OSNews: The Importance of Software Standards

“In a local office somewhere near you, someone wants to send
someone else a electronic document. Once there was a fairly broad
agreement about the way such documents were prepared and delivered,
before the advent of the computers and the Internet.

“Today there is also a fairly universal agreement about how such
tasks are carried out, central to achieving this fairly common task
is the ubiquitous Microsoft Word. With a form of Windows on
virtually every corporate desktop, the pervasiveness of Word
documents in business is understandable. MS Word and .doc may
appear to be a standard way of doing business but are they a
standard…?”

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