I don't see what exactly Ozzie doesn't "get". He made a fairly straightforward point, i thought. "People want interoperability, we're giving them interoperability". You can debate good faith all day, but MS of 10 years ago would never have released those documents to the EU.

There is that rift, sure, but I'm fairly sure they see it very clearly as a feature. Selling proprietary software is their raison d'être. Check back when openoffice starts eating at ms office's market share.

What a superb post. The follow-up by James Robertson (link at bottom) is also good and addresses one of the reasons the Smalltalk vendors originally screwed themselves.