Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems was given a paper of “talking points” used by some lobbyists in campaigning against Massachusetts’ proposal to adopt the OASIS OpenDocument 1.0 as a standard document format. He reviews the document and points out many distortions, fallacies and, well, cow dung.
Once the world has converted to a common file format so everyone has to compete on features and quality, this will still be a good business to be in, but nobody will be reporting 72% operating profits, which in this particular case means less money going from Massachusetts to Redmond, year after year, forever.
Good reading and thoughtful points.