be able to open
>> Office documents, but, in reality, cannot usefully do so?
> But to answer your question, yes, it is Microsoft's fault.

> They created a proprietary design with no documentation, and they did
> a bad job of it.  It has become a public standard, but they won't
> open it up.

> For years we've been forced to run Windows to trade a common document
> type.

And this points us in the direction of another group at whose feet at
least some of the blame has to be laid: end users.  The end users who
chose to make Word "a common document type" *despite* its being
undocumented and incompatible even between versions of Word.

> Bank of America stayed at Word97 for a long time, because the new
> versions couldn't read a large percentage of their existing
> documentation.

And that's a good example: when they saw the incompatibility they
should have bit the bullet and switched over to something open, so
they'd never have that issue again.

But instead they continued supporting the very supplier and paradigm
that put them in that fix.

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