Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 21st Jan 2007 22:39 UTC
The New York Times has taken a look at Microsoft Office 2007. "After a radical redesign, Word, Excel and PowerPoint are almost totally new programs. There are no more floating toolbars; very few tasks require opening dialog boxes, and even the menu bar itself is gone. (Evidently, even Microsoft saw the need for a major feature purge. 'We had some options in there that literally did nothing,' said Paul Coleman, a product manager.)"
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Member since:
2005-11-11
//What guarantees do we have that ODF will even be around in 100 years? Or that in the next 100 years there isn't a breaking change (or 10) made to the ODF format? And if there is a breaking change made, will there still be OS's even capable of running a 100 year old application that can read the older formats? //
You clearly do not understand "open format" and "future proof".
When a document is saved in ODF format, it indicates in the document itself "ODF 1.0 format".
ODF 1.0 format will always be ODF 1.0. It is known officially as "ISO/IEC 26300:2006 Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0". ISO.
This version is fully and completely defined here:
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.CatalogueDetail?CSNUM...
This version will always be the same, so this definition (of the 1.0 version of the format) will never alter. If you get a digital document in twenty years time and it calls itself a ODF v1.0 format document, then the definition I linked to will still describe exactly the format of the document.
There are no "secret recipes" here. No hidden gotchas, no lock-ins.
//Look how much Linux has changed in the past decade, much less 100 years. //
Version 0.1 of Linux (original version that Linus released in 1990) is still version 0.1 of Linux.
If you get Linux now, it will be something like version 2.6.20.
These are not the same, but nevertheless version 0.1 released in 1990 is still version 0.1. I could probably run it (version 0.1) fine (after being recompiled for whatever platform) to this very day.
Once it is open, it is open.
//At least most 20+ year old DOS apps can still be run on virtually any version of Windows. Which actually means that 100 years from now, there very well still could be apps for Windows that can read 100 year old office formats. //
This is where you are very, very mistaken. If it is closed, you only have a binary. You need an X86 machine, for a start. It is quite possible that there will be zero X86 machines on the planet in twenty years time.
Linux runs on everything from wristwatches through to "big iron" mainframes ... because the source is available. It needs only to be recompiled for a given machine.
You can't do that with DOS, or Windows, or any other program with a closed-source dependency.
If I have the source and a full definition I can run a program as old as you want. I could run a FORTH program from 1970 (before X86 was even an idea in someone's head):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FORTH
... as long as I have the source for FORTH and the source for the program in question.
http://www.thefreecountry.com/compilers/forth.shtml
Edited 2007-01-22 12:06