Andy Updegrove was called “anti-Microsoft” by at least one person. They use labels.

I’ve seen nothing worth discussing. All I’ve seen is Microsoft agents (Novell employees such as Miguel) making hypocrit remarks.

Have you spotted any personal smears directed against you? I ask this for a reason. I’ve seen some smears against you in USENET also.

As for the JOS article, actually the real message is that it will take at least ten years for someone starting now to implement something comparable to Microsoft Excel (and that’s just one of the three main applications).

Where JOS is incredibly clever is that, while his article makes references to the binary formats, which may make you think he’s only talking about the binary formats, the many years of work actually apply equally well for the new Office 2007 file formats (I don’t say OOXML, since OOXML does not exist).

What I find interesting in all this discussion about “OOXML” is that Microsoft will be discussing their specs at the end of the month in Geneva, exactly when Office 2009 beta 1 gets released (I am actually even surprised this has not been released already, I guess Microsoft intentionally blocks it until the BRM). See, the label “beta” means something. It means “feature complete”. So Microsoft knows very well what the changes they have made in the next version of Office, and yet they’ll play innocent and naive with the national bodies.

Office 2009, what to expect : the removal of VML, integration scenarios with servers such as Sharepoint. A good thing, but Microsoft can simply create a DrawingML namespace and stuff all the VML crap in it, hoping that they won’t be seen (just like when they want to edit Wikipedia without being seen). After all, they are known for playing dirty.