Comments on: Microsoft trying to live up to interop pledge

Company announces incremental steps, improving documentation and collaborating with others to create more translators to convert Office files into other formats.

[lmasanti]

quote:
"Microsoft trying to live up to interop pledge"

Is MS "trying" or is it being forced to comply with the DOJ agreements?
AFAIK, MS is delaying everything up to July 2009 --or something like that-- when the agreement ends.

[The_Decider]

If MS were the competent company some misguided people think they are, this documentation would have been written long ago, even if it were for internal use. It is amazing how small the code to doc ratio is at Microsith.

[kojacked]

If I were MS I would just open source all products and become a non-profit. Even then trolls will continue to hate MS but at least they'll haven given them what they wanted.

[The_Decider]

Profit and open source are not ideas that oppose each other. MS fan and intelligence apparently are.

[orcmid]

@Imasanti: The July 2009 date is for a set of system overview documents that are in addition to the specifications already released and the updates released today (making 50,000 pages already available so far). While the current compliance-oversight activity is scheduled to expire in November 2009, it can be extended as far as November 2012 and Microsoft has said it would not object to extensions.

@The_Decider Yes, it is amazing and retroactive documentation is hard. But they are slogging it out:
http://orcmid.com/blog/2008/06/interoperability-by-regulation-glass.asp