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."

Comments

Utilize isn't the same as support

[Reality Master 201]

It's one thing to read/write a document format through a filter.

It's another to utilize the format, i.e., as the underlying default storage format.

Re:Utilize isn't the same as support

[Deviate_X]

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.

Re:Utilize isn't the same as support

[Tinidril]

OpenDocument has next to 0% market share

Maybe this is true in your backyard, but globally that is not the case. For one thing, you can count the state of Massachusetts as one big customer, and open office is rapidly becoming popular in may overseas circles. I know I read that the open-office format is actually the most used format in the world when you consider that users of MSO are fairly equally divided among the various versions. I'm to lazy to look it up now, but it certainly seems plausible. And if its not the case now I expect it soon will be. Every office sweet that is not MSO is, or soon will be, supporting ODF as the default. It is also a given that the ODF formats have a much larger market share than Microsoft's XML format that hasn't even been released yet.

OpenDocument Format is a legal mine-field.

Microsoft had to pay Sun $2B because they intentionally created a broken implementation of Java in order to break the "Write Once Run Everywhere" nature of the platform. As a condition of calling their product JAVA Microsoft was required to support the standard properly, and they _chose_ not to. If there had been incidental compatibility issues that MS had shown an interest in resolving that would have been an entirely different matter. Instead they chose to ignore their obligations because they believed the legal bills would be less than the cost of allowing platform competition.

I find the suggestion that ODF is a subset of the MSO formats to be either ignorant or misleading. Many of the most demanding office users were heavily involved in the creation of the OD formats. For instance, Boing was very involved because they have unusually complex needs that they need addressed. They have to manage some of the most complicated documents in existence, and they have to be able to access those documents properly 30 years down the line.

If Microsoft was so concerned that there are important features missing from ODF then they had ample opportunity to bring that up in the standards process, but they chose instead to be uninvolved because they saw it as unimportant. ( That is their claim, but more likely they saw it as enabling open competition which they hate. )

Any features that MS sees as missing from ODF formats are most likely there because MS has a history of creating the data formats to serve the needs of the code instead of the needs of the data. In an inter-operable world the data must come first, but MS is not interested in an inter-operable world. Letting your data be defined by your code is a much faster way to write software, but it is one of the main factors that keeps one version of MSO from being able to properly read data from other formats. Its also the reason that MSO has had such a hard time converting to other formats like HTML.

OpenDocument is a version 1.0 Spec

I hope your not saying here that MS doesn't want to support a document format unless it knows that the format will never change. First of all, the MS track record for backward compatibility with their own older formats is well known to be piss poor. Second, in the history of computers I don't think there has ever been a document format more complex than ascii text that hasn't changed. But open formats like HTML have a much better track-record with backwards compatibility than proprietary formats ever have.

Microsoft doesn't want ODF to succeed, because they don't want to have to compete on an open playing field. That is the driving reason behind everything they are doing in this arena. Their first choice would be to not support the format at all, but if that is not an option then they want to support it in a way that makes it appear broken or inferior. Given that goal, it seems that supporting the standard through a third party set of tools with only import/export instead of native support is the way to go.

Re:Utilize isn't the same as support

[smallpaul]

* 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).

That's just silly. Microsoft has hundreds of import/export filters with varying levels of quality. Nobody would ever implement import/export if it were possible to be sued by standards bodies or their member companies. Why hasn't anyone sued them over Word's horrible HTML? Ths Java situation was totally different. Java was not (and is not!) a standard. Microsoft was only allowed to redistribute Java because they entered into a conract with Sun. They violated that contract. Therefore they were sued. Half-assed OpenDocument support is not even remotely comparable. Half-assed OpenDocument support would be simply Microsoft doing business as always.

How to get the State of MA to upgrade

[lseltzer]

You know, it's kind of clever: Support it, but only in the new version.

Re:How to get the State of MA to upgrade

[ThogScully]

This doesn't mean that MA can't switch to OpenOffice if they think it's the better solution for them. This does mean that they can use ODF files and *expect* everyone else to be able to open them. If someone can't because they're running Office, then they can just upgrade. This puts the expense of using Office and upgrading Office on the people who are forcing it down everyone else's throats. I don't use Office, but I do recognize a problem with exchanging documents with those who do. I generally save as Doc files for them and try to verify on another person's machine that it will open correctly. It's good to know that I may be able to just send them ODF files from now on.
-Neil

Re:How to get the State of MA to upgrade

[jacksonj04]

I know this is going to sound bizzare, and possibly get me flamed into oblivion, but what if this is a genuine change in the way MS is thinking about business?

For a long time MS has been around locking people in to their own formats and systems, but I think with the advent of the internet MS has realised that the most money lies in integrating with existing systems. Having well designed products which can talk to everything else is a big plus, they have brand recognition to begin with, and even if everything talks in open standards Microsoft can still sell their 'solution'. SharePoint, Exchange, Active Directory, Outlook, Office and Windows is currently a tightly integrated system, what's to stop MS making it use open standards and basing their business model on the fact that they can then sell the entire bundle to companies, with a unified administration system (Group Policy can remain proprietary, even though everything can talk to everything else using open standards). I know businesses would rather pay a large MS licence fee for a solution which is easy to look after than use 'free' components and pay someone to maintain them all and make sure they can communicate properly.

Re:How to get the State of MA to upgrade

[mrchaotica]

Well, the only problem I see with that theory is that, as far as I know, MS still uses proprietary formats whenever they can get away with it. Although it would be nice to think that they're turning over a new leaf, I think the evidence suggests only that they're grudgingly capitulating to Massachusetts' desires.

Call me when you see a large scale shift to open formats (i.e., when they abandon MS XML entirely, switch to XUL instead of XAML, stop working on that "PDF killer" I've heard stories about, drop Windows Media file formats and codecs for MPEG and H.264, etc.

Support

[TechJones]

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.

PDF Support?

[Rik Sweeney]

The company just announced support for PDF

I imagine that this will add extra features to PDFs which Adobe's (or anyone elses) Reader won't be able to handle.

Except Microsoft's Reader, obviously.

ODF Is Sweeping Through Governments

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has no choice. Either they will support the format, in a usable form, or be increasingly left out of government, city/state/country level, contracts.

I am surprised at how quickly ODF is becoming a must have feature. It makes perfect sense of course, but I think so many people have gotten so use to the "Microsoft is always the winner" mentality that they are having a hard time imagining that anyone would mandate an open format for documents.

Re:ODF Is Sweeping Through Governments

[ronanbear]

OpenOffice.org are doing well. They have won this battle. M$ have tried to crush ODF by saying that they won't support it and tried to muscle customers into accepting their format. Now someone has stood up to them and they know that MA will just buy StarOffice they have to move onto phase 2. They don't care (much) about the money of the MA contract. What they don't want is StarOffice to gain important market share and extra development cash. Once that happens other governments will follow. M$ will give MA full OpenDocument support. But don't go thinking that the version of Office 12 you get with your Dell or on the shelf at Best Buy will have it. M$ will try and win the MA contract with Opendocument support but that doesn't mean they are gonna give that feature to everyone. Even making it a feature that you must install additionally from the 2nd CD would be enough to put most people off. M$ haven't given up the war. In fact they still think they will win.

Microsoft playing catch-up

[Anonymous Coward]

They've heard that Open Office is beating them in bloat, and are scrambling to get back on top.

Good, because OO's import filter sucks

[elrous0]

Hald the documents I created come out horridly screwed when I try to go back and forth between Office and OO. Text boxes get resized, floating graphics end up all over the place, graphics lose their transparent color, etc.

It would be nice to have a way to go back and forth (between work and home, for example) with consistant results.

-Eric

Quiet

[squoozer]

...quietly engaging a French company...

Not very quietly it would seem.

Looks Like Conversion Is One Way

[canfirman]

By looking at the SourceForge project description it says, "This project aims at providing a plugin for Microsoft Word 2003 XML to open OpenOffice XML documents." It doesn't say that it converts Word XML format to OpenOffice XML format. So it's really not a true converter, because it won't allow you to save back into OpenOffice format.

I find it interesting that Microsoft will support other document formats (such as WordPerfect - is anybody using that anymore?) but not OpenDocument.

Re:Looks Like Conversion Is One Way

[julesh]

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?

Re:Platform what?

[HawkingMattress]

Yep, it's totally platform independant as it will run on 9x and NT !

Up to their old tricks?

[mrogers]

The problem with an extremely liberal license is that it can be embraced and extended. The best way for Microsoft to kill OpenDocument would be to implement it perfectly, wait a year, then add lots of cryptic, undocumented extensions that are only supported by MS Word. When you receive an OpenDocument email attachment you'll be in the same position you're currently in with .doc attachments - it might work, it might not, and you'll never be sure the document's supposed to look the way it looks on your computer, unless you're running Word.

OASIS (the consortium behind OpenDocument) is doing its best to avoid licensing issues and legal arguments, which unfortunately seems to mean you can write whatever you want and call it OpenDocument, or at least "OpenDocument-based" or some other form of weasel words.

Not "Open Office XML format"

[John Hasler]

It isn't the "Open Office XML format". It's the OASIS Open Document Format. Microsoft is attempting to confuse the issue by deliberately confounding "Open Office" and Open Document".

Re:Not "Open Office XML format"

[John Hasler]

ODF Myths

Denial

[debilo]

Apparently, Microsoft has already denied this.
I got that on OSNews.com yesterday.

Matter of time

[smallguy78]

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?)

The first E

[Johnny Mnemonic]

The first "E" in "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" is "Embrace". We are here.

Re:Have you opened ODF in a text editor?

[shis-ka-bob]

Unzip the odf. (rename it filename.zip and doubleclick). Now, look at the XML file named content.xml

Well that's MS's own damn fault

[BobPaul]

* OpenDocument Format is a legal mine-field. As stated previously OpenDocument is a subset of MsOffice format,

Microsoft is ALSO an Open Document committee member (and has been for many years). They've had ample opportunity to ensure that the OpenDocument format supports everything that they need it to.

Since OpenDocument has been painstakenly crafted as Extensionable XML, there should be no problem with Microsoft Extending the standard to add support for anything that is not currently included, provided they do so using Pure XML without any of the binary nuggets they've included in their own XML format. If they extend the format properly through the OpenDocument committee, then their updates can become part of the standard rather than being a fork (which definately would give Microsoft a lot of flak.)

Licensing on the ODF is actually very liberal and Sun, the only IP owner for anything related to the ODF, has already released an IP claims relating to the use of ODF. This is something they can't sue Microsoft over anymore.

--
Bob/Paul