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MS Office 12 To Utilize ODF?
J. Random Luser writes "Groklaw is carrying a story about Microsoft quietly engaging a French company to develop Open Document filters for Office 12, due out mid-2006. The SourceForge project claims to be an import filter for MS Office, and that is how the developer describes it. But ZDNet quotes Ray Ozzie as talking about an export filter from MS Office, and this french blog takes Ozzie at his word. Ostensibly the tarball unpacks as OpenOfficePlugin, and SourceForge has the WindowsInstaller.msi listed as 'platform independent'." From the ZDNet article: "Ozzie told me that supporting ODF in Office isn't a matter of principle. Microsoft isn't opposed to supporting other formats. The company just announced support for PDF, and he added that the Open Office XML format has an 'extremely liberal' license."
That's exactly the point. I know someone who was involved in the pitch to the Massachusetts government, and it's very hard to explain that distinction to someone who just wants to write documents and send them to other people. At least now the argument of what their users have on their computers is slightly weaker (except for the fact that people still use Word 97, so it's bound to be an issue for years whether you have a new enough version). But the point isn't that this could break Microsoft's stranglehold - that's just a lovely side effect. The point is that Microsoft hedged its bets that every would use Microsoft - and they almost all do, so it was a good bet - but it could absolutely lead to some scrambling for a solution if these type of moves to Open formats takes off.
Without the politics, it's 100% the right move because everyone should share the same format and it shouldn't matter what system you're on. Unfortunately, you can't decide this without the politics because of the situation of Office products and their history in everything from homes to businesses to government.
It would be nice to have a way to go back and forth (between work and home, for example) with consistant results.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
check this page : http://www.clever-age.com/references/interne-plugi n-openoffice-pour-word-424.html
WordPerfect - is anybody using that anymore?
Yes. It's still popular in the publishing industry. Many writers are still using WP5.1. It does everything they need... why would they want to upgrade?
There's a small problem with this idea: It's true that, if you want your office suite to be the dominant office suite, it helps to support other formats. However, if you're already the dominant office suite, and you want to maintain your monopoly, you might not.
Everyone supporting loads of formats is good for the consumer, because it makes your data more portable and encourages competition among software vendors. It's particularly good for the underdog, because it's hard to steal customers from your competition if you can't interoperate with the dominant software on the market. However, it's dangerous for the guy making the dominant software because it makes it easier for someone to switch to something else. Suddenly, your dominant position isn't as much of an advantage as it used to be, and you have to compete with improved products and better features.
So, yes, especially given Microsofts anti-competitive history, it would be surprising that they'd support ODF. The only reason that it isn't surprising is that the lack of ODF support means that Massachusets has effectively banned Microsoft Office from being used by government agencies.
Wrong. The MS Word document format has not changed since Word 97 for the express purpose of ensuring that 90% of common formatting attributes were preserved between Word 97 through 2003
.doc files only several times in the past few years, but still, I don't recall a single case where at least the formatting wasn't completely screwed up.
No. I am a lucky fellow who was forced to have anything to do with
A recent (~2 weeks old) example:
my boss received a ~4MB file containing ~40 pages, each with a screenshot and some text below. But, if you tried to even save the same file without making any modifications whatsoever, the resulting file got a random size anywhere between 2MB and 218MB -and- all the images were resized to a tiny size. I couldn't tell what could influence the file size, but the size the images were resized to depended on which printer was set as the default.
When I tried to import the doc on my box, both OO and AbiWord were able to read it just fine -- but, as you can expect, saving it and reading back in Word didn't help the tiniest bit.
Being a C programmer/sysadmin, I don't produce any formatted documents, but if I was forced to do anything beyond HTML, something tells me it would be a good idea to refresh my memory of TeX.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Reading http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200510261 95537674 describes how the body responsible for advising UK schools on IT policies (BECTA) is planning to force schools to
"...use software that saves files in open formats (see pages 25 and 26).".
Following from this, it probably won't be long until government bodies follow suit in the UK, and the trend spreads from country to country.
Microsoft will then definitely be forced to support the OpenDocument standard, or someone will get very rich writing plugin to do so.
Office vs competition will then be down to features and useability rather than format tie-ins (Microsoft purposely tieing people to their products surely stems from a satanic Sales/Marketing department rather than evil developers).
If the competition comes down to UI/useability I think Star Office and OpenOffice are a long way behind MS Office, both tending to looki like cheap shareware applications at the moment. Which then leaves the doorway open for a company to take OpenOffice, pretty-fy it and sell it for a vastly reduced amount compared to Office (unless the license restricts this?)
Nothing costs nothing
"WordPerfect - is anybody using that anymore?"
Lawyers. Giant teeming armies of lawyers. It sounds like the profession has to a fair extent moved to Word, but it took a while, they held on for a long time, they have GIGANTIC archives of Wordperfect docs, and they still use it a lot.
... they gonna use a fully *compatible* implementation of ODF?? *LOL* Then you really don't know microsoft at all...
As we all know (example: Java), microsoft never had problems "implementing" some non-ms-standards. But usually they just become *a bit* incompatible for no reason and then it becomes a ms-standard and the original creator has nothing to say anymore...
Maybe they get sued, but this does not change their behaviour because they achieve to even earn money from it. (You know what their "punishement" was for the java-case: Give some scools "free copies"* of windows and office. [read: hook kids to microsoft as soon as possible. earn the cash later.])
* to me this is a tautology, because a thing that is copyable without effort always is free by definition.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Then after a few people start announcing plugins and the OASIS thing starts to build some momentum, they approach a third party to do it? Are they not capable? They are one of the wealthiest companies in the world with a proven track record of delivering software of good quality.
Again, instead of supporting it, it will be some kind of 3rd party bolt-on, possibly with shoddy performance and maybe only doing a subset of the desired work. Probably at a substantial extra cost. They just blatently don't want to play ball with others, it's that simple. I'll place money on this, their OASIS support will be substandard and boardline unusable and they will finger the format for it rather than their lack of desire to allow for anyone else to coexist.
They did it with Office 2004 for Mac. On my dual g5, 4GiB of RAM, with most of adobe's type foundary installed (it's a design machine for my wife) it takes minutes to start up excel or word because it does this "font optimization" every time. I don't even know what it does, I think it might just be a dead loop because it sure as hell doesn't seem to improve font performance and it has nothing to do with what fonts are actually used by a document. None of the adobe apps seem to have that problem. OASIS support in office will be no different, you'll only be able to save spreadsheets with simple calculations (or maybe they'll just export it to text) and you'll only be able to use times roman or helvetica fonts in text docs; and it'll take 5 minutes to save or load something, with several extra clicks to actually do it ('Are you sure you want to save to this substandard format that lacks features?' 'Are you really really sure? You won't be able to undo changes you made 2 weeks ago' 'Are you still sure?' )
Maybe this will be one of the best things that happens, as Sun and Google put some energy in to openoffice and as 2.0 rolls out and support continues to build, I wouldn't be surprised to see some firefox like projects spin out. You get a lot of eyes on some of the performance stuff (which isn't that bad unless you really opening and shutting the app down a lot, it's quite usable) and I bet that stuff starts to get fixed. They start to get some collaboration built in to it and then there isn't anything that you'd get from office that you can't get for free, on most platforms.
The OpenOffice formats support only a subset of the funtionality in Word format - therefore there is emphasis on Import. But that does not exclude Export.
Microsoft has a number other reasons why not to support OpenOffice file formats directly however, here are three:
* OpenDocument has next to 0% market share (when opendocument has market share comparable to PDF, or HTML or RTF support considerations should be made)
* OpenDocument Format is a legal mine-field. As stated previously OpenDocument is a subset of MsOffice format, any attempt my MS to Extend the format, or any perceived crippling of output (conversion from ms->opendocument --- downgrade) will leave Microsoft wide open to billion dollar anti-trust, anti-competitive, lawsuits from all the other members of the OpenDocument committee - please remember Ms had to pay Sun Micrososystems 2Billion US (Sun is also OpenDocument committee Member).
* OpenDocument is a version 1.0 Spec and hence it is a moving target, and will probably go thru several revisions before the next Version of Ms office is released.
For the above reason it is appropriate to leave the implementation of OpenDocument support in Ms Office versions in the hands of small third-party developers.
MS Office also had support for WordPerfect files. If you want to have the leading Office software you must have support for your competition. OpenOffice has support for Word documents so it comes as no suprise that MS would do the same.
Hello, my name is Rudimentary Software Marketplace Strategy and Economics. It's good to meet you.
Let me tell you a few things about myself, for I am a complex, varying sort.
For instance, if I'm an underdog trying to get into a new market, then I'll do everything I can to advocate and embrace "openness", be it support for all types of files, standardization, and so on. I'll beseach the big boys to open up, for the good of all consumers, and allow for a dynamic, competitive marketplace.
For instance let's say I'm an underdog in the instant messaging marketplace, I might say "Come on everyone, let's just be friends and work with open standards!".
Now if I'm successful with this scheme - hopefully really successful - by making it easy for other people to switch to my product, then I move to stage 2 - lock in. This is where I start doing whatever I can to ensure that someone else doesn't do to me what I did to them. I'll embrace and hide behind proprietary standards, I'll make it a bitch for people using different clients, not only technically but via FUD, and I'll constantly move the target to ensure that no one can catch up. Maybe I'll add a "conversion screw-up-ifier" to make sure that the user of more standard formats is an imperfect, painful experience.
Wow, two references to religion in the same paragraph. I guess we are supposed now see that the ODF movement is just religious idealism fostered by anti-Microsoft fanatics. Its funny that when Microsoft declares the future of XML office documents to be the yet incomplete MSO XML you believe them without question. But when a major customer declares that they will only accept ODF you become a skeptic. I think you have a little religion yourself.
Microsoft is not in business to give a new format a free-ride into ubiquity.
I never have, and never will accuse Microsoft of not acting in their own best interest. But as a customer, I have interests of my own. If MS, or any other company, chooses not to align themselves with my interests than I will not use their product.
Nearly all the members of the OpenDocument collective are Microsoft enemies and many of them are know to have launched lawsuits against Microsoft in the past. Some have even done this multiple times.
...
The members of the OpenDocument format group should be forced to signed a "NO Lawsuits" contract before its supported in Office.
Some companies have competitors and others have enemies. MS has enemies because of their long history of business practices that are designed to prevent competition, not win in the marketplace. Your suggestion of a "NO Lawsuits" contract would be ridiculous in any case, but especially so in light of Microsoft's history. No business would ever sign such an agreement, and in fact I don't see Microsoft stepping up to the plate to do so with their new "open" XML format. Your ignoring the fact that in almost every case MS lost the suit, or settled because they knew they would. MS has always been willing to break the law if they believe the benefits outweigh the penalties
One of the major charges brought against Microsoft vs. Sun in the JAVA case was the fact that Microsoft broke the Java potential by "intentionally" only supporting version Java 1.0.
That is a clear red herring, and does nothing to change the fact that MS _intentionally_ broke their agreements concerning Java, and _refused_ to remedy the situation by bringing their implementation into compliance. Sun wasn't looking for a $2B award from Microsoft when they created Java. They wanted a ubiquitous development platform to provide true competition in the software marketplace. Microsoft was willing to do anything to stop that from happening. Your focusing on one small aspect to avoid looking at the big picture.
Additionally what you are asking is for Microsoft to support and chase a format already widely discussed and described on the web as incomplete and broken.
I am not asking MS to do anything. I want open formats for Office Documents, and I don't care if MS has anything to do with that or not. What I will not do is fall for the argument that MS is rejecting OSF on technical grounds. MS will compete when it has to, but it will first do whatever it can to prevent competition from ever taking place.
I don't think there is a single file standard that has not be criticized by someone as being incomplete and broken, but in fact complaints about ODF have been really few. I don't recall seeing complaints anywhere that the standard is broken, and the only complaints I have heard about it being incomplete relate to the specification of spreadsheet formulas. For the most part this hasn't been a problem, but to address this concern efforts have already begun to turn the existing de-facto standards into a formal standard. Microsoft has made no effort to make their "standard" anything other than de-facto. (De fact
XML is the best data format; unless your data needs to be read or written by a human or a computer.