How Microsoft Missed The Next Big Thing
Linked by Howard Fosdick on Mon 13th Dec 2010 23:11 UTC
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless It's hard to predict the future because we humans prefer to think in terms of familiar paradigms. Even the most brilliant of our species are subject to this flaw. Now, Microsoft faces its turn. The owner of the operating system that likely runs your personal computer, the company that achieved monopoly with Windows and ducked the Department of Justice's scythe to keep it, faces a midlife crisis as the world goes gaga over portable consumer devices. This is the story of what's happening to Microsoft in the handheld operating system markets -- and how it parallels the earlier, similar journeys of IBM Corporation and Digital Equipment Corporation. Can Microsoft achieve dominance on mobile devices?
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RE[7]: Comment by Neolander
by lemur2 on Tue 14th Dec 2010 22:00 UTC in reply to "RE[6]: Comment by Neolander"
lemur2
Member since:
2007-02-17

"MS Office has very poor compatibility with other Office suites. In that aspect it is way worse than OpenOffice in every way. Where two parties are interchanging documents and they use different Office suites, in general it will be the party which uses Microsoft Office which has the most problem. Using Microsoft Office is even a problem with your own organisation's older archived documents.
What you is arguing is the "defacto" vs "dejure" standards. Microsoft Office is the defacto standard so it doesn't matter whether it has poor compatibility with other office suites, because those are usually in the minority. Until there is an dejure i.e. enforced standard, everything must be compatible with Microsoft Office. "

The point you miss is this ... OpenOffice and derivatives do have excellent compatibility with Microsoft Office. Microsoft Office has very poor compatibility with OpenOffice and derivatives.

OK, so you have one office suite which has very good compatibility with office file formats across the board, and another office suite which utterly chokes over the file format of an office suite with 10% to 20% installed base.

If you are going to be doing document interchange (such as might a government), which Office Suite do you use? The only sane answer is to use the office suite with the good, broad compatibility. That is NOT Microsoft Office.

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