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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.
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
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. --
It speaks volumes that Microsoft chose to call the position "Director of Standards Affairs" and not "Director of Standards Compliance".