Word documents in Open Office?

An Fear Aniar

I was just curious about why Microsoft allowed Open Office to be able to save documents in Word format so that they can be viewed by MS Word users?

Aren't they totally slitting their own throats by doing this? I don't see what's in it for them.


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ethernet

Did the EU not force them to do this? To comply and be less anti-competitive? This happened even before Microsoft were forced to release all the gritty info about the Office file formats. Fair play for all that reverse engineering, I say.

death1234567

Yeah I think they were forced to do it by the EU. EU in doing something useful shocker!

Capt'n Midnight

An Fear Aniar wrote: »

I was just curious about why Microsoft allowed Open Office to be able to save documents in Word format so that they can be viewed by MS Word users?

Aren't they totally slitting their own throats by doing this? I don't see what's in it for them.

there is nothing in it for them

you have to remember M$ were also upsetting the corporates by having a major change in compatibility they did this back in '97 too

did that microsoft open standard that they got rushed through ever get sorted, wern't they having interoperabity problems with it ?

also Lotus 123 was well able to open excel files a long time ago and open office is able to open the 97-2003 format happily too, and in both cases are usually better able to recover corrupt docs than the original product so it was only a matter of time before the new formats were reverse engineered too

also a lot of corporates are taking note of the problems of obsolete file formats so open standards are the way to go

croo

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

did that microsoft open standard that they got rushed through ever get sorted, wern't they having interoperabity problems with it ?

You mean the OOXML standard passed by the ISO?
If so I believe it was, but with lots of accusations of unfair manipulation - for want of a better word.

It's also important to recognize that that no microsoft office product actually supports that standard! Their actual document formats are similar but not compliant.

It still went through, but thankfully OpenOffice.org 3 supports it