When an animal gets cornered, it becomes afraid. That's when it becomes irrationally aggressive. Microsoft has truly become an animal recently and it shows.

Even journalists have begun doubting and criticising Microsoft's dirty tactics. And rightly so. Here are the latest developments:

Bob talks about stories of corruption.

Every once is a while I get an anonymous comment or a tip about something that happened in “closed” standards meetings. This is especially true lately where the various national bodies are deliberating whether they should support Microsoft’s OOXML product specification for Microsoft Office.

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Slanted, inappropriate, and biased behavior (in any way in any direction and for anyone) is not allowable, in my mind, when deciding this and other important standards issues. I repeat: All this information must be made public and those running the processes must be accountable to each other, their fellow citizens, and the various standards organizations and committees in which they participate.

You have hopefully followed many stories on this subject before. We covered several of them. Sam has another shocking piece of information to share. Microsoft resorts to breaking the ODF plugins.

Sun is having trouble because Microsoft is breaking interoperability deliberately through hi-jinks with the Dynamic-Link Libraries ("dll") in Windows.

I guess that without OpenOffice.org (or another ODF-friendly suite), our colleagues will no longer be able to read OpenDocument-formatted files. Thank you, Microsoft. You never fail to surprise and I truly hope that the ODF Alliance/TC will take you to court. Knowing how it works, a settlement is more likely than time in prison. This is a recurring pattern and in days to come I might also attempt to show this by digging some old antitrust exhibits. In the following, mind the part about technical sabotage.

Conlin used a variety of computer-generated illustrations, including one that showed 15 icons, each representing what she said was an illegal action taken by Microsoft in pursuit of its bid to become and remain a monopoly. The icons had titles like “exclusionary contract,” “technical sabotage,” “buying out the competition,” “espionage,” and “deception and misinformation.”

I have seen many examples (exhibits) where companies, including Novell, had their products broken by Microsoft. It is deliberate. Microsoft did the same in order to gain control over the Web.

Another part worth discussing is "buying out the competition". Although Microsoft did not buy Novell, Xandros and Linspire per se, it took control of them and forced them to make some certain decisions, including the support of OOXML.

On the brighter side of things, New York seems to be reassessing its choices. It will study document formats more closely.

The OpenDocument Format Alliance (ODF Alliance) has hailed New York for becoming the second state, along with Minnesota, to enact legislation requiring study of electronic document formats.