zlacker

Microsoft? Not a walled garden?

I think it only seems that way because the open-source world has worked much harder to break into that garden. Apple put a .mp4 gate around your music library. Microsoft put a .doc gate around your business correspondence. And that's before we get to the Mono debacle or the EEE paradigm.

Microsoft is a better corporate citizen now because untold legions of keyboard warriors have stayed up nights reverse-engineering and monkeypatching (and sometimes litigating) to break out of their walls than against anyone else. But that history isn't so easily forgotten.

>>scythe+(OP)
I can install whatever I'd like on Windows. I can run Linux in a VM. Calling a document format a wall is really reaching. If you don't have a document with a bunch of crazy formatting, the open office products and Google docs can use it just fine. If you are writing a book or some kind of technical document that needs special markup, yeah, Word isn't going to cut it, never has and was never supposed to.