[LINK] Friday Musing: Docx - Open Office versus Microsoft Office

[Tom Koltai]

Observation:

I find it curious that Open Office can open all versions of Microsoft
Word Documents (including .docx extensions) whereas for example Word
2003 is unable to do so.
Mayhap Mr. Ballmer should ask the Open Office developers how they
managed to achieve such seamless compatibility.

One can't help but wonder if the incompatibility is a built-in auto fail
feature to assist the marketing department.

No-one has yet taken on Microsoft for the millions of hours of lost
productivity that this (and many other "free" features") have cost the
global economy.

E.g.: Doing a back of the envelope calculation analysing just one aspect
of Microsoft's lackadaisical quality control features, the Blue Screen
of Death; the probable cost to the world is at the very least in the
order of several hundred million reboots. Allowing 30 minutes of work
having been lost and having to be redone each time, the carbon cost (@
$23.00 per tonne) alone would be sufficient to feed several million for
many years.

The fact that buggy software affects productivity and output, it could
be legitimately postulated that Microsoft is responsible for as much as
.35% drop in overall CPI.

Over the last decade, that has resulted in an approximate 2.4 trillion
dollar cost to the economy.

With Smartphone/Tablet usage growing dramatically 16%/10% (respectively)
we are fortunate in now having options for the future.

For those with Android, Apache issued a statement last month saying
Development would continue.... In the meanwhile: odf docs can be read
via
http://www.appbrain.com/app/openoffice-document-reader/at.tomtasche.read
er

TomK