Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Prelude to Geneva
MICROSOFT is pulling out all the stops ahead of a crucial meeting in Geneva to determine if the default file format in its MS Office 2007 suite becomes an international standard. It is against the backdrop of this week’s International Organization for Standardization (ISO) meeting on the OOXML format that we can better appreciate Microsoft’s announcement last Thursday that it would be more open about sharing information on its products and technology.
IF you have a busted monitor or CPU, you might want to haul it over to the Recycling Market at the SM Supercenter in Pasig (along C-5) on Saturday, March 1, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. The fair organizers say there will be buyers for used ink and toner cartridges, junk electronic equipment, used batteries (including those from UPS and rechargeable lamps) used PET plastic bottles and aluminum and tin cans.
“THAT’S a cool looking notebook,” the customer at the computer shop said. He was referring to the Asus Eee PC, an ultra-portable notebook that I was buying. The notebook’s small form factor and attractive price had made quite an impression, and he asked me a few more questions. The fact that the computer had no hard disk but used a flash memory drive seemed to intrigue him, but the idea of Linux—the operating system installed on the Eee PC—seemed to stump him. He had only heard of the operating system but had never used it. “Okay ba ’yan? [Is it okay?]” he asked. In the brief time I had, I tried to explain to him that Linux wasn’t just okay, it was superior to Windows in terms of security. In the two years since I switched from Windows, I told him, I had never been hit by a virus attack—and I’ve never had to use any antivirus software. What about programs, he wanted to know. On Linux, I explained, all your software is free (in both senses of the word). There is no need to pay exorbitant licensing fees or use pirated programs and you are free to modify them to suit your needs.
MICROSOFT’S buyout of Yahoo! would be bad for the Internet pioneer, tens of millions of its users and the industry as a whole. Fortunately, Yahoo was expected to reject Microsoft’s unsolicited $44.6-billion takeover offer, but don’t count the software giant out just yet. It can still sweeten the pot or take the case directly to Yahoo’s shareholders.
A BATTLE is raging over the future of office productivity software, with most of the fighting going on outside the view of ordinary consumers. But obscure as it may seem, the debate over international document standards could determine if governments and companies alike will be able to choose alternatives to MS Office and still be confident that they can send and receive files that anyone else can read. The battleground is the International Organization for Standardization or ISO, where Microsoft is trying to get its proprietary OOXML file format certified. For reasons that will become apparent, the company refuses to support the Open Document Format or ODF, which is already ISO-certified.
