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Its the shadows and reflections cast from the future that interest me.

Who : Charles Ditzel

Email: cld9731@yahoo.com



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Microsoft's OpenOffice Competitive Document Self-Destructs

« H E email
posted Saturday, 27 March 2004
Marketing Rule Number 1 :
Never deliver a file in your competitor's file format and built
by a competing product.

Microsoft's recent attempt to provide competitive knowledge to its partners imploded in a display of extreme vulnerability. You can find the document here1.
Reading it - it is a nice bit of fluff that anyone that has dealt with both productivity suites could shred in about 3 minutes. Starting with the asking price of Microsoft Office. It is quite clear that the combination of OpenOffice and StarOffice have raised the specter of a potential revenue

info

Adobe Acrobat Document Properties of
Microsoft Competitive Document
Click to Enlarge
disaster not only from a cost perspective - but OpenOffice is capable of some very useful things unavailable to Microsoft Office .

Now you would think a company that sells a supposedly competitive productivity suite would write the competitive position document in their own productivity suite. Unfortunately due the document format they chose to deliver it in - they can't.

The document is a pdf file - one of the most common formats on the web.  Ironically, Microsoft Office can not generate PDF format on its own. Worse - OpenOffice and StarOffice both can generate PDF files.  Wait, the story gets worse for Microsoft. They apparently didn't just write it in Microsoft Office and then turn around and buy a copy of Adobe Acrobat for $299 at their local Stables store. If one opens the PDF document to look at the document properties - they state that the title file was :
competitive OpenOffice.qxd
and that it was generated by
QuarkXPress 4.11
and produced by :
Acrobat Distiller 4.05 for Macintosh

Now this is not a great advertisement for Microsoft Office. Worse, is the irony of it being a position paper advocating Microsoft Office.

Thanks to Linuxfr.org2.


Footnotes :

1 Microsoft site : TOPIC: OpenOffice 1.1 Competitive Guide SMB Segment
   On March 26, 2004
  http://members.microsoft.com/partner/salesmarketing/opensource/discguides/OpenOffice.pdf

2 Linuxfr site : Articles : Microsoft parle d'OpenOffice.org
   On March 26, 2004
   http://linuxfr.org/2004/03/19/15764.html

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