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IBM To Support OpenDocument Next Year
An anonymous reader writes "IBM announced this weekend that early next year it will begin supporting the OpenDocument standard in its WorkPlace line of products. They're planning on pushing this widely accessible format and their products in developing nations." From the article: "Rather than create an analog to Microsoft Office, IBM is offering editors for creating documents, spreadsheets or presentations within a Web browser. Documents are delivered via a Web portal and stored in shared directories. Access control and document management tools allow people to share and edit documents with others. Until now, Workplace supported the formats from open-source product OpenOffice, from which the OpenDocument was derived. Workplace Managed Client software also can read, write and edit documents created with Microsoft Office."
What about the rest of the world? Just because the American government will continue to support the convicted monopoly doesn't mean the rest of the world will. IBM is marketting this mostly to developing nations (I'm assuming developing nations who have computers with internet access). To them, saving the money from paying for Microsoft licenses is more then reason enough to swap over. Throwing in support from a large corporation is merely gravy.
But what I'm a bit confused about, is the usefulness of having it work as a web portal. "Good" nations do have trouble with internet connections, I can only assume it's as bad if not worse in developing nations. So why create an online solution, instead of a scaled down simple offline solution? Wouldn't that fit their needs better?
When I was in China a few years ago, I saw people in banks using abacuses. Not to denigrate them for that -- they were faster and more efficient with them than the average North American worker is with a computer. (at least, that's my subjective impression)
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Here's a hint: throwing around buzzwords doesn't indicate you actually said anything.
I promise you the average user does not want to go through a convoluted process to edit their existing docs, they just want to hit Open...
Keep in mind one of the ways MS Word overtook WordPerfect was by supporting the opening of WordPerfect files