Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 19th Jun 2008 21:09 UTC, submitted by Rahul
Features, Office The battle between the OpenDocument Format and Microsoft's Open Office XML was long, and here and there rather nasty, but it appears as if we finally have a winner. The company behind OOXML already conceded by announcing it would implement support for ODF in Office 2007 SP2, but now it has also said it quite literally: ODF has won.
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Cool! I think
by AndrewDubya on Thu 19th Jun 2008 23:35 UTC
AndrewDubya
Member since:
2006-10-15

This sounds kind of cool. I can imagine a variety of angles:

1. Microsoft is doing this because they want to provide a useful, open standard and it's the right thing to do.

2. This might make the EU look at MS in a better light.

3. MS believes that Office software is opening up, and they have no choice but to do it or their product will be worthless some day.

4. As long as they use another format by default, they don't actually care too much. Maybe they don't plan on putting much effort in to supporting the format correctly anyway.

Some are *ahem* more likely than others ;) ... Of course, it's probably a combination of some of the above and a million things I'd never even consider ;-) I think MS looked pretty slimy with the ISO standards process so I'm glad to see them backing down on OOXML.

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