Robin Miller recently had an article on Slashdot on whether or not Microsoft is still a monopoly. The article actually even questions whether they ever were. That’s not the initial interesting part of his article though. He goes on to discuss the importance of Microsoft beginning to work with more formats.
Microsoft may no longer be able to hire all the top programmers it wants, but there is already plenty of talent among its 60,000-plus employees, and they have done some excellent work in recent years. Windows XP is immeasurably better and more stable than Windows ME or Windows 98. The next generation of Explorer will have many of the modern browser features that those of us who use Firefox or Opera have gotten accustomed to. Microsoft Office may not have some of the features OpenOffice.org users take for granted, like a built-in graphics utility, the ability to act as a front end for industrial-strength free databases like MySQL, and the ability to save your work in 30+ different Open and proprietary formats, including PDF. But Microsoft Office today is a lot better than it was 10 years ago, and the next version may even use a sort-of free XML file format that may not be as open and standardized as the OASIS Open Document Format used by OpenOffice.org, but is less closed and less proprietary than previous Microsoft file formats.
I agree with the vast majority of everything that Mr. Miller states in the entire article. It’s a new day in the hardware and software business. This new day forces companies to react quickly and continually improve, if they don’t there’s someone there to offer something more to your customers than you are currently delivering. This is good! Let’s continue to improve everything everywhere.