The title of this piece is an old French saying. You will soon understand what it means. Forget a moment about the Microsoft-Yahoo stories. They’re important, although even the best take on them, in my opinion, still largely misses one important element of the proposed deal: Namely, that such an acquisition of Yahoo! by Microsoft would not take those two very far. However, Microsoft could use the only outstanding asset of the deal to disseminate its own proprietary technologies such as Silverlight, CLR, WP/F and everything .NET . Enough said for the moment.

Doug Mahugh, respected engineer at Microsoft (who’s leaving the company, by the way. He wants to have quiet week-ends at least.) is complaining about the lack of respect for Open Standards by the “anti-OOXML” camp. He also nominates OpenForum Europe and IBM as being behind the Geneva conference. Since my company stands among the conveners of that conference, I guess I should have a say on this.

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