Pender's Blog

Blog archive

More Eurotroubles on the Way for Microsoft

Well, here we go again. The European Union, not content to have already hammered Microsoft with all sorts of fines and other hassles (which Redmond has appealed, of course), wants more. This time, "people" (we just love Bloomberg's headline on this one) say that the EU is going to look into Microsoft's dominance in the word-processing and spreadsheet games. And if "people" say it, it must be true...right?

The EU's main beef seems to be with interoperability with productivity suites that compete with Office -- specifically, for instance, whether Microsoft is making it too hard for developers of, say, StarOffice to let their product handle Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.

Microsoft counters with its Office Open XML format, which was cruising through various certification organizations on its way to becoming a standard (having already been accepted by at least one) -- until this week, when things hit a bit of a snag. Regardless, Microsoft says that OOXML and its thousands of pages of documentation make it possible (if not necessarily easy, we'd hasten to add) for developers of rival systems to create interoperability with Office formats.

We're all for interoperability here at RCPU, and we're all for anything that makes it easier. But we're not for excessive government intervention into anybody's business or products -- and we're not for measures that weaken intellectual property. So let's see what rivals have to say about Word and Excel and how legitimate their claims seem (although we suspect there will be nothing new under the Eurosun). Our guess is that this whole episode amounts to more Microsoft-baiting from the EU and Redmond's rivals...and more multi-figure paychecks for corporate lawyers.

Posted by Lee Pender on July 19, 2007


Featured

  • Microsoft Appoints Althoff as New CEO for Commercial Business

    Microsoft CEO and chairman Satya Nadella on Wednesday announced the promotion of Judson Althoff to CEO of the company's commercial business, presenting the move as a response to the dramatic industrywide shifts caused by AI.

  • Broadcom Revamps VMware Partner Program Again

    Broadcom recently announced a significant update regarding its VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program, coinciding with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, a key component in Broadcom’s private cloud strategy.

  • Closeup of the new Copilot keyboard key

    Microsoft Updates Copilot To Add Context-Sensitive Agents to Teams, SharePoint

    Microsoft has rolled out a new public preview for collaborative "always on" agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, bringing enhanced, context-aware tools into Teams channels, meetings, SharePoint sites, Planner workstreams and Viva Engage communities.

  • Windows 365 Cloud Apps Now Available for Public Preview

    Microsoft announced this week that Windows 365 Cloud Apps are now available for public preview. This aims to allow IT administrators to stream individual Windows applications from the cloud, removing the need to assign Cloud PCs to every user.