To my dearest European Government

Gladly I’ll pay more than a few euros to support the great society we will live in. I’m sure what I’ve been reading is a wrong interpretation of a valid concern in which case I suggest the journalists to do some better homework.

I hear you’re concerned about the integrated search in Vista and about Microsoft knocking Google out of the search ring. I assume you aren’t allowed to use any beta software within the EU firewalls so I’ll try to give you a preview here.

Search in IE7 will work with search providers. Every site can be one and every user can configure his/her own defaults.

Like this:

This feature makes it much easier to search for the same keywords on more than one search site if the one of them doesn’t produce the expected results. Google, Yahoo, MSN and many more will be there. I hope you will like it.

Also Office 2007 producing PDF’s seems to be worrying. Although PDF is a proprietary file format, many see it as an open standard because (quoting Wikipedia) ‘anyone may create applications that read and write PDF files without having to pay royalties to Adobe Systems’. Now I know Microsoft and the EU are on the same page here; so again this must be some journalist’s misinterpretation probably triggered by the ignorance of the fact that the Office 2007 default file formats will be the Open XML file formats (supported by a wide range of players in the industry). Besides that, Office 2007 will allow users to save Office Documents as PDF or XPS. The file format space will be more open and Microsoft Office users will be able to share more easily with non-Microsoft Office users – nothing wrong about that.

I guess I haven’t really told anything new but I surely hope this will trigger those journalists to do some homework in order to avoid some of those concerning misinterpretations.

This post represents my personal opinion and desire to make Europe a better place to live and work in. Topics included: Microsoft, Office 2007, IE7, Vista