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My experience is different.  Most commercial product 
makers want to interoperate with MS because it increases 
their potential market by a factor of ten.  ODBC and MS work 
very nicely with Oracle given the right drivers (it 
always comes down to the drivers) and if you get 
the datatype issues (which both Oracle and MS diverge on) 
right.  Then there are the SQL dialects, but that is 
everyone.  There is no perfect interoperability, and 
may never be, but so far, MS tools don't seem to be 
better or worse but do have a lot more supporters in 
the commercial software market.

Usually if MS blows it, they blow it inside the product 
with things like library loading, eg, MS Access installs 
that file to load the right DAO, or think it has but 
really hasn't, so you have to hunt down the dll and 
do it by the numbers.

The HTML treatment in MS products suffers from too 
much cleverness in most things.  That is why I edit 
it by hand, won't use Frontpage or the like, and 
if I have to export from Word (almost never), I 
use a macro to strip it clean.

As for XML, friends, past XML 1.0, almost everything is 
up for grabs.  I have a lot of sympathy for the TAG 
members.  But not too much. ;-)  What I do note about 
the XML implementations is that MS keeps pushing the 
edge and sometimes they get it right (I like MSXML) 
and sometimes they don't.  Data islands are a nice 
idea; so are CSS behaviors. Maybe more vendors should 
be more receptive to MS ideas rather than spending so 
much time in committee coming to consensus on alternatives 
that do the same thing yet another way.


-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Champion [mailto:mc@xegesis.org]

My personal experience (most particularly in the XML and HTML arena) 
is that it is possible but quite tedious to get real interoperability 
between MS and other tools.  I would be astonished if very many 
experienced people disagree.  As far as I know, this is also true 
with Word's HTML output, Kerberos, ODBC, Samba, SQL, Java, and many 
other areas as well. 


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