Linked by Adam S on Wed 18th Jun 2008 14:40 UTC
Microsoft The launch of Microsoft's new interoperability principles have been both cautiously welcomed and sceptically scrutinised as the company goes about convincing the IT industry that it is genuine in its pursuit to provide interoperability with rival products, more consumer choice, less vendor lock-in and greater collaboration with the open source community. Here, Microsoft Australia CTO Greg Stones gives some obviously polished PR-approved responses to questions from Computerworld regarding the motivations behind support for ODF and PDF, what the software giant is really gaining by providing support to rival formats, and the ambiguities in its Open Specification Promise. He also gives a painfully polished response to CNN's senior editor's claims that the company is trying to eliminate free software.Typical Microsoft PR response to tough questions, but interesting nonetheless....
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RE[6]: yeah right
by Whats That There on Wed 18th Jun 2008 22:32 UTC in reply to "RE[5]: yeah right"
Whats That There
Member since:
2005-09-21

I can see what the guy is talking about, the site looks like pants on this setup too, it is Vectorlinux running on Firefox 2.

Can you not see his point ? Should I also have to change my default font setup just to accommodate Microsoft, or any other website that assumes they can dictate how I view webpages ?

It looks to me like some muppet designed a webpage in MSWord and saved it to web.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 1

RE[7]: yeah right
by google_ninja on Wed 18th Jun 2008 23:20 in reply to "RE[6]: yeah right"
google_ninja Member since:
2006-02-05

Any OS that does not ship with Arial, Helvetica, Times New Roman, and Courier automatically fails as a desktop machine. These are not microsoft fonts, they are standards that are used everywhere, and not just for computers. MS should not have to test against the hundreds of alternative operating systems that do not meet the minimum requirements of displaying text.

If it didn't look right without verdana, you would have a point. What you are seeing is a combination of freetypes collosal failure on anything but the simplest of tasks, and the lack of standard fonts on linux.

I'll repeat it again, because even though i thought I was clear in my last post, aparently I wasn't. The only non standard part of the styling of that text is putting verdana as the first choice. There is nothing else microsoft specific, and a system/browser combination that cannot support is not suitable even for viewing office memos, let alone the thousands of permutations that it will run into on the web.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 3

RE[8]: yeah right
by Buck on Thu 19th Jun 2008 07:39 in reply to "RE[7]: yeah right"
Buck Member since:
2005-06-29

It doesn't fail. We're free to use whatever fonts we desire. It's been said time and time again that *other* regular websites would render just fine and it's Microsoft's site that doesn't want to be rendered properly.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2