OK we are going with this in stages:
The parts of office that make it better is what they are complaining about. its like asking Coke to hand over the formula for the ingredient that makes Coke taste like coke and not like pepsi.
They are not complaining about Office, they are complaining about not getting the APIs. The APIs are not a part of Office they are a part of Windows.
The analogy you propose is the equivalent of them asking for
Office source code so that they can copy it. That is not what they wanted. All they wanted were the APIs to another
separate product called Windows. APIs are something that an OS manufacturer should want to release to developers to encourage them to build software for the platform. Microsoft purposefully released the details of the APIs to the team developing Office and didn't release them to other competitors in the office suite market thereby stifling competition.
It is closer to a company (that happens to be owned by Coca-Cola) whose business it is to sell aluminum can machines to the world. However the company refuses to sell the machines to Pepsi so that Coke can sell more cans than Pepsi thus giving Coca-Cola an unfair advantage.
And i believe that they have the right to make their products work together better. why not? if word perfect wanted a better product they should have increased their R&D budget. it all comes down to being sore loosers.
Yes Microsoft have every right to increase interoperability between two products. However they don't have the right to prevent someone else from getting the tools they require to make their product operate properly within the OS. Their withholding of that information undermines the competition in another product and at the end of the day hurts the consumer.
MS have a better product and they know it. why is the Linux groups not being sued for integrating everything? or apple for that matter? you buy a mac and you have almost all the programs you need in one. no room for competition. at all.
AFAIK this is not about integrating software with Windows (I assume you're referring to something akin to IE, this is not the same thing). It is about Microsoft not releasing APIs.
Apple does not have a monopoly therefore is not subject to these laws. If in the future Apple were to become a monopoly and behaved like they currently do then I would like to believe they would be treated in the same way as Microsoft are.
As for the Linux community: the Linux community doesn't hide APIs from anyone. It is open source and by definition anyone is free to read the information on the APIs and produce a product that will integrate perfectly with Linux.
what is happening here is that a company is being punished for making one very good product that was very successful. then they took their other product and integrated it into their first successful product.
i just don`t understand how its uncompetitive to have a better product suite.
That isn't what is happening at all. This isn't really about integration it is about preventing others from being able to make their products interoperable with Windows, they are two different things. From your post I get the impression that perhaps you have missed the point. Please don't see this as a personal attack because it isn't, it is just my impression.
