Interview with Sun's Florian Reuter

silentbob4 writes "Mad Penguin is running a series of three interviews with people in the trenches working to bring you OpenOffice.org 2.0. The first of these interviews, with Sun's Florian Reuter, covers some of the differences between the truly open XML found in OpenOffice.org 2.0, and the closed MS Word ML found in the upcoming Microsoft Office 12. He also discusses the importance of simple end users in the process of improving the code with bug reports."

Comments

Could be a goodie.

[holy zarquon's singi]

With the critical mass that the adoption of the open document format by Massachusets, google and others implies, the embracement of standards like XML and Xforms in OO.o that makes it pretty easy to create organisational workflows, this could be a real microsoft hobbler. Particularly if as seems likely, Microsoft keeps failing to adapt to an open standards world, and the price tag of OO.o stays lower than M$O.

Bring it on, I say.

OK, so what IS different?

[Moraelin]

I've actually RTFA, and I'm still at a loss about exactly _what_ is better about OOo's XML Schema, or wrong about MS's.

In TFA the guy just goes on about how his own XML Schema is, you know, lovingly handcrafted and how he _cares_ about your data. Which is just a content-free judgment call. Yeah, so he likes his own XML Schema better. Whop-de-do, that's such a total surprise.

It's not like if I went around the office and asked 10 guys I wouldn't get 10 different schemas, and each loves his own more and is convinced that everyone else's sucks. Just the proper way to use attributes alone has everyone polarized in three camps, with everyone in one camp arguing that the other two are awfully wrong and against the very idea of OOP or of XML itself. Handling validation and showing which fields are wrong to the user who filled the form? Yep, another clean three-way split, and I've actually had to implement three different ways to handle it, to please all three camps. And so on.

So that he loves his own more and thinks it's a better way to store my data, is very much expected there. I was already sure he thinks that. In fact, I'd be worried if he said he didn't.

What really interests me is exactly which concrete problems should I expect with MS's, that supposedly aren't there if I use OOo's format. If I try to retrieve that data in 5, 10 or 100 years, as in his answer, exactly in which way is OOo's format better? Exactly _what_ kind of data gets more benefits from his schema than from MS's in that context? In which way, and for what concrete reasons does he foresee that MS's own converters (which so far still import Word 6 documents with no problems) will break down and cry like little girls if fed a Word 12 document some 10 years from now?

No, really, it's not a flame. I want to know. If I'm to go there and pester my boss to switch from MS Office to OOo, I damn better have some very concrete arguments and use-cases. If my whole argument is "but some guy from Sun likes Sun's format more" and "but Sun's format is lovingly handcrafted with love and care for your data", chances are I'll get laughed out of his office.

So can anyone shed some more light on that issue?

Re:And what makes you think that MS won't...

[killjoe]

There is no google web office. However there is and has been for many years think free office. Contrary to your prediction it has not been adopted rapidly or widely despite being available over the web and despite being a decent product.