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Office + OpenDocument, Never Say Never
barryfreed writes "There's a blog entry by Andy Updegrove at ConsortiumInfo.org that says Microsoft has officially stated to him that support of OpenDocument in MS Office could happen. Microsoft sent the statement in a response to an article Updegrove wrote called Massachusetts and OpenDocument: A Brave New World?"
MS likes to embrace and extend, remember? I do believe that MS could make OpenDocument useless by over-supporting it.
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Yet, Microsoft must change; this old stance has not been working.
We expect the change; and there has been change.
First, the MS true type core fonts (that some think they later regretted)
the the WTL (template library) on source forge and their command line tools.
There may be something else.
MS are finding a new strategy that ensures financial success; Bill Gates is a businessman first.
This may be the next change coming up; finding that locked in=>locked out; and freedom=friends.
Sure MS office is good, but if its that good, why are they trying to MAKE you use it.
I understand your point but I think they will change and are changing.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Yes, I suppose so, and they could relicense MS Office under GPL too, but it doesn't seem likely unless 100's more government and business organizations do as Mass. did....
It will be good to see the bull with a ring in its nose for a change, so to speak, but the more relevant down line consequences don't seem to be jumping out at me. If MS goes with ODF, then we are all back in the same mess, more or less, aren't we?
I have faith in people, open-minded people, to see a product, and when the value of the product is comparable to any other product of similar purpose, then choose the cheapest one, or the one with the most compatibility with present relevant investments.
The trouble is, so far as I have seen or understood (I could be wrong), when the products are equal or close, MS uses those 'politicians' they paid for to ensure that only MS products get sold to all but the very edgy techno-geeks. That would leave us right where we started (more or less) in respect of MS's domination of the OS and software world.... that means very little competitive product in circulation by comparison.
So, what would make this more of a move to open and competitive markets?
I don't see the bright future in this.
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That said, they are likely to make it difficult to use and screw up the rendering and printing to make it less desirable than their proprietary formats.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I think Microsoft could actually take OpenDocument support in one of two directions:
1. Basically, how you put it. They would only support it enough so that it would be that extra bullet point at the bottom of the feature list "(blah blah, marketing drivel)...now with OpenDocument support!"
2. (Please don't correct me with a torch, I'm not an expert on this topic) but I don't doubt that MS would find some tiny loophole to sneak their own proprietary crap into OpenDocument formatted Office files which would have an adverse effect upon openning in any non-office program. I just wouldn't be surprised when I've seen two identical machines with identical software on the same network transfer a Word file from one computer to come out garbled on the other end.
Perfecting Discordia
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You mean like how Apple would NEVER go with x86 processors or how Intel would NEVER go with AMD's 64-bit extensions? Both of these were considered extremely unlikely in the past but are today's realities. These changes happened due to customer shifts, competition, and/or better technology. Believe me, if everyone starts eating MS for lunch because of this one sticking point, you can bet they'll support OpenDocument. In fact, much like Intel's 'skunk works' project with the 64-bit extensions, I'm certain they already have it working now.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
They will find way to still make money off it however
Can't be hard with the new tools their lawyers have.
If they encrypt the resulting documents using some lame encryption like ROT13 it would be against the law to Open them in anything but MS Office.
Come on... this is ridiculous, MS would never support something that destroys lockin.
:D
Unless the lack of that feature would lock THEM out (this reminds me of the scooby-doo scene where Scooby and Shaggy lock the door to keep the monster out, but the monster was already behind them).
In other words: If Massachussets decides not to use Microsoft products, other states would follow. Microsoft CANNOT afford that, they could lose their entire govt market. So they have to adopt the OpenDocument format, and face the competition.
Now the stability, experience and ease-of-use of their software is what they'll begin promoting to stay ahead the competition.
From my point of view, Microsoft was cornered into giving up the crown. They tried to delay the unavoidable, but there's nothing they can do about it. We already won!
If M$ wants to continue to make money, what with torrents, napster, E-mule (however it's spelled nowadays) burning, ripping, mashing, and overall passing the info to and from one another, they're going to have to adopt open source policies soon and they know it.
Simply put, people aren't going to tolerate closed EULA's much longer. Average Joe's can't afford 500 bucks every two years to upgrade an OS, relearn, understand, then do it again. That's why people are pooling cash, buying one copy, waiting for someone to crack it, then make tons of copies and give them to friends. (In college the "Academic Version" of XP, and Office 2k3 sold about 3 copies yet everyone had it.)
This is one very tiny step in the process toward embracing open source, but babies never started their journey on two feet by running marathons either. I say mark this as a minor event, but don't pass it aside and keep watch over what M$ does from here on out. Maybe someday people like me will drop the $ and actually give them their letter back.
They will refuse to support OpenDocument just as long as there is a chance they can browbeat customers lime MA into sticking with Office. Then they will refuse to support it while they make all of their plans to switch to something else. Finally at the last minute they will offer to allow them to be a 'beta' site for their upcoming OpenDocument supporting version. Since the grunts at the keyboards hate change, tons of political pressure will be put on the people in charge to stick with MS, this offer will be accepted. Then after a couple of years of buggy and disfunctional betas we will get to the final decision. If others also demand OpenDocument it will finally go production. Otherwise they will just pull the plug on it, the current IT team in MA will have been quietly replaced by then and the whole thing will be forgotten.... except by anyone else who is thinking of taking a similar stand.
Democrat delenda est
Did anybody think it wouldn't happen? Really?? And you just arrived from what planet again???
Of course it will happen. It will happen the moment MS needs it to happen. They've successfully resisted as long as they can, and when it starts costing them sales rather than creating sales for them they flip a compiler option switch and it's included. Don't think for a moment that they haven't had this running in their development labs for years. They would have been fools not to have.
Doesn't mean the battle is over. MS will certainly try to find some essential feature that OD doesn't support to keep people on their own proprietary format. Fight this by using OD regardless. The only thing I don't understand is why RTF was never an acceptable open format. I know it was supported by other platforms, and appears to be all ascii tags and data.
Kudos to Massachusetts to standing up to the MS BS. It took someone big enough and brave enough to get their attention. Apparently even a small state is big enough to really scare them.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
*cough cough* ack! Have you EVER seen the ugliness inside MSWord produced html?
Anwyay, HTML is a markup language - just as OpenDocument. The difference is that HTML was meant to be read by web browsers. Printing and formatting is out of its scope.
Not to mention being a text format it works well with CVS and allows you to have ***PROPER*** revision control, not that crap that Office does.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Microsoft can stammer about all it wants with respect to OpenDocument, but what's interesting is that new features WON'T MATTER, if they can't be translated from/to the open format. One thing I think Bill & Co. tend to forget, which is something that Massachusetts insightfully realized, is that a government record should be no LESS open than the openness provided by traditional media - typically paper. Once you start using proprietary formats, you've closed pretty much imposed restricted access.
2. (Please don't correct me with a torch, I'm not an expert on this topic) but I don't doubt that MS would find some tiny loophole to sneak their own proprietary crap into OpenDocument formatted Office files which would have an adverse effect upon openning in any non-office program.
All they have to do is put the little balloon that says that "saving to OpenDocument may cause loss of formatting", which will cause 95% of the people out there to save to the proprietary file type.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Support for reading, but only incomplete support for writing seems the most probable action for two reasons. First, it resembles how Microsoft beat other word processing competitors, Wordperfect in particular. Second, because there is no real competitor for MS Office, and Microsoft adds features based on customer demand. Supporting OpenDocument as an external, but less featured, format would be consistent with adding it as a customer demanded feature, but not letting the OpenDocument format guide the other features of MS Office.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
Microsoft will fully support OpenDocument. That is to say, it will open them and save them. The formatting will be completely messed up. Graphics and logos will mysteriously disapear or end up on the wrong side of page breaks. Tables will get eaten and the text will end up outside the table, and the table will follow, empty.
Microsoft will support OpenDocument to the extent that they have to to get whatever wonk working for the government to rubber stamp the official document certifying that it is supported. Expect it to be unusable for any document that has any sort of formatting at all beyond flat text.
In the end they will both support it and try to ruin it as a standard which permits cross platform collaboration of any kind, see Java.
Microsoft knows that the SECOND that you don't HAVE to use windows in an office environment, the migration will start. First a few offices will switch. Then a few more. Then things will settle down for awhile, a few major corporations will go "all X" where X!=Windows (linux or OS X or flavor-of-month) to save money. This will signal to the market that there is actually a demand for NON-MS office software, and people are willing to pay money for it. Next the market will be flooded with 10,000 software products, open-office ad-ons, etc, 99% will be crap. A few major competitors will emerge, with products which are competitive with MS's and which are cross-platform. About a year later MS will start supporting other OS's by creating a toolkit to port MS Windows software. This will be a ploy, as the much hyped toolkit will be intentionally impossible to use in the end to produce usable software. Many companies will waste a lot of time and resources attempting to port their windows code using MS's toolkit and API. The strategy by MS will be to delay as much software as possible from being ported for at least one development cycle, hoping to starve their competitors while they maneuver their Next Big Thing (TM) into position. In the end Microsoft would like to cause any company that switched huge costs when they can no longer get support (the stick), meanwhile reaching out to them to switch back with initial price cuts (the carrot). (see also "The Economic Theory of Crack Dealing")
I suspect that MS support will be like that in Excel with CSV files. I choose "Save As", hit the drop down, scroll through the list for .csv, select that, hit save.
.csv file, change one value and resave it...not using any fancy features.
I then get a dialog box saying something like "This file may contain features that cannot be saved if you continue to save in this format. Are you sure you want to save in this format?" Well, yes. I scrolled through the list and picked that format.
This behavior occurs even if you open a
Kind thoughts do not change the world
If you had read and comprehended any of the articles related to this discussion, you would know that a PRINT TO feature will not provide the level of support for OpenDocument that is being demanded by the organizations.
MS Office isn't slipping at all. Maybe a little bit here and a little bit there, but it's still the big dog by a long shot.
The reason they try to "make" you use it is not because it sucks (although that could be argued), it's because it costs over $400 a license and new, virtually featureless versions come out every two years or less. It's a major cash cow and they're going to milk it for all its worth.
Personally I don't feel that any "standard" software package should cost half of what you paid for your computer. Software just goes obsolete too quickly. I often wonder what would happen if some of the big application packages were priced so that individuals could easily buy them (e.g. sub $100). Certainly they would sell considerably more units at first, but would it make up the difference? This is why I'm not a businessman.
you assert two things:
1: there are "good enough" alternatives
2: the existence of "good enough" alternatives destroys MS Office
I assert: MS Office is still the king of the hill. Unless you want to say that something like OpenOffice has even noticeable market-share, at least one of your premises are wrong.
MS Office has been making a bit less money than usual lately. Not because of competitors, but because fewer people see the need to upgrade to the newer version every 2 years.
Now, on the Mac side, yes, MS is losing marketshare... but not to OpenOffice...
"Word also had support for WordPerfect documents for years and it didn't seem to keep Microsoft from eating their lunch."
And that is because like OpenDocument, support for != Default. I suspect that they will support it but prevent you from using it as the default. People are lazy when they make documents and as long as they can open them the rest be damned. So unless the default is mandated as OpenDocument expect it to die a silent death.
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
I'd consider it, and have, but OpenOffice for OS X in the form of NeoOffice isn't very good. It starts on my 1.5 Ghz PowerBook in about 30 seconds, compared to 3-4 for Word, and has inferior style support and lacks a unified toolbar. I also haven't been able to get it to do complex number patterns, like 2.c.iv., and have all of them increment appropriately. Finally, although NeoOffice is a noble effort, it's ugly on OS X. Although I've already tried your suggestion, I find that I do need MS Office.
But there's nothing ethically wrong in that. Integration within MS Office products does NOT prevent you from transferring the content to an aplication from a different vendor, if that is required. So if Office comes to be a better product that's not a bad thing.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
I assert: MS Office is still the king of the hill.
Your assertion that Office currently remains King of the Hill does not refute mine that "good enough" alternatives will chip away at Office's marketshare if more of the compatibility issues become non-issues (e.g. via a complete implementation of OpenDocument by MicroSoft).
The second part of your assertion contains faulty logic:
I assert: ... Unless you want to say that something like OpenOffice has even noticeable market-share, at least one of your premises are wrong.
Current marketshare levels of the alternatives do not do not refute either of my premises; if marketshare levels of the alternatives were falling, you'd have a point. I do not believe that fewer people are installing and using OpenOffice, StarOffice, KOffice, etc. now than they were last year, for example. More people seem to be discovering they can get the majority of their work done sans the King of the Hill.
As more users explore alternatives, and if MicroSoft fully adopts open standards to improve compatibility with these alternatives, these alternatives would be more attractive to more people. This was the point in my original response to the question "if Office is so superior, why does MS need to lock users in?"
Or, perhaps,
"Users complain about this extra step, and their IT department installs OpenOffice on their PC. Presto, no more extra step"