[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]
“Some of the Penguinistas delude themselves if they somehow
think they’ll control Microsoft from dominating LINUX or that the
company’ll somehow act differently. They can’t and it won’t.
Having MS Office for LINUX sounds like offering yet more choice
for the users but it’s illusionary. As the findings make abundantly
clear, Microsoft is very much like the old 19th century
imperialists: instead of the flag following the gold, the market
follows the standards. Microsoft’s standards are both
proprietary and arbitrary- the stealth incompatibility of Office 97
file formats with older versions of Office or the subversion of
Open standards like XML with proprietary extensions that require
Internet Explorer 5, MS Active server and so on, are sober
reminders of what the company does to a market.”