ODF Plugins and a Microsoft Promise of Cooperation

Andy Updegrove writes "Last week, the Massachusetts Information Technology Division (ITD) issued a Request for Information (RFI) on any plugins that might be under development to assist it in migrating from a MS Office environment to one based upon software that supports ODF. The RFI acknowledges the fact that it may be necessary or advantageous to see some of the code in Office in order to enable the types of features that the ITD is looking for. Conveniently, Jason Matusow, Microsoft's Director of Standards Affairs, had this to say on the occasion of ODF's approval by the members of ISO and the IEC: "The ODF format is limited to the features and performance of OpenOffice and StarOffice and would not satisfy most of our Microsoft Office customers today. Yet we will support interoperability with ODF documents as they start to appear and will not oppose its standardization or use by any organization. The richness of competitive choices in the market is good for our customers and for the industry as a whole." Presumably such support will include helping the plug-in developers that will assist Massachusetts migrate from a MS Office environment to one based upon ODF-compliant office productivity software."

Comments

"Microsoft promise"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft promise".. you're kidding, right? Since when has Microsoft ever kept a promise?
The sad part is that lots of people are going to believe they will.

Re:let me be the 1st to say ...

[pallmall1]

*sigh* OK, if Microsoft don't implement ODF they are rejecting open standards. If they do, they're embracing and extending.

If Microsoft would not pervert the standard it would be alright. The problem is that Microsoft has twisted and attempted to extinguish every standard it "embraces." Yet some still make the cry of "oh, poor, misunderstood Microsoft, they can't win, can they?"

Regardless, Microsoft won't honor it's statement to support interoperability with the OpenDocument standard unless they can do so by forcing any interoperation to first include conversion to the (still unapproved) MS XML standard. That way, Microsoft could still force any document opened in Office to use the closed, proprietary Office binary encoding system that is referenced in every MS XML document. Microsoft thereby controls any ODF extension used in MS Office, and MS wins.