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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."
Did Microsoft take the time to clarify exactly which features their Office suite offers that Open and Star offices don't?
Gosh, not that I'd like to insult the integrity of a company with such a spectacular record of interoperability and standards compliance as Microsoft, but I really just can't think of anything obvious that their closed document format offers beyond lack of compatibility with anything but their own products.
While we cannot and should not assume that Microsoft has OpenOffice's best interests at heart (of course they don't) this is still excellent news.
This is extremely significant news. What this means is that, after years and years of MSO having no competition, years after they basically wiped out wordperfect etc... There is now significant competition to Microsoft Office, and they are being forced to acknowledge it.
Hopefully this will mean that Microsoft will start developing some new revolutionary stuff in Microsoft Office instead of just resting on their laurels (sorry but I don't think any version since 6.0 has been that huge of an upgrade compared to going to 6.0). This is good news. We are all going to get better products instead of everyone just copying each other's minor features.
Open Office is here to stay. They have succesfully gotten a multi-billion dollar company to acknowledge them as a serious competitor just like Linux forced them to acknowledge that windows has competition. Microsoft no longer has the monopoly they did a few years ago.
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
I'm genuinely interested to know what features of Microsoft Word "most users use" that are not in OpenOffice or KOffice (which also does ODF).
Nearly all the users in our office are doing standard officey things in MS Office. None of them use features that aren't present in OpenOffice - in fact, hardly any of them use MS Office as anything more than a glorified typewriter with a handy spell checker.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
It is more like Microsoft must provide ODF compatibility or the state government as well as local governments will not be buying Office. Notice that this promise came after they tried to bribe and threaten the state government to back down on its ODF requirement.
Failure to reverse the ODF decision means that no matter what decision Microsoft makes they will lose the Office monopoly. Bill Gates can choose to keep a piece of the action or lose everything.
I am constantly amazed by the sort of mass-delusion people seem to have about MS office, intentionally perpetuated by ms - the idea that ms office is a framework of acceptably workable office productivity applications. Wrong wrong wrong.
Each and every office application is buggy, has gaping holes in terms of usability (for example the Access report designer makes adding columns to data a nightmare - you have to align line elements to the pixels manually, or use the severely clunky grid system), and makes any use beyond bare minimum severely frustrating (my job is to work with Microsoft Office and I'm at expert level with it so I know those only too well).
Microsoft dominate the market, and they have abused it as most public companies in a monopoly would do. The software is incomplete and as far as I'm concerned unacceptably faulty but it's the best out there given that they have had virtually no competition. Now that's changing, they act as if their so-far monopolised customer base would find other software unacceptably bad. It's ridiculous.
Thank God for open source giving people a more usable, workable solution not only for portability's sake but to finally give us an alternative so we can all show ms what is and isn't acceptable. In my opinion it isn't there yet - but it's only a matter of time before Openoffice exceeds MS in terms of functionality I'm convinced of it.
I know I'm probably gonna be modded down for trolling/off-topic/etc. but I feel so strongly about this - please can we all stop acting as if their software is acceptable. In any other industry a company producing such faulty goods would have gone out of business, and rightly so from the customer's point of view. We're only encouraging Microsoft to not bother fixing anything time and time again if we stay complacent, and yet again us customers' will be cheated out of decent software. They could do it. They have very talented people working for them. But they only understand the language of commerce - so let's make the competition strong and force them to change their ways. It's time for change.
/rant
Lets use a real world example. Microsoft Word uses technologies like 'Ink' and as well as even voice structure, in addition to rich media formats
The two examples that you provide are probably used by 0.01% of Microsoft Word documents. I would not call them "real world" examples.
If Microsofts wants to support ODF, and needs more features, all they'd have to do is propose extensions and present a well founded argument for why they should be allowed. They haven't.
In essence, Microsoft likes to whine about this, because it serves their purpose to keep ODF adoption rates down, but they show no interest in doing anything about it.
*sigh* OK, if Microsoft don't implement ODF they are rejecting open standards. If they do, they're embracing and extending.
They can't win, can they?
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
About ten years ago I read an interview by a top executive from Microsoft (Nathan Myrwold, iirc) that most features do not come from customer requests, but from magazine comparisons. When someone wrote an article comparing different office suites they would include a table with tickmarks showing which features were included in each software.
That may have been true way back in the heyday of the nineties, but as you yourself pointed out, that was ten years ago. This is 2006, not 1996, and things have changed. I am confident that there is not a single feature (Excel flight simulator aside... But I hear that doesn't work in recent versions...) that does not get used somewhere by someone to accomplish something they're trying to do at least once in a while, if not every day. Wake up, the nineties are gone, so is clippy (ok, almost gone from Office 2003, and will be gone from Office 2007 for good), as well as your reality. After all, do you really think that the Office team doesn't get enough feature requests so instead they spend their time coming up with worthless features solely for the purpose of adding more checkboxes to the list? And if you really can't come up with enough new features to occupy a dev team for a couple more product cycles, that's the best compliment I've ever heard that you can make to a product team: your product is done, it's perfect, time to retire!
Gotta love that. MS say they will support OpenDoc? Makes a change from last year "Yates reiterated the Microsoft does not intend to natively support the OpenDocument format" - Sept 05 (ZDNet) Also a little confused about this line: "The ODF format is limited to the features and performance of OpenOffice and StarOffice". I thought OpenDoc was created by an open consortium of companies and was based on real world needs instead of an artificial construct to match the features of a particular program. Surely MS' doc format is the only one limited specifically to the features of a particular program? And last, a real doozy: "we will support interoperability with ODF documents ... and will not oppose its standardization or use by any organization."
Hmm... so how come MS spent so much time & effort lobbying Mass. in an attempt to derail their attempts to implement OpenDocument?
I value interoperability much, much more than some newish Word processor features that few know about and almost no-one uses. Even if they're really useful, they can't possibly be moreso than enabling people to exchange documents independent of what word processing software they happen to be using.
Fix the huge problem first and then aim for new features. I'm a little doubtful that a significant amount of the population will start using much of what is added at this point to the very mature product that is an office suite but even if some do, they'll still have the option of using a document format that only Word can read for it and using ODF when they don't need those features.
Nothing new or encouraging about this. Microsoft ruined html, Java, and so on by embedding non-standard features supported only by their software. They're well on the way to embedding Windows dependencies in Windows-generated Postscript and PDF files, too.
Transparent as it is, the strategy is remarkably effective. The masses blame the standards-compliant software for "not working", not Microsoft for having poisoned the standard. The courts will sit on their hands and a couple of billion-dollar buyouts will silence the commercial opposition.
It speaks volumes that Microsoft chose to call the position "Director of Standards Affairs" and not "Director of Standards Compliance".