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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."
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.
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?
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
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.