Article:		At Microsoft's Mercy
Subject:		So What Did You Expect?
Date:		2003-04-25 03:48:37
From:		Kurt Cagle
I think that there is a tendency to look at Microsoft's motives and suspect a deliberate attempt at obfuscation on their part. Some of that may be there, but the more I look into Microsoft (and being within a few miles of Redmond campus I am over there a fair amount) the more I think that Word's XML feature can be chalked up more to a world view that wants to see everything, including XML, wrapped up within some form of procedural API. To expose the XML directly violates a major precept in the MS Psyche that proprietary content should be proprietary. Period. To expect them to do anything else is to miss the point that the culture is so strongly indoctrinated against anything even remotely open source/open standard that trying to promote the merits of open standards is about as useful as (well, I can think of any number of religious metaphors here, but I won't go into them). As to the point about XML being presentable for only Pro and Enterprise ... Pro and Enterprise are both notable for their much tighter integration with web services than the other versions are. The assumption that the XML in question will be from a web service is very strongly promoted. On the other hand, I'm not so sure I agree with Andrew Watt's geek comments. I've run into any number of small and mid-size shops that are using Open Office for three reasons - it's cheap, it produces workable XML and it has some nicely integrated features to it. They really like the fact that schema is publically available, and many are already building applications around Office as an XML server. - Kurt Cagle

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