Comments

• twitter

  2010-06-15 17:26:33

  An online version of Microsoft Office will be the equivalent of RTF of the 80s and 90s, a fig leaf to cover the fact that no Microsoft text format has ever been a good collaborative medium. RTF was a supposed "open" standard that could be implemented by everyone and serve as a lowest common denominator. Governments were even fooled into publishing documents this way, some moved to doc and the smart ones finally settled on pdf. RTF was a farce, of course, that never worked because the "standard" was not really open or well documented. Formatting and sometimes real information was lost in translation. Even people paying the full price for Office were burnt because the formats were tied to fonts and printers that could not be shared, but Microsoft made a lot of money selling software. Today, Microsoft is trying to sell everyone a new copy of Office and would do it they way they did in the past - convincing schools and governments to adopt and publish in a new Microsoft Office format, docx. This is a transparent crime but it is not going as well as Microsoft would like. People remember the past, have called them on their corruption of the ISO and no one wants yet another Office format. This is why they will again pretend to give editors and readers away.