Google hire Codeweavers to improve Wine support for Photoshop

Google has hired Codeweavers (makers of cross over) to "make Photoshop CS and CS2 work better under Wine".  There is much discussion on OSNews whether existing Linux alternatives to Photoshop are good enough, but for me the more interesting point of this story is the motivation for Google.  As tomcat notes, Google will hurt Microsoft by this move, but is this a wise strategy?  If Microsoft's core market of Windows and Windows applications disappears they will be forced to move more heavily into the networked applications space that Google currently dominates.

Read full story at the Google open source blog.

Joel Spolsky disects MS Office file formats

Joel Spolsky discusses why the Microsoft Office file formats seem so impenetrable.  Now that so much time is spent working with files that are designed to be easily parsed by different applications such asPDF, HTML,XML,PNGit is easy to forget that application's native file formats are designed from a very different perspective.  It makes even the somewhat flawed abilities of Open Office and AbiWord to read and write MS Office formats impressive indeed.

Read full story at Joel on Software.