According to Wikipedia the term FUD was first defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company, Amdahl Corp.: “FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instil in the minds of potential customers who might be considering Amdahl products.” As Eric S. Raymond writes: “The idea, of [...]

The ODF Alliance published a report on 20th December last year that puzzled me a little. The document talked about the steps that governments globally are taking in the debate around XML based document formats, and specifically tried to outline a number of geographies where a governments had made a selection of one standard over another. This [...]

The ODF Alliance published a report on 20th December last year that puzzled me a little. The document talked about the steps that governments globally are taking in the debate around XML based document formats, and specifically tried to outline a number of geographies where a governments had made a selection of one standard over another. This [...]

What a complex and confusing world we live in. This is a really good step for all involved. IBM and Google are starting to support OpenXML, Microsoft provides access to ODF files from Office… …customers get choice, all is well with the world! Maybe.

It has been a busy week on the OpenXML front, I have been travelling for the last few days and have just spent the last 30 minutes trying to catch up on the long list in my inbox. Three of the items stand out; 1. Accessibility. A group of accessibility experts have worked on reviewing Ecma-376 [...]

The compatibility pack comes up in conversation pretty frequently these days, in past years when Microsoft has upgraded to a new file format users of older versions of office products have had to deal with some well document issues when files are sent to them in the newer format. With the advent of Open XML and [...]

Earlier this week Korea’s largest producer of Office Automation software announced that they will support both Open XML and ODF in the next version of their product. This is extremely significant for Korean users of Haansoft’s Hangul package, where as I understand it the number of users of Hangul outweighs users of any other office ...

You might have caught a story in the press today about a translator project that Microsoft and the Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) Consortium are establishing on SourceForge that will provide both some new functionality in Microsoft Office along with an offline capability to convert Open XML files into DAISY format for use with a ...