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Microsoft Lashes out at Massachusetts IT Decision
scoop writes "Infoweek is reporting that the plan to eliminate the use of Office by the Massachusetts state government (previously covered on Slashdot) has not gone over well with Microsoft. Microsoft's Yates said the company agrees with the adoption of XML but does not agree that the solution to "public records management is to force a single, less functional document format on all state agencies." Microsoft also states they will not support the OpenDocument format. Looks to me Microsoft is scared their biggest cash cow is in danger from a free alternative. Soon I'm sure we'll see a Microsoft funded comparison between Office and OpenOffice."
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However, I suspect we may see a reversal soon. Because the traditional MS response to this sort of thing is either to claim support, but embedd MS extensions in it (which is more or less what they did with the last version of Office and it's suposed XML support), or to write support but make it really suck. Watch for the next version of Office to have OpenDocument support, but for the support to be poor and buggy.
It's partially true, opendocument does not have it's own format for storing pictures like microsoft's formats do..
Instead, it stores the picture in whatever format it was originally (jpeg, png, gif etc). Since opendocument is basically a zipfile, you can simply unzip it and retrieve the pictures in their original format. Part of the design goal of opendocument was to use existing standards wherever possible..
So it seems that here, microsoft is just trying to twist this around to suit their own ends. I`m sure if someone invented a car that ran on air, microsoft would complain that it didn't have a gas tank.
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I own Word licenses for OS X and Windows, but I just like OO.org better - seems simpler and stays out of my way when writing. I used OO.org for 2 of my last 3 books.
The OO.org 2.0 beta is especially good.
I have written a few blog entries on the massively huge advantages of open file formats - I won't repeat myself hereexcept to say that took me 5 minutes to write Java code to perfectly handle OO.org and AbiWord file formats. For my GPLed NLP project, I spent huge amounts of time trying to dea with Microsoft Office formats, and did no really do very well.
As a Microsoft stock owner, I wrote a letter to Microsoft compalining about their failure to also support OO.org file formats - I never received a response, which I think is rude behavior. After not receiving an answer since the 3 or 4 months that I wrote the letter, I am thinking of dumping their stock.
No, there are reasons people will want to be able to *synchronize* that data together, but that has nothing to do with the idea that you need one mother-of-all-document-format to store that different data in the same file.
The sane thing to do would be to store the video in a (common, open) video format, and your (textual) notes hold a time index into the video for synchronization, thus the text and video are separate from each other, *and* in standardized formats, *and* held in the same file using a standardized container format like a zip file. So you can still use open standards which keep your own options open, and keep your synchronization too.
Unless of course you're a company who's income depends on keeping your customers locked in to your proprietary formats (forcing them to use your, and ONLY your, apps to access the THEIR OWN data), in which case, "innovating" a brand new (proprietary, redundant) format to store text and video in the same file makes perfect "sense"....