[odf-discuss] Microsoft playing footsie with China?

[marbux]

On 5/21/07, Christian Einfeldt <einfeldt at gmail.com> wrote:

x--snip--x

>This is an attempt to get
> close to the Chinese government, so that they can get more favorable
> treatement with them, and eventually steer the world's most populous nation
> back into their camp.
>
Nah, another plugin that doesn't provide native file support isn't
exactly playing footsie. It's creating *something* for the sales reps
to talk about and *something* for the Microsoft lawyers to talk about
if Chinese antitrust regulators get involved or China takes
Microsoft's refusal to support its national standard to the World
Trade Organization dispute resolution process, things like that.

It will play the same role the Clever Age plug-ins play with ODF.
"Whaddya mean, DG Competition? We have ODF file support. And how well
it works is irrelevant. Just as degrees of compatibility are
acceptable in the eyes of the law, U.S. v. Microsoft decision
upholding consent decree, DG Competiton should not consider issues
involving degrees of interoperability. And that argument about us
breaking the OpenDocument Foundation's plug-in in the platinum version
of Office 2007? My client assures me that it was an inadvertent bug
they they will get fixed Real Soon Now. Certainly there is no basis
for suggesting that Microsoft did it intending to disable that
application. No, Microsoft objects to producing the source code
involved for inspection. That is Microsoft's valuable intellectual
property and our developers would lose their innovative edge if they
start believing they have to worry about justifying every bug in an
antitrust investigation. Besides, Microsoft already provides
interoperability with its own plug-in, as I already explained. ..."

How hard would it be for Microsoft to add native ODF file support itself?

"… technical people at Microsoft told him it would be "trivial" to add
support for ODF to the new Office 2007. The resistance to doing so
came from the vendor's business side, according to Kriss."

<http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=273815&pageNumber=2>.
(statement attributed to Peter Kriss, former Massachusetts Secretary
of Administration & Finance).

My 2 cents..

Best regards,

Marbux