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:2006-12-16
Quote: "Any fair tendering process for a government purchase would either reject non-compliant MSOffice with MSODF, or if it didn't such a decision would be trivially easy to appeal ..."
And you believe in the tooth fairy and santa claus don't you? Trivially easy to appeal? If that was the case, Microsoft should never have been able to hijack the recent ISO process for OOXML approval as an ISO standard. But - they did. Money talks. Shall I remind you of the Massachusetts debacle? I didn't see anyone appealing the decision to out the IT guy there, or kill off ODF and replace it with OOXML.
I agree that it *should* be an easy thing to appeal [and win], but what happens in fantasy, and real life are generally quite often opposites.
Dave
Member since:2006-01-16
Sorry but no. M.$ is still the monopoly when it comes to office suites (at least market share wise) and that means that THEIR format will dictate what will be used.
What M.$ did was very wise from their perspective. They seem to be cooperating, and the governments will have no reason to switch to non M.$ office suites now (price not withstanding, this is irrelevant to governments, because the people who decide what to buy are in 99% corrupt, they get a slice of the price).
What this means is that from now on, Office XXX will be used in governments with "but they support ODF" excuse, but the ODF they support will not be the ODF we support.
Simple as that, and pretty damn smart. You have to give them credit for these things, no other company even comes close to their evil geniality(tm)(R)(c).
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
Member since:
2007-02-17
Not quite.
As soon as Microsoft released a MSOffice product which claimed to support ODF, and use it as the default format, with a view to allowing governments to purchase MSOffice because it had support for standards, then the first thing that would happen if the MSOffice would be subjected to a complaince test.
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument_Compliance_Testing
Imagine that ... a test to see if a given program complies with a standard or not.
This is so foreign to "Microsoft think" that most Microsoft supporters would probably not even realise that such a possibility existed.
If Microsoft claim that certain features of an Office suite are not supported by ODF ... but other Office suites which did use ODF did support that feature ... then in that way also is Microsoft's claim demonstrated to be false. It is just that Microsoft haven't bothered to implement it.
Anyway ... if MSODF did not pass the compliance tests, or did not include some features that other ODF Office suites did support, then what you would have is an Office suite from Microsoft that implemented file saving poorly, and several alternatives that cost a lot less which implemented it correctly ...
Any fair tendering process for a government purchase would either reject non-compliant MSOffice with MSODF, or if it didn't such a decision would be trivially easy to appeal ...
The only way for MS to compete in this arena is to implement ODF correctly.
Edited 2008-06-19 23:34 UTC