A letter to the Microsoft CEO with a fair and reasonable request from the OpenDoc Society:

Microsoft Corp
attn. Mr. Steve Ballmer
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052-7329
USA

Date: 22/01/2008
Telephone: +31 20 888 4251
E-mail: michiel@opendocsociety.org

Amsterdam, January 22nd 2008

Dear mr. Ballmer,

on behalf of OpenDoc Society I want to request the following:

we would like to have the possibility to enable the users of the
Windows platforms to work with the Open Document Format (ISO
26300:2006, or ODF for short). We think there is a significant amount
of Windows users that would be helped with this technology.

What is the price your company would charge us for pushing a mechanism
to your users through the AutoUpdate-facility of Windows and/or
Microsoft Office that should activate at the first encounter of a user
with an ODF file? Your operating system Windows should then prompt the
user with some information about the available software that works with
ODF, and how to install that software that would enable him or her to
make use of ODF. Preferably we would like the user to have as little
work as possible during the whole process.

Can you tell us what the different options are in this respect, and
what these different options would cost? Potentially, we would be
interested in some other file formats currently not available under a
vanilla Windows installation too – such as SVG, RDF and SMIL. Are there
other options available to us to have third party applications
installed in Windows when a user encounters them?

As you will understand, we are eager to start using this post-factory
file extension facility as soon as possible. Would it be possible for
you to respond by February 14th 2008?

Kind regards,

Michiel Leenaars
Board of OpenDoc Society

For correspondence please use:

OpenDoc Society Intnl. secretariat
Wibautstraat 150
1091 GR Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Phone: +31 20 888 4251
Fax: +31 84 712 2055

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