] The proposed patents apparently seek to protect methods
] other applications could use to interpret the XML
] dialect, or schema, Office uses to describe and organize
] information in documents. Microsoft recently agreed to
] publish those schemas and is looking at opening other
] chunks of Office code.

They go from not telling people about the format of their files to patenting how to _read_ the file format. How much market share is enough? They are killing innovation.

I mean look at IE. Its crap. Its more than crap, its easily the worst of the mainstream browsers. That is what we would be stuck with if it weren't for Mozilla, Opera, and Netscape. No tabs, no gestures, no ad/pop-up blocking. Just a steamy pile of shit that lets viruses propogate better than it renders HTML.

What do we get with OpenOffice? We get export to PDF/Flash, we get awesome and logical file formats (They are zlibed tar balls of XML documents). We get good excryption, PGP signing, the works. And these fuckers want to kill that. What do they offer in return? Another closed format, shit encryption (oh wait, thats right, once hacked its no longer a security feature but Microsoft no calls it a protective feature against accidental editting) and DRM. Other than that Office has not really changed much in the last several years.

My Dad taught me something long ago. He said in any industry the #2 highest seller has the best product, and #1 hs the best marketing. When a competitor releases something new, a normally company will try and improve there product and release theres. Microsoft kills the competition, normally through lies or downright illegal means (Borland compilers, Stacker, Netscape, Java), but doesn't improve their products. This pisses me off to no end because the state of software doesn't improve. Instead we get a company growing bigger and fatter off the corpses of very smart and cool ideas, and still they producing shit.

Microsoft seeks patents for Office XML file formats - RANT