Brian Jones: Open XML Formats : Specifying the document settings - 0 views
blogs.msdn.com/...ing-the-document-settings.aspx
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# re: Specifying the document settings @ Thursday, January 11, 2007 5:11 AM Brian, the fact that you are encouraging people not to use those compatibility flags does not matter at all here. There obviously will be documents with those flags turned on, right? Otherwise you wouldn't have put this in the standard. So it's just a corner case, but still: This means ONLY your office suite will be able to display those documents correctly, even if a competing program implemented the whole specification. Why? Because you didn't specify how those flags affect the display of the document (a hell of a specification you have there...). I still haven't seen any answer to this valid criticism. It's a competitive advantage for Microsoft since the standard is incomplete and your company is the only one that has the missing parts. - Stephan Stephan Jaensch
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Nice catch by Stephan Jaensch. He caught Brian Jones trying wriggle out of corner Rob Weir has trapped the mighty Microsoft Blogmeister in. The last line of Stephan's question to Brian Jones says it all; the incompleteness and undocumented aspects of the EOOXML specification give Microsoft an incredibly unfair competitive advantage regarding the billions of binary MSOffice documents in circulation and vital to critical day to day business operations the world over.
The quote from Stephan: "I still haven't seen any answer to this valid criticism. It's a competitive advantage for Microsoft since the standard is incomplete and your company is the only one that has the missing parts."
The response from Brian? We're waiting. We've been waiting. With each passing day the EOOXMl specification looks more like a monopolist endagered species protection order than the open standard Microsoft is trying to palm it off as.