Re: Microsoft does a good deed

Roedy Green <see_website@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>European courts have forced Microsoft to do***ent the formats of its
>various application files and provide im****t/ex****t in various
>standard formats.
>
>We North Americans will get the benefit of this. 
>
>It will reduce MS lockin, but it will make their products more useful
>when it is possible to create, extract and manipulate that application
>data with third party programs.
>
>I think of it this way. The data belongs to the customer, not to MS.
>What they were doing was like a bank that refused to honour
>withdrawals.

Joel Spolsky has an interesting article about this:

Joel on Software:

Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some
workarounds)

    http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html

--
Regards,
Casey