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Trimarco Confirms Mass. ODF Support
Andy Updegrove writes "After Peter Quinn resigned, only two brief statements -- both from spokesman for Governor and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney -- were made to the press regarding whether Quinn's OpenDocument format policy would survive. Both were vague, and both spoke only of the "rules not changing", leaving ODF supporters worried that ODF would be swapped out for Microsoft's XML Reference Schema, even before its expected approval by Ecma. But today, in a private meeting with ITD General Counsel Linda Hamel, Secretary of Administration and Finance Thomas Trimarco assured her that Peter Quinn's departure "will result in no change to the Administration's position on the ODF standard." Trimarco is the public official that will supervise whoever Quinn's replacement will be until after the deadline for the new Massachusetts' policy is to become effective."
"While I know that it is unreasonable to expect companies or even individuals to actively persue open formats"
I do have a company and I certainly want to persue it. While my word processing requirements are rather simple, they are specialized and aren't dealt with by any word processor on the market, so I want to have my own developed. But, of course, my clients must be able to read the documents and I can't ask my customers to deal with X11 etc. So, I do need word processor developing companies to support the OpenDocument format cross-platform (no, I don't turn customers away because of the platform they use). You know: the double-click and install type of software. If the word processors aren't free, I don't mind: If it is not expensive I can give it to the client. This easily makes up for the time and money I lose struggling with the bugs in Word, left alone the productivity I would gain if I had a specialized word processor of my own (with bugs getting fixed when I spot them).
Bert
If governments start to use ODF, MS Office will certainly support the format (either natively or via importing and exporting). It will have to or it will lose revenue. However, I'm sure MS will do what it almost always does with open formats, which is fsck it up just enough to make its output incompatible just enough with other readers to keep those readers from being valid replacements for Word.
Probably the easiest way to do this is to allow importing of an ODF document into native Word DOC format, and then exporting to ODF format. In this way, people will not be restricted to using only features which ODF supports while editing the file in Word. Then, when exporting, they will get a warning message about how features will be lost if they convert this file to ODF. All of a sudden their clip art is grayscale, their title is no longer in 3d and written on a curvature, meta information like comments and 'track changes' is lost or corrupt, etc.
Just enough of a nuisance to keep the status quo and get the user to send their version of the document in Word DOC format.
Not that this really relates to your comment, but OpenOffice.org doesn't have a grammar checker.
I wrote a paper in OpenOffice once... then I took it to a computer with MS Office to run the grammar check. I think the lack has a serious effect on OO's functionality and as a consequence, its usefulness.
AbiWord has one though.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
No, and I suspect Amphenol would be very surprised to hear it as well;
Crap, looks like I've opened a can of worms.
Looking around, the sources I see that are not Amphenol seem to list both names, and sometimes a few others as well.
So I highly doubt Amphenol would be suprised to hear about this. Anyways, it does seem like Bayonet Neill Concelman is the correct name. Thanks for the correction.
Life is too short to proofread.
Well upgrading to the latest version of word will cost a lot more than upgrading to openoffice..
There are about the same level of differences between old and new versions of word, as there are between word and openoffice so any training costs would be very similar..
On the other hand, they don't need to pay for openoffice and can easily install it on as many machines as they have..
Also, the latest version of word no longer runs on older versions of windows (NT4, 9x etc) whereas openoffice does, so upgrading word may also require upgrading windows, at more cost.
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The grammar checker, at least in Word 2002, is pretty crap. I rarely trust its judgement, since it's often wrong.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
I know it misses certain features, but I'm either not using them, or so rarely that I can live without.
A lot of large companies I know are still using Office 2000. It's good enough for them. Microsoft should be worried. Unless they can think up something radical to do with Office, they could lose the dominance of the document standard.
New York City agreed to a proprietary, closed design for their bus/subway card, "MetroCard." Only the company that designed the card knows the information storage format (although hackers have deciphered some of the unencrypted information, like some users' social security numbers!)
The result? As the Village Voice revealed in several investigative pieces in 1997/8, The state (which administers the city's public transportation) is forced to pay an obscene $125,000 for each full-sized MetroCard vending machine they buy. They've lost millions of dollars (money which, for example, might have prevented the recent strike) just because they misunderstood the difference between "proprietary" and "secure."