Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 28th Oct 2006 16:46 UTC, submitted by twickline
If you don't like the mandatory antipiracy checks that Microsoft now enforces for Windows, brace yourself. The Microsoft Office productivity and collaboration suite is about to get a similar program. The company's Office Genuine Advantage program will require mandatory validation of Office software starting October 27, the software vendor quietly disclosed today.
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Member since:
2005-11-11
//Where do you work? If I were to tell my customers to switch word processors because I can't read their industry-standard-formatted documents, they would tell ME to switch. //
I think you are getting very confused about that word "standard".
ODF is the only standard for digital storage format for Office documents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opendocument
"OpenDocument or ODF, short for the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications, is an open format for saving and exchanging office documents such as memos, reports, books, spreadsheets, databases, charts, and presentations. This standard was developed by the OASIS industry consortium and based upon the XML format originally created by OpenOffice.org. ODF was approved as an OASIS standard on May 1, 2005, and was approved for release as an ISO and IEC International Standard (ISO/IEC 26300) on May 8, 2006."
European governments are making moves towards mandating ODF for reasons of interoperability.
http://business.newsforge.com/business/06/10/20/1621200.shtml?tid=1...
If in the near future you are running Microsoft Office in Europe and you are sent an ODF formatted document by a government department, which you cannot read, then yes indeed it is quite likely that you will have to switch.
When will people get it through their heads that it is Microsoft products which are non-compliant with standards?
How about the standard for scalable vector graphics, for example?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svg
"Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML markup language for describing two-dimensional vector graphics, both static and animated, and either declarative or scripted. It is an open standard created by the World Wide Web Consortium."
Try and use this file in an MS Office document:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/Svg.svg
It is perfectly OK to put it in an ODF document.