The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
Last Wednesday, the 21st of May 2008, Microsoft said that it was now going to offer “customers greater choice and more flexibility among document formats, as well as creating additional opportunities for developer and competitors, by expanding the range of document formats supported in its flagship Office productivity suite.”
Microsoft noted its support for 20 different document formats in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and promised that SP2 for Office 2008 would “grow to include support for XML Paper Specification (XPS), Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1.”
Specifically, Microsoft says that: “when using SP2, customers will be able to open, edit and save documents using ODF and save documents into the XPS and PDF fixed formats from directly within the application without having to install any other code. It will also allow customers to set ODF as the default file format for Office 2007. To also provide ODF support for users of earlier versions of Microsoft Office (Office XP and Office 2003), Microsoft will continue to collaborate with the open source community in the ongoing development of the Open XML-ODF translator project on SourceForge.net.”
Microsoft also promises to fully support its own new OOXML format now standardised by the ISO in “the next major version” of Office, codenamed Office 14.
Microsoft also touts its “interoperability principles” http://www.microsoft.com/interop and says the “company [is] committed to work with others toward robust, consistent and interoperable implementations across a broad range of widely deployed products, the company has also announced it will be an active participant in the future evolution of ODF, Open XML, XPS and PDF standards.”
Well, we’re simply going to have to wait and see just how committed Microsoft truly is to its new caring, sharing and interoperable attitude (against lawsuits?) and working with others.
No doubt there will be more squabbles, more fights by Microsoft’s competitors to claim they won’t be as interoperable as they claim, and much scrutiny of Office 2007 SP2 when it arrives.
Otherwise all the ODF and OOXML fights will lead to … uh-oh… more billion dollar fines! And even Microsoft with its billions of dollars doesn’t want to waste that money even if it can afford to.
“Putting customers first” as Microsoft claims it now wants to do is very noble – and is the right thing for consumers who just want their computers to work and their data to be accessible when they need it.
It’s a shame we all need to keep an eye on Microsoft to make sure they do it. But if there’s no other way, then hey, finally, governments and their commissions are good for something after all.
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
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