Re: Office 2003 Beta

[Mark Barratt <markb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bill Briggs wrote:
> At 1:52 PM -0800 22/03/03, DW Emory wrote:
> 
>> If you want to have it all and you accept the Microsoft approach, 
>> you're stuck with Microsoft stinking Word and specific types of 
>> Windoze platforms. If that isn't an overt attempt to preempt/hijack an 
>> emerging universal standard, what is it?
> 
> 
>  I fail to see how this even warrants a debate. Internal MS documents 
> that have been available on the web for years clearly spell out the 
> strategy that MS has taken. (Start here to discover their intentions 
> <http://www.opensource.org/halloween/halloween1.php>)
> 
>  The "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" approach is not only spelled out in 
> those documents, it's evident in their practice of recent years. They 
> desire control over the protocol space, the standards space, and 
> anything else they can control. These are not some kind of fantasy Dan 
> has concoted in the haze of watching too much reality TV. They are real.

I agree. The Outlook-centric, .NET-based future is scary.

But it doesn't help anyone to get facts wrong. It isn't the XML support 
in Word that is a problem - in the terms of this discussion so far, Word 
is standards-compliant.

The restrictive technology, as I understand it, is in the server and the 
InfoPath client. Even InfoPath is 'standards-conformant' in that it uses 
W3C schemas, UDDI, SOAP and WSDL.

Mark Barratt


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