LAWTECH GURU BLOG by Jeff Beard

Microsoft Metadata Chuckle of the Day

This one was just too good to pass up. John Lederer, a fellow Wisconsinite and friend of mine on the ABA LAWTECH list, posted this gem last evening:

"Microsoft has produced a sales document explaining why MS Office is better than OpenOffice.

OpenOffice.pdf
[Note: Link text shortened from John's original post for formatting reasons.]

Among other reasons Microsoft argues are:

'Seamless Information Exchange There are over 300 million users of Office worldwide who can seamlessly exchange documents without concerns for loss of data or formatting errors.'

And

'Office includes Publisher, which enables small businesses to create professional sales and marketing documents, Web sites and email campaigns in-house, without the need for expensive outsourcing.'

The marketing document? Oh, that is a pdf produced on a Macintosh using QuarkExpress as can be seen by looking at the last few lines of the pdf code. After all it needs to be seamlessly exchanged and look professional."

Indeed, the PDF above contains the following text near the very end, when viewed with even the simplest text editor:

/CreationDate (D:20030911160553)
/Producer (Acrobat Distiller 4.05 for Macintosh)
/Author (Gravity)
/Title (competitive OpenOffice.qxd)
/Creator (QuarkXPress\(tm\) 4.11)
/ModDate (D:20030911160603-07'00')

Yep, that's why MS Office is better than OpenOffice all right.

[Also posted to illustrate another hard lesson in the dangers of metadata. If this content is accurate, not only was the document not created using MS Office, but it wasn't even done on Windows.]