Microsoft Office 2007 to Support ODF - But Not OOXML 377
Andy Updegrove writes "About two hours ago, Microsoft announced that it will update Office 2007 to natively support ODF 1.1, but not to implement its own OOXML format. Not until Office 14 is released (no date given so far for that) will anyone be able to buy an OOXML ISO-compliant version. Why will Microsoft do this after so many years of refusal? Perhaps because the only way it can deliver a product to government customers that meets an ISO/IEC document format standard is by finally taking the plunge, and supporting 'that other format.' Still, many questions remain, such as when this upgrade will actually be released, how good a job it will do, and whether the API Microsoft has said it will make available to permit developers to supply 'save to ODF' default plugins will be supported by a patent non-assertion promise allowing implementations under the GPL (the upgrade supplied by Microsoft will not allow ODF as the default setting)."
Sinking Ship. (Score:0, Insightful)
They have yielded this little bit because they have to but it is too little too late.
Embrace and Extend (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
April Fools? (Score:4, Insightful)
Victory (Score:5, Insightful)
Larger question (Score:5, Insightful)
- Will ODF spreadsheets be functionally equivalent to CSV?
- Will ODF text be functionally equivalent to plain-text ASCII with line breaks?
- WIll ODF presentations be JPEG renderings?
- Will ODF import and export take hours?
- etc.
I've occasionally been accused of having an evil mind, but I'm sure that professionals given weeks or months can come up with better kneecapping plans than the above amateur hipshots.Re:Victory (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Which means that all the administration costs, travel expenses, bribe money, etc that they spent to have the OOXML standard pushed through was just thrown away for nothing, even though they got what they were aiming for.
Talk about mismanagement. Hey Ballmer, why don't you try hitting yourself with the chair this time. Might knock some sense into you.
Re:Victory (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sinking Ship. (Score:3, Insightful)
Whether or not MS will keep their mitts off it remains to be seen. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for now. Suicidal, I know.
Not embrace and extend, but embrace and squeeze (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Typical Tactic (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they are begrudgingly supporting ODF since their customers are demanding it, but making the implementation just irritating enough (and, I would guess, incompatible with many features of Office) that users will be inclined to just work in docx (which OpenOffice and others cannot read perfectly, if at all).
Re:Not embrace and extend, but embrace and squeeze (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Q: Will this signal the end of Excel dominance? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Typical Tactic (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously Microsoft is counting on this to let them sell MS Office to governments as "ISO compatible" until they can properly implement the OOXML standard, while still trying to keep everyone using their proprietary formats. It's a risky gamble, and with Office 14 having no announced release date, not one I'd be comfortable making.
Re:Worse than that (Score:3, Insightful)
What people want (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but most people actually couldn't give a crap about standards. Most people just want a functional suite of office applications that works more or less the way they've come to expect such programs. Most people aren't even aware that there is such a thing as a file format, or that there are different types of them.
Most people also want to be able to easily exchange documents with other people. That's part of the reason why Office is so well entrenched. Sure, you can download a copy of OO to open an ODF file, but if you're running a business, you don't want to make your clients do that, because it's a hassle. Nearly everyone has Office, and practically nobody has OO (this is in rough marketshare percentages).
Don't get me wrong. I would rather have a clear, open standard with a decent existing implementation that's not tied to the whims of a vendor. But I and people like me really are a very small part of the market.
Re:They walk on ice. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Victory (Score:1, Insightful)
They have far too many customers demanding, not asking for, demanding, the use of an ISO standard for documents.
These are governments, business with international operations and those with hetrogenus computing environments.
Microsoft would only poison their relationships with these high paying customers if they did something like that.
Playing the standards games is a double edged sword. MS is feeling the other edge because not even they can implement OOXML now or in the near future.
Doesn't even need to be patent encumbered (Score:5, Insightful)
(or of course like Orcs in Warcraft III we really really have misunderstood them ...).
Andy
Re:Embrace and Extend (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not embrace and extend, but embrace and squeeze (Score:3, Insightful)
Welcome to the brave new world. OpenOffice.org is the one that's working "correctly" and preserving people's copyright.
Re:eee (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:An Empire in Rapid Decline, said Time Magazine. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm more scared of them supporting ODF than I am of OOXML. How do we know they aren't going to try to do what they successfully did to Netscape. They could easily add a bunch of their own stuff into ODF so that nothing but Office would be able to read the ODF files Office puts out.
If however they are really trying to comply with ODF then hats off to MS for being serious about embracing standards.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
In fact, they didn't put too much into that, they just created an EU investigation exclusively for that happening, and oppened guard for lots of other monopoly abuse and criminal (bribery) prosecutions. No too much indeed.
In fact, they did have nothing to gain, but everything to lose.
Re:I almost thought Micro$oft went good (Score:3, Insightful)
Why Microsoft supports the ODF format (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft knows that OpenOffice.Org, Star Office, IBM Lotus Symphony, and other office suites already support ODF, and Microsoft does not want Office 2007 to be the pink elephant that does not support ODF, and Office 2007 users couldn't open up ODF format documents from friends and coworkers, and would flock to Office 2007 alternatives to open them up. Microsoft knows that would cut into Office 2007 sales as most ODF office suites are free to download and use.
Microsoft also knows that many governments have already decided to support ODF format documents, and if Office 2007 doesn't get ODF support, sales will go to Microsoft's competitors.
There have been massive online campaigns for ODF and against OOXML, this is Microsoft's way of silencing critics of Office 2007 that it does not support a true open standard.
Microsoft knows that MS-Word and PDF documents have already started to be replaced with ODF documents. Also the old RTF format no longer meets the needs of Internet documents anymore and MS-Word format is just a modified RTF format. Just as Adobe lost control of who uses the PDF standard, Microsoft knows that they can get control of the ODF format from Sun/IBM etc as well.
Re:What people want (Score:3, Insightful)
They also tend to have rather limited requirements, and wouldn't want to spend a lot of money on it.
Someone who just types up a few letters or does their own limited accounts in a spreadsheet would be much better off with openoffice, if only due to the cost. There are also a number of cheap suites, such as msworks being marketed quite successfully to these people.
Large companies and governments on the other hand, are starting to realise the importance of open formats but are far more constrained by the need to support an existing corpus of documents in proprietary formats, and communication with other companies who use proprietary formats. There's also a large number of businesses who would like to implement openoffice for the financial savings if nothing else too.
Re:Easily predictable: (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not so sure. They can only lose share to quite capable (and free) alternatives. Its not the empty marketplace it was 5 years ago.
If Microsoft's options are:
Plan A) Lose market share and goodwill by making things as awkward as possible, making a hash of the implementation or making their products look poor.
Plan B) Lose less market share by having a crack at making the ODF implementation they can one top of the base of their current line.
Its probably a good bet that someone not interested in playing law suit marketing can see the benefit of having the best, most extended (with proprietary extensions) ODF format they can.
Re:Sinking Ship. (Score:3, Insightful)
Slashdot sucks more and more every day.
Re:What people want (Score:1, Insightful)
Here in Norway pdf and odf was selected as national standards (guess ooxml might join soon). Which means all documents from the government, published as editable text must also be published as an odf-document.
I assume similar regulations exist elsewhere, and that Microsoft thinks they will loose more customers on not suporting any ISO-standard, than by supporting that-other-standard.
I think I speak for a lot of us (Score:4, Insightful)
But almost every time stuff like this happens, Microsoft eventually ends up playing their old tricks.
It would be cool if they surprised us this time, but they have far too great a credibility dept for me to think anything particularly good will come from this move.
Re:Victory (Score:3, Insightful)
Like they did when Microsoft came up with a buggy and mangled implementation of HTML?
Much as I wish you were right...
Re:Embrace and Extend (Score:5, Insightful)
Hm
Look, I have to wonder if such a strategy wouldn't backfire on Microsoft in the long run. I would assume the customer base that wants this feature is aware of the tricks MS might try to play, otherwise why would they be dragging MS (kicking and screaming) towards open formats?
And yet, this whole issue does seem to bear a similarity to the perfunctory implementation of support for POSIX standards in Windows NT many years ago. I'm not up on the details, but as I recall MS implemented it merely to appease government customers who wanted it as a condition of running NT in their environments. Could ODF support be the same? Not an attempt to E^3 (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) ODF, but just a temporary measure to maintain compliance with government mandates until their own OOXML monster is released on the world?
Re:Typical Tactic (Score:3, Insightful)
Open Source is not a product. It is not a company. It is not an individual. It is not a group. It is not an entity. Open Source is a development model.
The only way that Microsoft could be "victorious" over Open Source is if they were to originate a superior development model that attracted more developers to it.
Since that has not happened, I'm really not sure what sort of victory they are talking about.
On the other hand, they could be trying to say that they are victorious over products developed using the open source model.
But even this is a strange thing to be saying because the game never ends. They may be selling more of Microsoft product X than there are installations of Open Source product Y, but is that a permanent situation or a temporary one? If history tells us anything, it is the latter.
The sad sick truth of the matter is that Microsoft's precarious position is due entirely to lack of competition, a situation that it worked very hard to create. If Microsoft were but one 800 pound gorilla among many 800 pound gorillas, then the product quality engendered through the process of competition would mean that Open Source products would have a very hard time of it.
But because Microsoft has been so successful at defeating its competitors, it has nowhere to go but down. Growth of a company is dependent upon its markets. It can't grow bigger than the markets it serves. The bigger a percentage a company has of a particular market, the more difficult it becomes to grab more of that market. This is why Microsoft's strategy has always been to violate anti-trust regulations in order to conquer new markets.
Unluckily for them, they can't do that anymore. Since they cannot expand, that leaves them in the precarious position of having to defend their position within the markets they have already conquered, and as anyone can tell you, you can't win a defensive war. The most you can hope for is that the enemy gets tired and goes home, and that doesn't happen in free markets. There is always another enemy coming right behind to take a shot at you.
So not only are they not "victorious" over Open Source, they aren't even going to be able to maintain their current position. That isn't to say that the company is doomed, only that much like the British Empire, their glory days are at an end.
Re:Doesn't even need to be patent encumbered (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:An Empire in Rapid Decline, said Time Magazine. (Score:2, Insightful)
It specifically allows someone like Microsoft to rape it - BECAUSE IT LACKS SO MANY STANDARD FORMAT implementations...
Microsoft will turn ODF into a virtual equivalent of OOXML (think ODF/MS) if it is the standard. Ink content ODF/MS format, Voice tagging OSF/MS format, etc etc etc...
So again to read any non ODF written standard, MS will write it and you will still be using MS specifications in the long run.
And no one else here thought of this before?
Re:can't create reality with your keyboard, twitte (Score:3, Insightful)
He has multiple accounts? So fucking what? His posts aren't that great? Again, so fucking what?
Is twitter some sort of child molester and I missed the memo, or is it really just that some number of ACs really have nothing better to do than search out all of his posts and whine about him because... um... just because?
Re:can't create reality with your keyboard, twitte (Score:2, Insightful)
Why, precisely does it matter as whom he posts? Even if all these accounts are, as is apparently the consensus, belonging to twitter, shouldn't you be rebutting his POINTS instead of his name? You spend two and a half paragraphs attacking his accounts, and half of one line giving a statement that says, in essense "oh, yeah, and your argument doesn't make sense either." Sounds like an ad hominem to me [nizkor.org].
If I were someone coming in without an opinion, I would see someone making a statement backed up by data, as much as you may contest its validity, followed immediately by an unprovoked attack on the person who made the statement.
Like I said, I'm new here. Care to tell me why, exactly, you choose to respond against the man instead of against his data?
Re:Sinking Ship. (Score:2, Insightful)
In case you haven't seen my big hairy white ass, it doesn't care what the fuck you think the tilde means. In case you haven't been paying attention for the last twenty years, the ~ means approximately (or to some Unix wanks, the home directory) and assigning it yet another use is like boning a vacuous prostitute with no wrapper for your wing-wang: just fucking stupid on every level.