A case of sour grapes and just MS bashing - Grow up.
First of all I see most of the comments are just about bashing MS, just for the sake of bashing.
Well think carefully - why was the ODF first created and rushed through? To drive a wedge against MS Office. So the motive for ODF itself is founded on ulterior considerations, and never out of any great altruism to promote openness.
And who are the vendors who pushed ODF - all of MS's competitors which lost the battle. And how do they fight the competition, not by offering compelling end user experience, but by playing dirty tricks like going crying to courts. Now that they have found US courts not that favorable, they go to the next place - EU to sue MS. And EU has a bunch of sour grapes, they jeel jealous about US corporations, that are successful. With all of those losers still loudly wailing here, in the end success is determined by the consumers and market which see compelling value in Microsoft products - so cry all you can, nothing can alter that. If you want to compete, compete by delivering compelling end user experiences like MS or Apple.
And why should ODF be the only standard - is there any god given rule for that. What is wrong with another standard. Let these standards play themselves out in the market - or are people frightened of competition. Are'n there multiple standards in other areas of engineering across the globel. How about just electricity the basic commodity - the world operates on atleast two set of standards.
I see most of the comments are from outside the US, who just make use of every oportunity to bash an american corporation.
And lastly if some one here has long memory the ODF itself was aggressively lobbied and pushed through rapidly so as to put a blocker on Microsoft's Office products, without actually having the strongest player in the market on documentation products having a meaningful say in it. So past mistakes of ODF cannot be swept under. The true test of standards is Openness and interoperability and I for one have not found a vendor so strongly promoting openness and interoperability as MS does.
Do any of you know that MS systems can interoperate and work with Linux, Sun-Solaris, Novell, and a host of other systems and their protocol stack is open to other developers.
So before you go crying and wailing just a tirade of ignorant CRAP about MS, get your facts straight.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
