NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

Just saw this....I do wonder what this will mean....

http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/11/n...tomorrow-what/

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

time for some wild mass guessing it seems...

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

MS Web Office will work with FF, so maybe that... :)

http://www.techflash.com/microsoft/M..._52982712.html

And we know that Apple and Google are out:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08...rome_or_opera/

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

Maybe it will be they finally finished the silverlight for both Windows Mobile and Symbian?

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

the end of Free Software in Nokia?

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

Yes, they've spent the last year hiring open source developers by the dozens and investing millions in open source projects and technologies to completely shut down all of those efforts tomorrow. Sounds super plausible.

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

Highly doubtful.

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

End of commercial software in Microsoft? ;)

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

That'll be the day.

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

to turn them into soylent green :D

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

Eh it was a joke.

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

Ah, apologies, then. You'll want to familiarize yourself with a selection of these for use in avoiding future misunderstandings: ;) :p :D :rolleyes:.

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

But that would mean . . . ! :eek:

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

Maybe Microsoft broke GPL again with something related to Nokia products. :)

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

This thread has the gory details... MS Office on Nokia phones :eek:

WTF, seriously. Why not get OpenOffice.org working well?

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

I don't know if my experience illustrates a wider trend or is an outlier, but years ago, before mobile phones knifed PDAs in a dark alley and PalmOS vs. Windows CE/Mobile/whatever was a choice one might consider, I worked for a company that went with the Windows solution. Why? Well, opening Word and Excel documents was a stated priority for the folks who'd be using the devices, and though 3rd party software on the Palm performed the task better, it wasn't "real".

Folks wanted Word, not something that opened Word documents. That the two Words obviously weren't the same program and had only limited compatibility with one another was irrelevant. The name alone decided the matter.

Epilogue: The HP Jornada clamshells purchased were quickly abandoned due to being too large to carry to meetings, too unreliable in synchronizing, and not able to open regular Word and Excel documents. PDAs were declared non-useful.

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

It's amazing how Office manages to be incompatible with anaything else. Word and Excel files have grown up into bloated monsters full of unheard-of features that always make programs like open office and mobile versions of the programs break when they read less simple files. I can never fill simple forms that are sent to me because they are never opened quite right in openoffice. And it is quite annoying that it can't diagnose exactly where can be a problem when you switch file formats.

I hope the MS Internet Office trend means files will become simpler, and more compatible with OpenOffice and others... That could happen: for the first years that people start using the "iOffice" we manage to have more interoperability between windows users and others. That until Microsoft starts making things complicated again.

On the other hand, I have been seeing a great difficulty in my work in the adoption of the docx format, not to mention windows Vista. How long are windowze users going to be stuck at the pinnacle of incompatibility?

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

Compared to the alternatives, it's too bad that the publishing (Word/Excel) world is being led by its nose by Microsoft.

OpenOffice hasn't set a standard that's stuck. In fact, why hasn't anything replaced *.rtf, *.txt, *.doc, *.xls, *.pdf and *.ppt? Too much bellyaching, no solutions that will drive people away from MS Office.

If a better option were to truly evolve, it needs to be pushed out there. That just hasn't happened. I wonder why.

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

What's with all the extreme reactions lately? :confused:

nvm-- joke. Got it. :rolleyes:

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

Well, for one - instead of innovating you will be forced to reverse engineer and support MS's proprietary formats. Its an already lost battle.

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

Maybe I'm the only one who truly prefers openoffice to the microsoft office suite? Not just for sociopolitical reasons, but because "feels" better?

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

Word should die and rest in peace, (as should OpenOffice for the same reason).
It's difficult, considering that we all live in a Dilbert cartoon, but it is possible.

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

if i understood some blogs right, the ms office formats are basically memory dumps of whatever the program is up to at any one moment. And the oldest parts of the formats can be traced back to competitive programs from the 80's (embrace, extend, extinguish frozen in time, as most will not know of the programs "supported", let alone used them).

if one study microsoft products, one will see that the support for third party formats of any kind drops like a rock ones said ms product hits a dominant market share...

that is why i really hope we will see a open format on external storage thats foture proof, and that microsoft will need to support...

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

I guess that's the problem. Why even go after those formats... have something that print, office, enterprise and commercial would latch onto instead.

Especially with the problems that come with those formats. PDF did rather well in a historically MS only market.

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

Because when your boss sends you a .doc or a .ppt file, "why don't you use OpenOffice instead?" is the last answer he wants to hear from you. Isn't it obvious?

Ah! An optimist! :)

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

Quite different. I'm a realist.

And as it stands, despite all of the fancy jaw-jacking of open this or open that, nothing has replaced what's complained about the most quite yet.

And I don't mind using MS Office. It works as I need it to work.

NeoOffice/J on my Mac. OpenOffice on my Linux boxes.

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

And not going to, in the foreseeable future. MSOffice is way too deeply entrenched for Nokia not to support it on any device that it intends to sell to the suits.

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

also, suits, especially those that deal with turning data into glossy prints, are highly conservative...

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

Just reply to him with a targa image file, but I guess I'm very lucky my boss has a sense of humour ;-)

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

Ding, ding, ding... We have a winner! :)

The fear that the Maemo community will do just that may have been what brought M/S to the table in the first place.

Hell, M/S may have even been motivated to open the dang discusions.

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

I wonder if what they will offer is seamless (or at least reasonably good) conversion to and from a more portable and lightweight format (in the same way as they do for the Mobile Office products).

This was what Psion did a long while back, and it was very useful, but not everything worked perfectly (no tables for one thing iirc, which is a pita for a then Engineering student).

Anyway I think something like that would be reasonable and useful, certainly more so than needing to run OO on a device with all of its features, etc.

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

To me it seems rather that Nokia is serious about making maemo a base also for professional use in pocket computers.

I'm looking forward to a race between ARM-maemo
(in the pocket, and possibly in netbooks) and -86-moblin (in netbooks, and possibly in the pocket).

Will ARM stay ahead of -86 in the race for low power?
Will new battery technology make this race less urgent?

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

Note that Nokia already provides a third-party MSOffice-compatible solution on its E-series phones. It is called QuickOffice and does relatively good job, considering all the hardware limitations.

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

All of this sort of stuff just makes me chuckle -- my circumstances aside -- about what the world's economy is doing to the global tech market. It's pretty interesting -- and good, imho.

I'm not a MS hater. I'd rather not use their products, but I must for many work-related reasons. But, what if all of this (and I've read other news in other places) will start a trend for MS to move to an even more open philosophy as well? (No time soon, of course, but maybe someday?)

Any alliance between any two (or three, or four, or...) major corporations is always a good thing. Alliances are better than mergers and acquisitions and inherently create a more "open" vibe, regardless of the products that come out of it.

Tim

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

The one and only thing I want is adding Exchange support to Modest so that I can get my work email without having to use a web browser.

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

But, you can just use the Exchange Web Portal via Fennec! :p

Tim

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

That's exactly what I'm trying to avoid. ;)

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

This was just a joke. But maybe it means something that so many people took it seriously?...

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

Exchange is supposed to support IMAP, have you come across any specific interoperability problems with modest?

Re: NEWS: MS and NOKIA Announcing Alliance tomorrow
 

You have to persuade the M$ admin's to enable imap on the server to do that :-(

evolution supports mapi at the moment, it's not pretty at this time - but it works well enough to struggle with.

http://www.openchange.org/index.php?...d=15&Itemid=49

Maybe someone will help out on this?