SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
When the UK government announced plans to shift to the .odf Open Document Format, and away from Microsoft's proprietary .doc and .docx formats, Microsoft threatened to move its research facilities out of the UK.
The prime minister's director of strategy at the time, Steve Hilton, said that "Microsoft phoned Conservative MPs with Microsoft R&D facilities in their constituencies and said we will close them down in your constituencies if this goes through" "We just resisted. You have to be brave," Hilton said.
Although I am not a great lover of Microsoft, I'm not sure that this is any different than many other companies who will try to protect their profits - and, arguably, the jobs of their employees - when they can see the potential for the loss of business. But perhaps other companies are a little more subtle - especially when it is obvious that official papers will one day become public knowledge.
[Editor's Comment: This submission has been significantly edited - comment is not attributable to sigma]
[Editor's Comment: Please see public apology regarding this story.]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2015, @01:39AM
It might be different if MICROS~1's "standards" were actual standards.
They aren't even "standard" from 1 version of their own product to the next.
The DOCX "standard" is far from an actual standard.
What it is is 6000 pages of twaddle.[1]
It's not a specification; its an encrypted interoffice memo among Microsofties. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [wikipedia.org]
What Redmond produces is closed and proprietary.
Any claims otherwise are hogwash.
[1] OpenDocument Format does it in about a fourth of that--and produces an actual usable spec.
-- gewg_