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So here you are, thinking, “Goodness me. How could he be saying that a big reputable company like Microsoft could be sleazy? That is a bit off isn't it? Why, everybody knows what a prominent company Microsoft is. They couldn't possibly be doing anything sleazy, could they?”
Let me tell you a true story. Once upon a time, I used to offer the documents on this website in .SXW format, as written by an earlier version of Open Office. Everything was great, people could visit the site, download the documents, open them in Open Office and read them, print them, copy them as much as they liked and so forth. My readers and I enjoyed the space efficiency and openness of the wonderful .SXW file format. All was right with this website and everybody was happy.
Everybody, it turns out, except Microsoft.
Meanwhile, the Open Office project was making wonderful progress and Open Office was getting better and better. In Open Office there is an excellent word processor called “Writer”. However, Microsoft has something called “Microsoft Office” which has within it the popular word processing program “Microsoft Word”. Word is by far the most popular program in Microsoft Office. Microsoft has made billions of dollars from Microsoft Office, which is expensive. They have handsomely covered all development costs with very generous profits thrown in as well. However, Microsoft has many other projects which are not doing nearly as well as Microsoft Office. They need money to pay for their losing projects. Microsoft Office is a huge “cash cow” which pays for all sorts of stuff. Microsoft would be a much smaller company if it was not for the river of money coming in from Microsoft Office.
Now in a properly working free market for goods and services, everybody competes on their merits. It has taken economists hundreds of years to work out that free, fair and open commercial competition is the thing which gives ordinary people the best standard of living. The economists have finally “got the message”. Alas, the politicians are still having a lot of trouble with the general idea of fair competition. Politicians are always thinking it would be a good idea if some special interest was allowed to have an extra leg up, they just need to tweak some law somewhere. They like to be nice to their “mates”. Whenever politicians give way to that temptation, that is known as “sleaze”. With mates like that, the politicians betray their own voters and turn into their own worst enemies.
So, word processors, such as Writer and Word, should be able to compete freely, on the famous “level playing field”. Word uses the Microsoft proprietary .DOC file format. Writer uses the .SXW file format. Actually, the .SXW format is now obsolete, having been replaced by the .ODT format, which is an open public international standard, ISO 26300. Now, if everybody was playing fair, it would not matter if a website offered documents in either .DOC format or .ODT format. The web server program would just serve them up regardless. That is exactly what happens with the most popular web server program, “Apache”.
However, unknown to me (at the time, 2006), my ISP was using a Microsoft web server program, IIS (Internet Information Services), to serve up my website to the world. IIS used to have no problem with documents in the .SXW format. It all just worked fine. However, sometime in 2006, IIS got changed, so that now, it lies that a file in .SXW format, which is really there, does not exist. To be precise, it says, “The page cannot be found - HTTP Error 404 - File or directory not found.” Anybody clicking on a link to a file in .SXW format gets an error message, which is not the truth, saying that the file does not exist. That is an act of deliberate malevolence by Microsoft, against anybody (including me), who uses the .SXW format. Same thing happens with files in .ODT format.
The effect of that is that all the links on my website to .SXW files suddenly became broken. Anybody visiting my website would get the lying error message instead of the document they were expecting. Naturally, nobody told me anything. I found out, purely by chance in late 2006. I complained to my ISP, but they were unable to fix it. All they could do was offer me a commercial web server deal, running Apache, at much higher cost. Thanks for nothing. It took me a while to work out what had gone wrong, but when I did, I was very angry at Microsoft and remain so today.
The result is that I have had to rewrite all my documents in the less useful and less efficient .PDF format. I know IIS is still serving .PDF format. I refuse to use the .DOC format. Luckily, Open Office allows me to write out in .PDF format very easily. Plus, I needed to change my website to link to .PDF instead of .SXW. I also wrote this explanation. It was a lot of work. A great deal of cursing of Microsoft happened.
Classic political sleaze is to change an unrelated bill to give an advantage to somebody, who would never get that advantage on their own merits. The reason this change to IIS is sleaze is because Microsoft is using their power over an unrelated program, IIS, to give an unfair advantage to their Microsoft Office program. When Microsoft Office and Open Office compete for users, Open Office has an advantage, being free and functional. Microsoft wants to protect their revenues from Microsoft Office, so they consider it worthwhile to engage in sleaze directed at preventing documents in .SXW or .ODT formats from being offered through IIS.
I apologise to any of my readers who saw the lying error message instead of getting the document they wanted.
There may be some kind of denial of malevolence, coming from Microsoft. There might be stories told that, “it was all an accident”, “we did not know”, “it was done by a rogue programmer, no longer working for Microsoft” or some such rubbish. If you believe any of that, you believe in fairies. They knew what they were doing and they knew why they were doing it. Never forget that.
Are they still up to their tricks? See for yourself. Here is a link to one of my documents, in .ODT format:
Click on the link. I have checked very carefully, that the .ODT file is right there in the directory, with all the other .PDF files. I have downloaded it using FTP and it is definitely there and it is definitely all present and correct. If you see the error message, Microsoft is guilty as charged. If you get a copy of the file in .ODT format, then they have fixed it, but I have not forgotten that it was broken for a long time.
Why did I not publish in HTML? HTML is still not a satisfactory word processing format due to limited control over formatting and fonts. Web browsers are getting better, but they are still not as good as a proper word processing program.
I do not like to publish in .DOC format, because of the Microsoft sleaze, mentioned above. The .SXW format would be nice, but that has been now superseded by the .ODT format, supported by Open Office and more and more other programs. So all the documents on this website are maintained in .ODT format, but because of the sleaze, I have to convert them all to .PDF format and publish in that.