The golder words, used by Microlobbyists is always the same:
The market should decide
But the same Microlobbyists don’t accept that a perfectly legitimate market player, the Commonwealth of Massachussets has decided not to choose Microsoft.
Then the Microlobbyists go on and repeat the same words:
The market should decide
Are we talking to automatic bots? If so, AI programmers Microsoft should be doing a better job. 🙂
It is quite funny sometimes to wake up and read that Microsoft is ‘suggesting’ the people of Massachussets to hold on and wait for their own standard to be deployed. Groklaw has a transcript of the hearing held on Dec. 14th where Microsoft simply says "well, ok, there is one standard (ODF) already approved and ready to be deployed, but you should also wait for ours to be approved and deployed because the public administration should not interfere with the market". This is such a load of unacceptable "fuffa" (buzz, noise). The real question should always be "Why on hearth Microsoft doesn’t provide import/export support for ODF?" We don’t need two standards! That would be a technical mess, IMHO: imagine the same document, released by the government in two formats, and the two documents don’t have the same content. What will be the official doc? We need Microsoft to stop its arrogance NOW. They had their chances to hand their formats to independent standard bodies but they FAILED to do so. Now a open standard exists and it is the OASIS OpenDocument Format, it is acceptable for ALL players (free and non-free software) and it is on its way to become a ISO standard. What shall we Fellows do to make it clear that Microsoft has put itself in a corner and the ‘market’ should force it to adapt to ODF?