The head honchos at the British Library must feel like they've been ship wrecked on love beach.
About three years ago, the British Library and Microsoft partnered up and announced plans to digitize 100,000 old out of copyright books. Wasn't Microsoft a wonderful corporate citizen?
The British Library acted as a so-called "independent" ally of Microsoft in their heavy-handed bid to get ISO (International Standards Organization) approval for their brand spanking new 6,000 page "Office Open XML" file formats.
(An even more broken version of this broken file format is used in Microsoft Office 2007).
Microsoft's committee stacking and general political interference in the ISO process worked and they got their broken file formats approved in February, helping them to perpetuate their Microsoft Office monopoly for a few more years.
The ISO's credibility in the tech community is now very close to zero.
Move the calendar forward to this month.
Microsoft has just announced that they are abandoning their digitization project at the British Library.
Microsoft just wants to be friends.
See:
Goodbye, British Library
Microsoft "Live Search" Blog
Alex Brown, the British Library and OOXML
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment