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A far better outcome for end users would be for Windows & MS Office to support ODF fully.

For which end users? The 99.9% of the market that would be pissed that their documents won't move forward with full fidelity to a format that is also usable outside of Office and who couldn't continue to use features available in their product of choice because ODF can't currently support them, or the minority who just want to push a non-MS format at all costs with no consideration for data preservation and a misguided belief in ODF being a universal document format?

//For which end users?//

For all end users.

All end users are served by an open, standard, encumebrance-free, cross-platform, interoperable format.

No end users are disadvantaged by such a format.

This cannot be said for any format which contains dependencies on a specific platform, available only from a single-source supplier.

Edited 2006-12-05 02:01

//features available in their product of choice because ODF can't currently support them//

Which features are these?

Remember, Microsoft were a participant of the ODF committee. If there is any Microsoft-only feature within an office format and interoperation protocols that ODF cannot "connect" to, then it is that way only because Microsoft refused to open up the interface to let ODF interoperate with that.

Microsoft had two options that would have achieved interoperability: (1) support interoperability by adopting ODF and the other attendant features such as SVG, ogg & SIML, or (2) open up their own formats to allow competing products to be written (even as open source), including all of the attendant features such as ActiveX, wmv, wma, OLE, binary blobs from legacy MS Office formats, exchange connector, etc, etc, etc.

Microsoft have done neither of these. People should abandon Microsofts offerings for this reason.

Edited 2006-12-05 02:15

Are you claiming that Microsoft is that technically inept that they wouldn't be able to make an adequate ODF filter for MS Word? Gee, I would have thought you'd have more faith in the quality of MS's workforce.

The fact that Open XML cannot be completely ported to other platforms than Windows automatically means it is inadequate. It is not a question of numbers (and I must say your 99.9% figure is exaggerated, otherwise you'd have to agree that MS has a file format monopoly). It is a question of avoiding vendor lock-in.

Thank you for clarifying this issue for me. For a moment I though MS really wanted to play nice, but now I realize it's still up to its old monopolist tricks, trying to use one quasi-monopoly (Office file formats) to maintain another one (Operating Systems).

Please explain these dependencies, it's just an XML spec, how could there be any dependencies?