There is already some fairly strong momentum for ODF across the European Union and now comes a seminar that several high-level officials seem likely to attend.

Seminar on ODF, targeted at municipalities in Belgium.

Guest speakers include product managers from various vendors and representatives of federal and local governments.

We previously showed just how much trouble Microsoft is in, at least in Europe. In fact, amid sagging profits, caused partly by antitrust fines, Microsoft is unlikely to get much of a break. After so much recent abuse the Commission will carry on breathing down its neck. The following article contains some gory details about past and present abuses and includes this incident of blackmail, just like similar ones that were reported last week.

Microsoft's troubles in Europe are far from over, as Neelie Kroes, The EU competition commissioner, has warned. We review the past and future options for Microsoft and the European Commission.

[...]

During the US anti-trust trials, Steven McGeady, a vice president of Intel, testified against Microsoft, Intel's most important trading partner, asserting that Microsoft intended to "embrace, extend and extinguish" competition by substituting open standards with proprietary protocols, and claimed that Intel had been warned to cease development of its Native Signal Processing audio and video technology, which promised to vastly improve user experience of the desktop - or else Microsoft would bypass Intel and develop Windows exclusively for AMD and National Semiconductor chips. "It was clear to us that if this chip did not run Windows it would be useless in the marketplace," McGeady testified. "The threat was both credible and terrifying."

As a side note, in case you have not come across this in the news yet, Microsoft has just suffered another blow in Europe. Schools in Geneva are switching to GNU/Linux.

About 70,000 students and their 7,000 teachers in the Geneva school district will gradually be moving to Open Source.

The 52,000,000 students in Brazil belittle this somewhat, but when change arrives, you know it's here to stay. Microsoft did this to itself by choosing bad behaviour over service to its customers. ⬆

"There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their silicon masters."

--Bill Gates