Microsoft Continues to Waste Shareholder Value on Standards

Dennis Byron submits: Pardon my French but de jure information technology standards such as the Open Document Format [ODF] suck and never achieve their intended goal. Especially when they are just the creation of one company using the standards movement, and complicit governments, to try to make up for total failure in the marketplace.

To the extent that Eurocrats want to waste their time on standards, so be it. Talk about activity having a negative effect on economic development (but does it matter since the EU will shrivel to nothing as an IT market shortly anyway?).

But Microsoft (MSFT) continues to waste shareholder value on standards too, trying to placate Brussels. It’s a bunch of European academics trying to dictate that the little thing that turns on the automatic windshield washer in your car always be on the left hand side of the steering column… from the same people who cannot agree on where the steering column should be in the cabin. Or what side of the road to drive on.

Please Microsoft, for the sake of your shareholders, let these hypocrites adopt Sun’s (JAVA) and IBM’s (IBM) “standard” Open Document Format. Tell the world that this is a company vs. company thing that goes back to the dirty tricks played by them in Massachusetts four or five years ago. Then let the market decide the way it always does. What’s the current score? Something like 12:1 in downloads (measured in millions) with Office with OOXML leading Sun and others’ ODF.

Comments

[PK deC'ville]

Byron,

You're so out of it, I'm astonished. You really think MSFT has a choice? They're waving their hands and pretending to do stds because whole countries do not want to be handcuffed to MSFT's formats AND they're walking unless MSFT standardizes!

If you want MSFT to lose value fast, get them to announce a new policy: WE WILL NOT DO STANDARDS!

(And go short, big time!)

[DennisByron(Research2.0)]

And the Microhate begins.

But for all of you that prefer to be "locked in" to Sun or IBM, it's a free country. (Oh sorry, no actually in your country, it's not. Nanny Neelie has to tell you which company's products to use.)

[gc5674]

Dennis,

"Locked in to Sun or IBM or <insert name here>" in utilizing open standards is neither a lock nor a waste of time. It is called consumer choice. "Locked" in to Microsoft may also be a choice but inevitably results in a lack of innovation and stagnation of ideas. Wave goodbye to your beloved gatekeeper and more of your shareholder value if they so choose to invent a wheel that only fits their car.

BTW - whose browser did you use to post this? I can only assume it was once again something from your provider of choice...

[Comment edited for offensive language. Commenter put on watch]

[Dylan Probst]

Sun says they're downloading 1,000,000 copies per week of OpenOffice - Microsoft sells something like 70,000,000 copies per year. So at the rate they're seeing, they'll be out-distributing MS within the year - well on their way to becoming the defacto standard you so admire. Keep up the great work evangelizing OpenOffice!

[Dennis Byron]

Mr. Probst-

I am not sure if you are referring to OpenOffice.org or StarOffice in your statistics but according to a survey OpenOffice.org completed for me shortly before I prepared this post, they had had 116,000,000 copies downloaded from their site over the history of their project-that is over seven years, not in 2 years!

The best ratio I've seen of downloads to production systems is 100:1 (based on MySQL and JBoss reports) so maybe there are 1,160,000 OpenOffice sites. Vs. as you say 70,000,000 instances of Microsoft (MSFT) Office a year.

Both numbers seem high to me but the proportion is probably about right. I don't think Microsoft is too worried about OpenOffice.org.

But of course that is not what I posted about. My complaint is that Microsoft is wasting its shareholder's value spending one nickel on this Sun/IBM ploy.

-- Dennis

-- Dennis