Erwin's StarOffice Tango

Erwin's StarOffice Tango
Erwin Tenhumberg's Insights into Open Source and Dancing
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Mittwoch November 22, 2006

Burning the Bridges
Via this Slashdot article I became aware of this blog entry about Microsoft's new Office 2007 user interface license. It says:

"There's only one limitation: if you are building a program which directly competes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access (the Microsoft applications with the new UI), you can't obtain the royalty-free license."

From my point of view, users should now be even more careful about adopting Microsoft Office 2007. Not only is Office 2007 using a new file format that has not been designed for interoperability across different implementations and different platforms but for backward compatibility with Microsoft's proprietary world, now Microsoft is apparently also trying to make it even harder for other projects and vendors to compete. It looks like Microsoft is trying to "burn the bridges" in order to make it difficult for others to follow.

Sure, I can fully understand that companies try to protect their investments and their customer base. That's natural and logical. However, I think customers should be really, really careful about following Microsoft across the bridge.
( Nov 22 2006, 04:01:10 PM CET ) Permalink

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