USA Today

[Robert Bushman]

On Tue, 6 Aug 2002, David Demland wrote:

> The reason is simple, if office is moved to other OSes it will lower the
> barrier to entry for other companies to move to those OSes. This was a key
> point in the trial and the phrase "Barrier to Entry" said a lot. If
> applications do not exist on a platform companies will not support the
> platform. This is an important move to allow Linux a chance to go main
> stream.

Agreed that porting MS Office to alternative OSs
would be better than nothing, but this is not
a removal of the monopoly abuse, it merely
separates it into two parts - information
communication monopoly, and information system
monopoly. It might be harder for them to continue
to be an two abusive monopolies this way, or
maybe not - the fed is charged with eliminating
the monopoly abuse. IMO, porting Office, or even
splitting the companies wouldn't necessarily lead
to an elimination of the abuse of monopoly power.

> It is not uncommon for file format to be keep internal. FrameMaker,
> WordPerfect, and other applications have kept this as internal for many
> years. This is no common standard for file formats so how can Microsoft use
> a standard format.

FrameMaker and WordPerfect never leveraged the
monopoly power of their operating system with
the monopoly power of their document format.
MS doesn't have to use anyone else's format, but
if they wish to continue to be allowed to be a
monopoly, they should be required to fully publish
the specifications for their data formats.

It's not about being anticompetitive. It's not
about being a monopoly. It's about being an
anticompetitve monopoly. In the US, monopolies
are (I think rightly) held to a higher standard
of ethics.