How much?

Posted Sep 22, 2005 11:23 UTC (Thu) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link]

Now what would be the fun in that?

Posted Sep 22, 2005 19:33 UTC (Thu) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link]

MS thinks that if they take a stand and make the transition to OpenDocument as painful as possible, MA will give in, nobody will follow MA's path, and OpenDocument will go back into the "obscure freeware (sic) that nobody important ever uses" corner. MS can easily survive without the licensing revenue from MA, and they probably will pay that price even if it is more expensive than the technical modifications to Office to support OpenDocument. Why?

If MA succeeds we will probably see more governments and maybe some large corporations coming up with similar policies; however, if MA fails, we won't hear anything like this for a few more years, long enough for MS to shore up their customer lock-in.

If the population of MS-free users ever gets large enough to get through a year using only OpenDocument for their office applications, MS's circular sales pitch--"you have to use MS because everyone has to use MS"--falls apart. MS office software is too expensive for low-end general consumer use and insufficient for high-end specialized uses.

In a free market with actual, existent competitors, MS could be decimated by a single healthy competitor (although 10% of $50G is still a lot of money); however, the damage to MS's intangible assets (things like stock analyst opinions, trademark value, and consumer opinion) could do more damage to MS than a competitor ever could. When you're a monopoly, the only place to go is down, especially if your users already regard your product as more of a necessary evil than a useful tool that enriches their working lives.

Therefore, we can expect Microsoft fight this until they either crush OpenDocument, or become irrelevant. MS will fight both actively (through political manipulation and tying attractive new products to new versions of their existing ones), and passively (they'll refuse to implement any feature or fix any bug that helps a user use anything other than MS).