Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 19th Jun 2008 21:09 UTC, submitted by Rahul
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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Member since:
2007-02-17
Sorry, but no.
Microsoft's opportunity to scuttle ODF was to join in the OASIS committee right at the start when they were invited to. The could have then sabotaged any harmony of purpose right from the start, and made their own implementation concurrently with others (such as OpenOffice and KOffice) ... and made their implementation in such a way as to exploit any ambiguities and make sure that interoperability did not work.
Then Microsoft could have simply abandoned the format, or let it stagnate ... citing as a reason that the format did not work when it came to interoperability and it was not as powerful as OOXML anyway.
Microsoft's problem right now is that, despite their saying that ODF is not capable enough to be an Office file format, they are very short of being able to cite features which it does not support. If Microsoft now try to claim that ODF does not support interoperability ... there are a number of Office suites including OpenOffice and KOffice that give the lie to that claim too.
Any attempt extend & extinguish (they have done the embrace now) of ODF will be easily seen as sabotage.
ODF is shown to be an open, freely implementable, interoperable and capable format. Despite constantly trying, Microsoft have not been able to stop it so far, and I think their chance to do so has passed.
I think Microsoft might have painted themselves into a corner, and they could well be left with no choice but to implement ODF properly.
Edited 2008-06-20 10:12 UTC