Article: Document or else

[Gene Kim-Eng]

The article cited in the original post described Microsoft's efforts as
attempting to head off fines resulting from antitrust rulings, not the
potential loss of government business.  It also referred to the US
Justice Dept as another agency looking over the company's shoulders.
So it appears that "legislation" was indeed involved in this instance,
though it does seem to me that had the EU and US governments 
just threatened to drop Microsoft from their lists of approved vendors
for software and ordered all their agencies to cease accepting 
documents in the proprietary formats it might have made more of 
an impression on the company than court rulings.

Gene Kim-Eng


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lou Quillio" <public at quillio.com>

> Uhh, there's no market-interfering legislation involved.  The EU has
> shown leadership in requiring that business with government be done
> using open file formats.  By extension that means -- to the greatest
> extent possible -- internal government business will also be done in
> open formats, which in turn means that European government(s) will
> not be a purchaser of desktop applications engineered to work best
> with proprietary formats.