[ Thanks to Benjamin Urias Diaz for this
link. ]
“So Microsoft wants to get rid of application files (such as MS
Word doc files) and store everything in a database. The
ramifications of this are staggering. It is a brilliant strategic
move in that Microsoft users are not “chained down” by their
loyalty to Windows — they are chained down by their loyalty to
their most heavily used Office applications — principally Word and
Excel. Microsoft’s ability to keep users locked into Windows is
largely a function of its ability to keep users locked into
Microsoft Office.“Open Source projects such as OpenOffice and KWord hope to win
these users over, but to do so, they rely on the critical
interoperability provided by their import/export filters. The
Microsoft file formats have become the IT lingua franca of office
workers all over the world. Whether it is professional writers
submitting articles in Word doc format to their editors or
consultants emailing cost breakdowns to their clients in Excel xls,
people have to be able to speak “Microsoft” to do business in the
world today…”