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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?"
Isn't "OpenDoc" a much older standard than OpenDocument that never quite caught on? I remember being so jazzed as an OS/2 user that OS/2 Warp 4 would support OpenDoc, then... well, we all know what happened to OS/2 after that.
In any case, blah blah open standards good blah blah down with proprietary crap.
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I honestly believe that over the next 10 years Microsoft will embrace the open standard. They will find way to still make money off it however :P
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Most likely, Office will support OpenDocument format, both reading and writing, but will continue to aggressively develop new features for their own proprietary format that OpenDocument does not provide. In other words, they'll deal with it much like OpenOffice deals with Word format: They will read it (and write it), but not necessarily perfectly, and it won't be their preferred format.
Microsoft has to know by now that basic word processing functionality is far too common and easy to copy to make it a cornerstone of your product line. Word itself is an important part of Office, but most of the "innovation" in Office in recent years has not been in the Word component, but rather in the other pieces, and more importantly in how the different pieces interoperate.
This would be very beneficial since every web page would look the *same* and act the same regardless of the browser use to view it.
What about that?
Even if Microsoft includes support for an OpenDocument format, the only thing it will do is enable MS Word users to read documents from other word processors such as OpenOffice or StarOffice. However, I'm sure MS will still have the default save setting be their proprietary .doc format, which Joe User will automatically choose when he saves his document which someone who only has OpenOffice will try to read. Sure, OpenOffice does its best to render .doc files, but sometimes it still looks disfigured. What MS really needs to do is open up its .doc format.
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Even if MS decided to realize what interoperability actually is, the only reason they would add OpenDoc support to Office is to grab back the millions of dollars they'd lose on MA not buying Office licenses. This is precisely why MA is switching, and whether or not MS can FUD them into going back to Office remains to be seen. I predict promises that will ultimately go unfulfilled.
Hopefully any government bodies which adopt OpenDocument will thoroughly test any suites they do purchase for compatibility (so that they aren't stuck creating 'open' documents which are only able to be opened by products from one company).
However, given the corrupt and incompetent nature of governments, I'm very much not counting on it.
Just like they support Posix -- just enough to be considered in bids by government organizations that mandate the format. There may be tools out there that do it better, but the "Supports Opendoc" checkbox on those contracts don't specify how well that support works, just that it's there. And although OpenOffice might be free, government IT bids will necessarily go through the 3 companies on the planet that feel it's profitable to do that work despite all the paperwork, and they prefer Microsoft products. Don't think to take your independent consulting firm into the bidding process either. You won't even get past the form WXD-423. Assuming you can even find one.
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I never really understood this but how come in this day and age the default format for text isn't html? It's a standard that can be read on tons of devices, it can contain images or text or whatever, why not have word processors use it??
Having a lot of IT friends in Europe and Asia, I know that a LOT of organizations are now using open office as a document standard. Since OO doesn't work 100% well with MS formats, allowing MS Office to be 100% compatable with OO will make the US companies (who are still obsessed with MS Office) more easily work with their OO businesses. If MS didn't support it, then the US companies will begin to use both MS Office and OO - which will start the push for US companies to use OO.
It's a win for MS to do this. They've done this with Java in the past and it proved damaging to the Java world.
Microsoft realizes as much as anybody that the days of desktop-bound apps are swiftly coming to a close. They realize that XML is "the" way that data is shared between applications, a trend that will likely continue for many, many years to come. The realize that being able to easily inject Office-authored content into enterprise-wide, services oriented architectures is critical to their very future.
... the whole Office suite. The Open Document format goes far, far beyond being able to encapsulate word processing documents. Open Document puts the entire office data model into one, clean spec. Open Document is HTML, XML, SMIL, and XForms, all rolled up into one. This is heady stuff. Read it for yourself at as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument .
I think people should be paying more attention to where MS has been heading lately. They are aggresively pursuing a platform of loosely-coupled, network-delivered services, just like everyone else. They have a complete software stack of everything needed from the back office to the mobile desktop. Very few companies have anything close to their breadth and depth in application coverage.
Key to this whole enterprise is a data model that can capture everything people do in the business environment. Well, it just so happens that we have a suite of products that shows us what kinds of data models we need: WYSIWYG text, spreadsheets, databases, presentations, drawing, messenging, calendar
Microsoft gains absolutely nothing by not being able to participate with other services in this larger, connected world. Of course they will always have their own specialized content, and even their own specialized XML version of what Open Document provides. But if the customer base needs compatibility with another XML schema, of course MS will participate. To participate is to make money, and that is something that MS is very, very good at.
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