Microsoft Gives its Blessing to OpenOffice.org

“By arranging for GNU/Linux, Apache and Samba to be benchmarked
against Windows NT, Microsoft was officially admitting that these
were real and direct rivals. After all, there is no point
benchmarking things that are not in some sense comparable, and a
company wouldn’t bother trashing a competitor that represented no
threat. This was a major shift from Microsoft’s previous stance
that GNU/Linux was not up to enterprise-level tasks, and that
nobody was using it anyway.

“It seems that Microsoft has forgotten this important lesson.
For it has put together a three-minute video of customers
explaining why they switched from OpenOffice.org to Microsoft
Office.

“The criticisms made in the video are not really the point –
they are mostly about OpenOffice.org not being a 100% clone of
Microsoft Office, and compatibility problems with Microsoft’s
proprietary formats. The key issue is the exactly the same as it
was for the Mindcraft benchmarks. You don’t compare a rival’s
product with your own if it is not comparable. And you don’t make
this kind of attack video unless you are really, really worried
about the growing success of a competitor.”

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