Our competitors seems to get a bit nervous about Microsoft supporting the ECMA-376 standard becoming an ISO standard. They filed complaints against this move.

ECMA-376 represents decades of experience with document processing and a large number of engineers putting efforts into compiling this standard. Novell announced to put support for ECMA-376 into Open Office for Linux, and Corel announced to put ECMA-376 support into their products. Together with Microsoft they represent a large market share in document processing (I guess some 99% or so :-))

Technically and market wise, ECMA-376 is far superior to ODF. Current implementations of ODF aren't interoperable, they even can't represent formulas in spreadsheets (!!!) and show numerous other deficiencies.

 Miguel de Icaza has a nice and extensive blog entry about why our competitors are wrong.

To me it is quite obvious: if you can't compete technically, you have to move the game to non technical grounds. It's clear that they put their own interests over those of the customers and the public.  

 

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