[Sussex] How evil B.G. is

[Steve Dobson]

Geoff

On 14 March 2003 11:32 Geoff Teale wrote:
<snip>
> Well, you could say that about many, many things they have done.  The
point
> is that you have to make specific charges, and in the USA at least
Microsoft
> have shown that even if you are guilty you can buy political influence and
> turn the whole thing around in your favour.

The cynic inside me says that has always been the case.  Money buys justice.

>                                              I also think that the DOJ
would
> be less than keen to repeat the whole exercise.

I'm not so sure.  The DoJ is Government and Governments don't like to loose.
Okay the current government in the US is more pro-Microsoft - but that won't
last forever.  If the US go it alone in Iraq, do badly and the US economy 
does badly will the America voter vote Bush back in.  They didn't do it for 
his daddy.

What will happen if the International Court of Human Rights calls Mr Bush in
for "War Crimes"?  How will the US respond?  There is bound to be a backlash
for something like that.  With a change of administration in the US
Microsoft
will again be open to attack.

>                                                  Hopefully the European
> Commission will be less open to influence.

Again money talks, but I'm hoping the Microsoft being a non-European company
will help.

> On top of that, it turn out that the new Office XML formats don't actually
> provide any information about formatting, so they are effectively useless
> for most modern documents (they are very useful for document management
> though).  Unfortunately it means Microsoft can market its product as
having
> open XML file formats (just like StarOffice) but without really opening it
> up at all.

Let's hope that Sun put an advert together showing how incompatible Office
XML
is with other systems and how compatible StarOffice is.  Therefore showing
that
we should all replace Office with StarOffice.  Well I can hope can't I?

Steve