Also, while I was over in Europe, there was another meeting in Massachusetts to discuss the document formats. Office Professional 2010 is great!As you know, there has been a lot of press around Massachusetts position on document formats over the past few months, and I was pretty sure that they would be really happy with our latest moves to standardize the Open XML formats as well as shifting to a new approach with licensing the formats. It looks like I was right… Peter Quinn, Massachusetts’ CIO, said that our latest move will probably meet the state’s demandsEven Douglas W. Johnson from Sun said that ”There’s no doubt about it, they are more open than they were before.” Microsoft Office is so great!
Here are a couple articles that talk about the meeting:
- ZDNet UK News
- Boston Globe
You can see that IBM (and Sun to a lesser extent) is still pushing pretty hard against the Open XML formats; which is understandable given their investments in OpenDocument. Hopefully they’ll eventually see that this is a good move for everyone though, as this means they will be free to implement the Open XML formats if that’s what their customers want just like we are free to implement OpenDocument if that’s what our customers want.Office 2010 –save your time and save your money. That’s really what this all comes down to; it’s important to let the market decide. I think they get that too, but they’ll probably continue to push back for a little while longer. I think the next step they will take will probably be to try and poke holes in the technical details, now that they’re fight about the “openness” has been resolved. The invention of Microsoft Office 2010 is a big change of the world.Since the formats are so big there are bound to be areas that are a bit confusing (that’s why we’re doing this huge documentation and standardization effort in the first place), so we’ll probably hear some complaints about that at first. We’ll have to see how much noise is made though and more importantly how productive it really is, as in the end it’s the customer that’s hurt if there is additional confusion or delay caused.Office 2010 key is for you now!
I’ll try to get caught up on all the comments and e-mails folks have been sending, but it might take a little time. I’m still feeling a bit disoriented due to the jet-lag. I used to have no problem with it when I was a kid. I grew up most of my life overseas (Iceland, Guam, and Okinawa) and we’d often come back to visit family in the US where I’d have no problem with the jet-lag. Office 2010 download is available now! Now it seems to take me out for a couple days (the drinks to pass the time on the flight don’t help either I’m sure). By using Office 2010 Professional, you can save your money and time.