Microsoft musings.

Read this article on how the Masachusets (know i spelt (or is it spelled ? ) that wrong but cant bother looking it up ) government is planning to ditch MS office for open-office in all their offices. And this on how Indonesian government is ditching Windows for Linux. Things aint too rosy for MS these days. Note : I`m not a Microsoft fan, but definitely a Bill Gates man.

For the non-technogeeks, what this means is , documents and presentations are no longer synonymous with .docs and ppts . Open office reads Microsofts formats but not vice versa. In essence, that means you can no longer open the documents you find on the web ( or least a good fraction of them ) with Word or Powerpoint.

This article is especially interesting because, it comes months before the release of Offfice 12. 'Interesting' , considering Office 12`s major USP is that it uses license-free open XML formats for storage. Read more here . Seems they could have at least waited to give MS a try . Kinda reminds me of the GC - SG saga in cricket . Common opinion is GC is good because SG is bad. :)

But i digress, getting back the Office , check out this blog by one of the Office development team guys, naturally biased, to get a view of the other side of the coin. But couldn`t resist smiling over the "The default format for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in Office 12 will be completely open, meaning you aren't tied into Microsoft software to access your files" line. The points not being able to open MS files in OO but vice versa, i wud think.

Anyway, my 2 cents on what I think MS would do if push comes to shove? Bundle Office with windows and price it slightly higer . Lets face it, for all Linux`s growing popularity, it wont get too much welcome on the home user front for the next 3 years, at least. So, if you already have a office suite bult into your computer, and a pretty good one at that, why would you bother downloading another one ? Just as IE has got to be one of the shittiest browsers around ( aw come on, putting in tabbed browsing can`t be that tough !! ) , but i still use it more often than firefox for the simple reason that it starts up an whole second faster than firefox !

But then , remains to be seen how much MS got scalded over the DoJ suit over IE to try the same stunt again . Not much, in my opinion . For those of you who still think Microsoft got the bad part of the bargain , all i have to say is , When was the last time you used a certain "Netscape Navigator"?..