Corel apparantly did an impressive handbrake turn yesterday, because it confirmed it will support ODF— an obvious shift in position seeing it only a week ago said it wouldn’t. But that is not all on the ODF front today. Microsoft yesterday also opened the door to supporting ODF just a bit more. “Microsoft is working with a French company on translators to determine the scope of the problem in exporting Office documents to ODF. It sounds to me that support for “Save As” ODF in Office is a when, not an if.” Andy Updegrove, who recently critized Corel heavily for not supporting ODF, replies.
If Microsoft really doe this then: they must feel trapped like a rat!
Actually, the articles really just say that both outfits are still bullshitting around the subject since neither will come out and say “yes, definitely” or better, “yes, definitely, no strings attached, by date X”. Until they do, this is just rumour. I guess the only one that matters is Microsoft and they don’t exactly have a history of good behaviour over this kind of thing.
It will be interesting to see whether Microsoft come out with full odf support or do their usual thing of hedging it around and making the whole thing a hassle, so that later they can either drop it claiming no one uses it or try to twist the stuff in a proprietory direction. Why oh why is this company so completely incapable of telling anything straight.
Why oh why is this company so completely incapable of telling anything straight.
The answer is in your question. It’s a company. They want to make money. Money + people = lies. Microsoft isn’t special in this regard. It’s just that very few companies today have such an impact on our daily lives (so that the company’s errors become more apparent).
Logic as old as time.
Logic as old as time.
So true, so true. I don’t think you can find a company who haven’t lied to some extent some time.
Just look at commercials. They always claim to better than the competitor no matter if it’s true or not. That’s the way it is.
The fact that MS and Corel are considering ODF-support is not a surprise. Of course they are considering it. If enough customers switch to a ODF-supporting application then they lose money. It’s that simple.
It’s not a simple of course. If Microsoft supports ODF it gives customers an easy way to migrate to other Office suites.
What amazes me is that they’re working with a French company to do it… I cannot believe that implementing ODF is going to be any harder than writing a new save “macro/plugin/module” which doesn’t necessarily save everything. If it is, wow, I didn’t realize their development methods were that bad.
Maybe they’re just looking for some excuse to try and get out of doing it. I wouldn’t be surprised if they already have the code to do it cause somebody got bored one afternoon or two.
If I had to guess, I could certainly see MS coming back with some release stating how ODF formats are horrible, prone to corruption, viruses, etc… I don’t see MS giving in on this one.
The thing is, all someone needs to do is to use OpenOffice’s code to write a plugin for an MS Doc to ODF exporter. OpenOpenOffice is taking this approach.
If the OpenOpenOffice plugin is better than the one produced by Microsoft, it’ll reflect badly on Microsoft, not ODF.
Does Microsoft make it reasonable to write plugins for Word without paying them to be their friend and have their source code? Or do they require some sort of special license to even get started?
I don’t know enough about the internals of Word to have any idea…
…though I doubt it will, and if it does happen, it won’t be soon or without some horrible catch negating practical value in having OASIS OpenDocument support.
It’s best to pick one of the other programs that support OD properly and without an agenda that is only there to cause long term problems.
I’d really like to see Microsoft put my fears to rest and do the right thing. I’m not betting on it, though.
It’s good to see that it seems like a lot of the fighting might be over and people can get down to one standard now.
Microsoft’s revenue growth has been slowing steadily over the past few years leading to this:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=MSFT&t=my&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=
With the demand for open file formats sweeping through governments and businesses all over the planet, one third of Microsoft’s revenue is in danger of going away.
And there is nothing Microsoft can do to stop it.
With the demand for open file formats sweeping through governments and businesses all over the planet, one third of Microsoft’s revenue is in danger of going away.
I would not paint the gloom-and-doom picture over a single issue quite yet. Their product line is strong. As good as OO.o2 is, businesses and power users will likely prefer MS Office for the forseeable future (I know a few individuals that acutally use VBA in their documents).
Microsoft has a hugely advantageous market position, and plenty of resources to throw at any problem they come across. They can support a standard and still be profitable by making a great product (talking Office, here) and keeping it the corporate standard – after all, they have the support infrastructure, and the momentum in their favor.
Let me just temper my post by clarifying that I am a “hippy-freak” Linux user, and have several copies of OO.o2 at my desk to hand out to co-workers, should they express interest in alternatives to MS Office.
I don´t expect a mass-exodus from MS Office either (or from Windows to Linux for that matter).
But what will be the largest threat to the MS cashcows, is that the more credible a competitor Linux/OO becomes, the easier it will be for customers to play the Linux and/or OO “migration trumph card” when negotiating deals with MS. We have already seen a couple of examples, where MS has had to come up with huge discounts and increased customer flexibility on SA deals, just to stave off Linux and OO.
Microsofts weak spot, is that it needs to earn a hell of a lot of money just to maintain its current size and current stockprice. Add to that, that MS invests a lot off money from the Windows/Office divisions (or whatever they are called today) in other business areas.
If MS can´t keep their monopoly sized margins on their cashcows, they will either implode on their own weight, make some new cashcows (they haven´t been too successfull so far), or they will have to make some very deep cuts. So although nobody will be able to challenge the marketshare of MS in the near future, I still think that they look pretty vulnerable.
I think that the next 5 years could become very interesting.
“With the demand for open file formats sweeping through governments and businesses all over the planet, one third of Microsoft’s revenue is in danger of going away.”
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. Microsoft Office is still the king of Office apps at least based on market share. People seem to be letting their anti-MS zeal cloud thier thought on this issue. The issue here is over open document formats, not open source office applications. The DOC format is threatened here, not particularly Office. If the office suite was at issue here then there would be no argument, people would switch to OO.org or a similar libre suite, there would be no calls for MS support the standard. The push here is for future-proof document formats, so that 50 or 100 years from now they can be opened and read long after MS has stopped supporting them (provided that the DRM on the storage media they are stored on allows us to open them, but thats another argument
)
I want MS to support an unmolested implementation of open document formats. If they do I won’t be dropping Office anytime soon. I am happy with the product, especially Outlook 2003, but I would just like to see a more future-safe document format replace the proprietary ones, or at least be supported.
{{I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. Microsoft Office is still the king of Office apps at least based on market share. }}
This contention is quite open to debate.
The previous version of OpenOffice (1.1.x) (the x represents various minor version updates) had a larger share of installed base than the competing (and still incumbent) version of MS Office (AFAIK that is Office 2003).
OpenOffice 2.0 will be well entrenched by the time Office 12 hits the streets – and since Office 12 has a significantly different look and feel it is quite likely that people will either stick to their current version of Office or switch to OpenOffice 2.x.
“The previous version of OpenOffice (1.1.x) (the x represents various minor version updates) had a larger share of installed base than the competing (and still incumbent) version of MS Office (AFAIK that is Office 2003). ”
I would like to see numbers to back that claim up. The last numbers I saw a little over a year ago claimed 15% in large enterprise. They report may not have used a large enough sample or been thorough enough but it was widely and happily reported on all the major linux news sites. I can’t image that number marched up to over 50% in a years time.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=6407
{{I would like to see numbers to back that claim up.}}
{{The last numbers I saw a little over a year ago claimed 15% in large enterprise.}}
{{I can’t image that number marched up to over 50% in a years time. }}
Office 2003 has less than 8% market share. Not 50%.
Back your own numbers up.
“Office 2003 has less than 8% market share. Not 50%”
Quoting Myself — “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. Microsoft Office is still the king of Office apps at least based on market share.”
i.e. collectively versions 97-2003, vs collectiviely OO.org 1.x-2.0.
Where did I claim that MS Office 2003 had 50% share? I don’t understand why you are getting so upset over this issue. I am not trying to offend you but I would like to see where you are finding these numbers.
He – “The previous version of OpenOffice (1.1.x) (the x represents various minor version updates) had a larger share of installed base than the competing (and still incumbent) *version* of MS Office (AFAIK that is *Office 2003*).” (emphasis added)
You- “I would like to see numbers to back that claim up. The last numbers I saw a little over a year ago claimed 15% in large enterprise.. I can’t image that number marched up to over 50% in a years time.”
**************
Durr he was talking about OOo 1.1.x having more share than MSOffice 2003. You say that isn’t possible since OOo can’t have more than 50%. What could you possibly mean other than Office 2003 (what he was talking about) has more than 50%?
He- “Office 2003 has less than 8% market share. Not 50%.”
You- “Where did I claim that MS Office 2003 had 50% share?”
***************
You appeared to in your previous post. You responded to his assertion that OOo 1.1.x was more widely distributed than MSOffice 2003 by saying that OOo couldn’t possible have over 50% share, implying that you believe MSOffice 2003 has more than a 50% share.
Since with your statement you obviously meant MSOffice (all versions) has more than 50%, why were you using it to “refute” his claim that OOo has wider distribution than MSOffice *2003*?
His replies at least respond to assertions you appear to have made (though in reality you didn’t, because you were responding to assertions he didn’t make, and never appeared to make) You are incredibly frustrating.
“His replies at least respond to assertions you appear to have made (though in reality you didn’t, because you were responding to assertions he didn’t make, and never appeared to make) You are incredibly frustrating.”
I apologize to all, I did not read the post as thorughly as I thought I did. It was a misunderstanding based mostly on my error.
Nevertheless, I would still like to see supporting sources for the original argument because I have yet to find a market share comparison of office 2003 to OO.org 1.x. Especially not some thing as definitive as 15% vs 8%.
Marketshare can be a very difficult thing to define and establish when comparing commercial vs. free applications. Commercial marketshare is generally defined by the number of licenses sold (not necessarily the number being used). Free applications can be distributed in so many different ways that it is difficult to move beyond the very vague metric of downloads (there are many arguments as to why # of downloads can be misleading).
I’d say that the whole argument is pointless.
{{Where did I claim that MS Office 2003 had 50% share? I don’t understand why you are getting so upset over this issue. I am not trying to offend you but I would like to see where you are finding these numbers.}}
I am not upset at all, if anything that is you with the wobbly figures who is getting upset.
Your confusion appears to stem from “upgrade”. It costs almost nothing (a bit of time & bandwidth) to upgrade OpenOffice from one version to the next. It is expected that nearly every user of OpenOffice 1.1.x will shortly upgrade to become a user of OpenOffice 2.0.
The current installed share of OpenOffice 1.1.x is estimated to be about 15%. There is no reason why that figure shouldn’t rapidly fall to give way for an installed share of openOffice 2.0 of 15%, perhaps rising after that.
MS Office on the other hand has a significant upgrade cost. Many people are still using Office ’97 – in fact I think I saw somewhere that Office ’97 has a bigger market share than Office 2003. Office ’97 is an orphaned product – it is no longer supported by Microsoft.
{i.e. collectively versions 97-2003, vs collectiviely OO.org 1.x-2.0.}
Users are going to be far more “version mobile” for OpenOffice (with free upgrades) than for MS Office (with costly upgrades), so you are not comparing apples with oranges.
The critical point is this – there is a very low cost alternative upgrade path for users of earlier versions of MS Office. If they download & use OpenOffice 2.0, they get a free upgrade from their earlier version of MS Office to a version of OpenOffice that is actively supported, that can read both earlier and later versions of MS Office files, that supports OpenDocument format, that will not require an upgrade of their hardware, that has a GUI interface very similar to what they are already used to, and that has an “export to PDF” capability.
Compare all that with trying to sell such a user on an upgrade to Office 2003 or even to Offcie 12 (which would doubtless require new hardware).
If there is going to be a shift in the installed base market share of earlier versions of Office, surely now it is far more likely that these users will shift to OpenOffice 2.0?
While I think MS Office will someday have OD the question is how well will it support it. Right now if you wanted you can save doc files as .rtf .html ect you can even make it the default save option. However unless you only use the most basic functions (and sometimes even if you do) there is a very strong chance the formatting of the file will become screwed up requiring extra work to fix it.
I will be very surprised if it will be-able to do a perfect or neer perfect conversion of office03 files to OD files, if it can it would be a simple script to convert all the existing office files to it. I’m sure MS is worried at least a little about people going “Thanks for OD format!, ohh yea we will be canceling our order for Office 2010 now, OO.org 3.0 does everything we need now that we don’t have to worry about doc format”
Agreed. If they do support ODF, it probably won’t be ODF at all, but some bastardized MS Office-only version of it.
{{I will be very surprised if it will be-able to do a perfect or neer perfect conversion of office03 files to OD files, if it can it would be a simple script to convert all the existing office files to it.}}
Such a thing already exists.
1. Download OpenOffice.org 2.0.
2. Install OpenOffice.org 2.0.
3. Start OpenOffice.org 2.0 Writer.
4. Select from the Menus File->Wizards->Document Convertor.
Convert all your MS Word, MS Excel and MS PowerPoint documents to OpenDocument format in a batch.
Enjoy!
{{“Thanks for OD format!, ohh yea we will be canceling our order for Office 2010 now, OO.org 3.0 does everything we need now that we don’t have to worry about doc format”}}
One doesn’t need anything at all from Microsoft (not even OD format for Office) even as of this very moment in order for this very thing to be possible.
Unless of course OpenOffice.org 2.0 is so confused by your powerpoint files that it crashes…
I’ll try to file a bug about it today. In the mean time, be careful, save often and make copies of your open files from time to time.
Every empire has a begining and un end !
It’s time to see the end of MS empire 🙂
One less dumbass move from Corel, as these folks have done the impossible to screw up anything and everything in their path.
Of course, they do have a contract with Microsoft of some kind. Remember in the 90’s when they were almost out of money and Microsoft vail them out. Sure Microsoft didn’t get anything in return for that. Right after it, WordPerfect for Linux was discontinued and Corel Linux was sold out/spinned off to Xandros.
In a way, MS has been trying for years to get users to pay for a program when they already have an alternative that’s good enough and mostly compatible with the latest and greatest. The alternative is to keep using software that has already been paid for and for all intents and purposes is free (as in beer) moving forward. The only reason that MS continues to add features to Office is because they want people to upgrade. Sure they get some revenue off of first-time sales, but how many people are there that don’t already have a copy of Office by now.
People will still buy Office in the future, and companies will continue to pay for software that is more expensive than the alternative. MS is going to have stiffer competition in some areas because of ODF, but no matter what MS does the effects will continue to be slow for a while. The tough part is predicting whether adopting ODF will help or hurt MS (as a company, not just Office) in the long run. As a business that’s all that MS cares about, and that’s what their decisions are based on.
Particularly for Corel, who was a contributor to the OASIS OpenDocument specification in the first place?
For Microsoft, of course they’ll support ODF, and they’ll do a bad job of it too. OpenDocument is just not very complex compared to other formats. Microsoft didn’t want to support OD because format lock-in was part of their business plan. However, if customers are wising up to format lock-in, they need to convince people that they will support an open format but that it’s plainly inferior. The best way to do that is do a lousy job in supporting it.
“Look, ma, Word can write OD documents now, but durned if they don’t look like a pile of poo!”
Take a look at the recent BECTA UK publication, Technical Specification for Institutional Infrastructure. Basically, all Office apps from here on in in the UK in public institutions must support open standards. Now, this is not yet Massachussets. The open formats do include rtf, csv and so on. OpenDocument is not mandated. Nor is the storage of information in OpenDocument mandated. And BECTA, though it is endorsed by the Secretary of State for Education, does not make recommendations that have the force of law.
But its getting there, one step at a time, and if you are any sort of charitable or public institution in the UK, you will not now be buying any database package that doesn’t support either csv or odb. Yes, there are some, in quite wide use, and from here on in they either comply…. or they go.
After
MSRTF (which can be open only in Word or other MS products)
MSMAIL (pesky winmail.dat outlook and exchange attachment package)
HTML export from Word? I know it exists, but WTF does it creates? One would expect simple html, but in reality a monster-like-html is exported
I would expect MSODF with the excuse that they needed to make triple E (embrace, extend, extinguish) crippled all the way in any other software but MS Office.
RTF is documented on MSDN. I know because I used the docs to write an IRC to RTF and HTML to RTF converter, without using any MS code.
Maybe if we give Corel and Microsoft 1000 more chances to get it right they will stop being evil monopolies.
I vote with my money. Do you?
Because we all know that Corel is a monopoly, right?
I would prefer the opposite.
One thing, microsoft is evil.
Think about it there is open document standard.
with microsoft coming in, there would be Microsoft’s own
open document standard.
See Microsoft comes there, and then he/she create his/her
own ODS variants which is only 100% compatible with their
software products. Which is one disadvantage for open document format itself.
It sounds like crazy.But I would prefer Microsoft out of
ODS.
ONE THING IN MIND, IF MICROSOFT SUPPORT ODS, THERE SHOULD BE ONE FORCE TO CONTROL NOT FORKING ODS FORMAT.
OpenSource Life is peaceful.
…somewhere in Redmond, the distant sound of a chair being thrown…