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Microsoft Claims OpenDocument is Too Slow

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the compared-to-the-blazing-speed-of-.doc dept.

SirClicksalot writes "Microsoft claims that the OpenDocument Format (ODF) is too slow for easy use. They cite a study carried out by ZDNet.com that compared OpenOffice.org 2.0 with the XML formats in Microsoft Office 2003. This comes after the international standards body ISO approved ODF earlier this month." From the ZDNet article: "'The use of OpenDocument documents is slower to the point of not really being satisfactory,' Alan Yates, the general manager of Microsoft's information worker strategy, told ZDNet UK on Wednesday. 'The Open XML format is designed for performance. XML is fundamentally slower than binary formats so we have made sure that customers won't notice a big difference in performance.'"

44 of 553 comments (clear)

  1. I don't know about the rest of you... by BHearsum · · Score: 3, Insightful

    But how fast a document opens is one of my last concerns here.

    1. Re:I don't know about the rest of you... by giorgiofr · · Score: 3, Insightful

      De vulpe et uva.

      --
      Global warming is a cube.
    2. Re:I don't know about the rest of you... by Eideewt · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's pretty important to me. The thing is, I highly doubt that ODF is naturally slower than MS's format. They're both XML, right? How can one take that much longer to parse?

      In fact, the study cited doesn't even refer to "the speed of ODF". It's about OO.o's speed only.

    3. Re:I don't know about the rest of you... by peragrin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No MSFT's formt is a Binary XML, with binary data encased by XML tags. Images are stored directly in the file unlike ODF which is a zipfile, with a subdirectory for images.

      In other words if you don't have an ODF appilication all you have to do is unzip it( a feature found in most OS's these days) and extract the data by hand.

      If you don't have MSFT Word of version x you can never open MSFT's formats. Patents will prevent third parties from implenting it. Defeating the entire point of having a standard.

      --
      i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
    4. Re:I don't know about the rest of you... by Shisha · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is typical FUD! The article is not comparing the speed of OpenDoc vs Microsoft's Open XML. It's comparing the speed of OpenOffice vs. Microsoft Office. It does not make any sense.

      How about if someone with a Windows PC at hand compared the speed of opening and saving OpenDocument vs. the usual .doc to give us some real numbers. (Microsoft's Open XML is not even available to compare speeds!)

      I'm sure Microsoft would very much like to shift the debate from OpenDocument vs. Open XML to OpenOffice vs MS Office. Let's not fool ourselves MS Office has many advantages.

    5. Re:I don't know about the rest of you... by Tim+C · · Score: 2, Insightful

      They're both XML, right? How can one take that much longer to parse?

      Well, for one thing, if one stored the formatting and type face information on an as-needed basis, while the other stored it on a per-character basis, which would you expect to be quicker to parse?

      (Yes, it's a facetious example, but you get the idea)

      --
      It's official. Most of you are morons.
    6. Re:I don't know about the rest of you... by NutscrapeSucks · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Alright, that's pretty much the Maximum-FUD version of the story, stretching the truth pretty far. Hopefully someone articulate will set the story straight and the moderators won't have to reward the loonies.

      Bottom line is that ODF is a better format -- it's a cleaner format and superior for archival purposes.

      --
      Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
    7. Re:I don't know about the rest of you... by suv4x4 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's actually likely they're slightly faster for spreadsheets. For example:

          * they use single-letter tag names, for the most part, to reduce parsing time
          * they remove all strings and put them in a look-up table

      Thing is XML was desgiend to be readable and easy to parse. If you start doing hacks like embedding tons of binary data (OpenXML has images embeded in the XML), using one letter tags and look-up tables, you've essentially a bloated binary format.

      You can call it an XML, it's technically XML, but it really isn't.

      It would be better that Microsoft offers an open binary format, but truly open, patent free. XML is really heavy compared to efficient binary formats. Compressing the resulting XML makes XML formats on par with binary as to size, but that's just faking it: the program will have to decompress it and parse an XML, which is tons harder that directly parsing binary offsets and bits (for a machine).

    8. Re:I don't know about the rest of you... by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You forget the rest of the fable: When the fox realized he couldn't get the grapes, he walked off, saying to himself, "They were probably sour anyway."

      This is arguably analagous to Microsoft saying (about a format they can't control, which has been approved by the ISO as their open XML hasn't yet), "We'd support it but it's too slow"

      --
      ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
    9. Re:I don't know about the rest of you... by Lodragandraoidh · · Score: 2, Insightful

      This point hits the nail right on the head.

      The idea with XML is to have a portable format that can be used by various applications/services (web, editors, and XML backend parsers).

      The power with XML is that not only does it describe a document - but that it can also be parsed by search engines and meta data can be embedded which all taken together - allow your documentation to also serve as a data source for various applications - (tied to RSS feed perhaps, part of taxonomy based search engine etc..) some of which are only now being developed - and many that are just ideas.

      Embedding a proprietary binary format into XML defeats the purpose of this and is, in fact, not 'open' at all.

      More FUD from Redmond - why is anyone surprised by this?

      --

      Lodragan Draoidh
      The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
    10. Re:I don't know about the rest of you... by KonoWatakushi · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Thing is XML was desgiend to be readable and easy to parse.

      XML is a miserable failure on both counts. It may technically be readable, but it is excruciating. Easy to parse, it most certainly is not. About the only thing it has going for it, is that it is an extensible standard.

    11. Re:I don't know about the rest of you... by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 4, Insightful
      It would be better that Microsoft offers an open binary format, but truly open, patent free. XML is really heavy compared to efficient binary formats.

      ...and it can also be written with any program that can read and write text. Right now, today, I can generate valid OpenDocument files with standard Unix command line tools and simple "print" commands in common scripting languages. While that isn't valuable to the average user, it's extremely handy for those of us who want to generate documents dynamically with as little overhead as possible (example: sending quotes based on form input on a website).

      Beyond that, XML is human readable (even if not terribly convenient). I can read well-designed XML documents with any text editor. 100 years from now, I'll still be able to glean the content of OpenDocument files with any program that understands by-then legacy encodings like ASCII. If a binary spec is lost, though, so are the documents written with it.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    12. Re:I don't know about the rest of you... by jinxidoru · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The parent had a lot of good things to say except this comment: The idea that XML-based documents are "inherently" slow is silly.

      No, the idea that XML-based documents AREN'T "inherently" slow is silly. Of course an XML-based document will be slower than a binary document. XML gives a number of niceties, in the form of maintainability and platform-independence, but it can never be made faster than a well designed binary document. That's just the trade-off.

  2. INCITS by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What I didn't see mentioned in this article was the fact that back in March, Microsoft joined a subdivision of INCITS (V1 Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface group within the International Committee for Information Technology Standards). Which is the group that kind of decides whether or not it should be widely adopted. Being ISO certified is one thing but it doesn't mean everyone's going to use it as a standard.

    There was much speculation that Microsoft had joined INCITS with the intent to slowdown or stop the spreading use of ODF and insert their own standard. Sounded like another Microsoft power trip to me.

    I predict that Microsoft will bitch and bitch about ODF and then release study after study suggesting some other patent laden format (probably Open XML) over ODF. This is just the first complaint against ODF--too slow. Perhaps next they'll complain that it's not documented well enough, some of their apps just can't support it, it gives their developers arthritis, it looks too ugly, etc.

    --
    My work here is dung.
  3. If I was an MS shill. by Whiney+Mac+Fanboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If I was an MS shill (like so many in these forums seems to be), I would be deeply, deeply ashamed that the company I pimped myself out for was incapable of distinguishing between a document format and an application.

    (read the 'study')

    But I am sure the shills will pipe up with "easier to use", "people are used to it", "noone forces people to use MS" and other such irrelevance.

    --
    There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
    1. Re:If I was an MS shill. by smallpaul · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Although it is complete true that the distinction between application and document format is key, it is quite possible to design a document format with performance in mind versus merely counting on Moore's law to handle performance issues. My observation is that Microsoft has thought through some performance and reliability details to an impressive degree in OpenXML. The files are sorted in the zip file in the order that they are needed for incremental loading. The zip file is stream decompressed so that a lost bit halfway through the file does not prevent decompression of the beginning. Textual data is earlier in the file than bitmap data both because it is needed sooner and also because a truncated file will still have its text and basic formatting intact.

      Obviously this Microsoft dude is not making any kind of fine distinctions. But I would love to see a careful analysis of the performance and reliability choices made in OpenDocument versus OpenXML if only so that OpenDocument can copy the best (unpatented) ideas from OpenXML. Microsoft has a lot of experience optimizing the performance of office suites and their file formats. I know from experience that those considerations tend to get lost in the standardization process.

    2. Re:If I was an MS shill. by Tim+C · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Honest question - why do you, like so many others, assume that anyone who defends MS (or $otherHatedCompany) is a shill? Is it so hard to accept that other people have different opinions, and see things differently to the majority here?

      I'm not condoning or defending this particular study (although I have to admit, to me it smacks of "Company rubbishes competitor, talks up own product - film at 11"), I'm just getting a little weary of seeing all the calls of troll, shill and astroturfer levelled at anyone with an opinion that differs from that of the collective.

      (And before anyone says it, yes, that goes for both sides, Linux zealots and MS weenies alike)

      --
      It's official. Most of you are morons.
    3. Re:If I was an MS shill. by Amouth · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If you are refering to the refrence of a file format being slow.. then yes there is a diffrence between apps and formats but formats can be slow.

      a prim example is look at compressed archives.. say RAR.. if you look at the diffrence between a normal RAR archive and a Solid RAR Archive. the Solid archive takes all the files and treats them like a TAR ball so that you can compare like data and get better compression.. It doesn't take much longer to create the orginal file than a normal RAR archive which treats each file on it's own basis but when extracting or updateing you have to read through every file before the one you want in the archve when reading. and when writing you have to read all the ones before to evaluate the one you have and change it and then progress and extract and recompress every other file after it instead of just skooting them over when updateing a normal archive.

      both methods use the same compression methods and are of the same type and data types.. one gives you better compression but is and is faster to extract but is horid at random openings and updates where as a normal archive doesn't have the horid side affects but doesn't give you the higher compression or the speed in extracting.

      One thing MS has always been very good at is making MS Word fast. the load times are impressive and the save times like wise. forget about the stability for the moment and give them credit for being fast.. now i know TFA is fud and stupid but there might be a legit argument. MS knows how to make doc files fast, they designed them to be - if ODF wasn't as thought out for speed i could see it being an issue for anyone trying to implement it, and with some implementations there really is no way to make it faster.

      It is just something to think about. While the artical is dumb the argument could very well be legit. people should bash it just because it has MS writen all over it.

      --
      '...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
    4. Re:If I was an MS shill. by ednopantz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      >What possible reason could anybody have for defending Microsoft unless they're on the payroll?
      Here's 3:
      Because we find the slashbots' misinformed, knee jerk, MS bashing tedious?
      Because we find that often, their tools are a good solution for our problems?
      Because we aren't interested in fighting the Linux Jihad?

    5. Re:If I was an MS shill. by Bob9113 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Although it is complete true that the distinction between application and document format is key, it is quite possible to design a document format with performance in mind versus merely counting on Moore's law to handle performance issues. My observation is that Microsoft has thought through some performance and reliability details to an impressive degree in OpenXML.

      Performance optimization should be extremely limited before the product is feature complete and in the hands of at least expert customers, and preferably the real customers. Performance optimization is in tension with programmer friendliness. ODF is zipped ASCII XML with binary embeds (eg: raster graphics) stored in a separate part of the zip - it is really easy to generate documents (I have written a few apps that do it). MS XML is not going to be so easy - inline binary and lookup tables for content. Do you want nicely encapsulated code that can meet the customer's evolving needs without developing bugs (eg: Office's security holes), or do you want a document format that can run on a Pentium 60?

      I work for a very large company that has had a number of teams developing code on several different ideologies for the five years that I have been here. I have been able to see up close the long term cost/benefit of teams that write heavily optimized code versus those that write code that is heavy on OO theory at the expense of performance (and versus those that write code that is neither clean nor fast, which is kind of funny/painful to watch). In the long run, there is no competition - the maintainable code wins hands down for anything that has evolving customer needs (which, except for those that have been cancelled, is every project I have seen).

      The zip file is stream decompressed so that a lost bit halfway through the file does not prevent decompression of the beginning. Textual data is earlier in the file than bitmap data both because it is needed sooner and also because a truncated file will still have its text and basic formatting intact.

      That is the very epitome of inappropriate technical magic put in place by the, "Shouldn't our code handle hypothetical situation X?" people. It makes the code harder to write, understand, and maintain, and it solves a problem that doesn't happen in normal operating conditions. If there's a problem with software or hardware failures during write, do what OOo and MSO already do - keep a backup while the file is open. Once the file is on disk, it is very unlikely to be truncated or bit-flipped unless the drive goes bad (in which case you are going to have a hard time recovering it anyway). If you need your data to withstand drive failures, use an off-disk, off-site, or off-line repository as appropriate.

      --
      Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
    6. Re:If I was an MS shill. by zenhkim · · Score: 2, Insightful

      > And how does any of that have anything to do with the assumtion of slashtrolls that anyone supporting MS for any reason is a shill?

      Uh... you *did* read my comment, didn't you?

      >> I remain morally certain that some people hold legitimate pro-Microsoft opinions, with better or worse justification.

      This is in spite of the fact that the author of the article (Bruce Ediger) has amassed a very damning laundry list of documented astroturfing/shilling incidents on the part of Micro$oft. He's pointing out that it's still possible for perfectly sincere people to express positive opinions about Micro$oft.

      That's not the problem.

      The third time the little shepherd boy cried "wolf!" *he was telling the truth*. Yet no one believed him. His word was no longer trustworthy.

      That's the problem.

      >> Microsoft, or its public relations company(s), have so muddied the water with all the shilling and astroturfing that a neutral observer cannot determine whether a paid shill produced an arbitrary pro-Microsoft opinion as propaganda, or a random person produced it as his or her own opinion.

      The question isn't simply whether or not honest pro-Micro$oft testimony still exists -- it's *whether or not anyone can tell the difference anymore*. Thanks to Micro$oft's long and sordid history of "disinformation" (which includes lying to a judge in court AND GETTING CAUGHT IN THE ACT) many people no longer accept pro-Micro$oft testimony at face value.

      > Oh, wait it doesn't. There's nothing better than watching someone post something they think is on topic and insightful, then poiting out how it's neither.
      >
      > Thanks for the opportunity to do that to you.

      A great many people in the tech community view Micro$oft with disgust and suspicion (including yours truly) -- so yes, Your Honor, we plead guilty as charged! Now I pose a rhetorical question to *you*:

      Whose fault is it? Is it Micro$oft's, for behaving in such an underhanded, dishonest manner? Or is it our fault, the Micro$oft skeptics, for not disregarding the corporation's history of behavior?

      --
      "All hands, BRACE FOR IMPACT!"
  4. It's a fucking WORD PROCESSOR by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's not a game loading complex 3D worlds and sound effects, it's a load of text being displayed on screen. What difference does a few milliseconds here or there make? OpenDocument could be ten times slower and the benefits of an open document format would still vastly outweigh the effects of loading time.

    1. Re:It's a fucking WORD PROCESSOR by fireboy1919 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No, it matters! There's no way anybody could design a markup language that doesn't take any shortcuts in separating content from logic and still be worth it.

      Oh wait...it has been done. By Microsoft too, in fact. IE, Mozilla, and Opera are all capable of much more than ODF and at ridiculously high speeds.

      If you add to that the fact that the MS version actually has more useless features in it (which add to the parse time), I guess this is entirely a lie.

      --
      Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
    2. Re:It's a fucking WORD PROCESSOR by mikeisme77 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's actually not a word processor (as your sibling correctly points out). ODF is simply a format and as such can't exactly be speed benchmarked. The study that this summary points to is about OpenOffice, which utilizes ODF but is not ODF in and of itself. All it takes is some way to more efficiently utilize/load the data. It's in the algorithms, not the format (unless it's a bloated format--which it doesn't appear to be from what I've seen of it).

      --
      Read my blog posts on usability.
    3. Re:It's a fucking WORD PROCESSOR by maxwell+demon · · Score: 2, Insightful
      unless it's a bloated format--which it doesn't appear to be from what I've seen of it

      It's XML. So how can it be a non-bloated format? <gd&r>
      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  5. Haven't they defended that one themselves? by mustafap · · Score: 3, Insightful


    "Any performance limitations now will be resolved as Moores Law continues"

    Not that I like the argument.

    --
    Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
  6. Something important to remember by oldosadmin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Anytime Microsoft complains about OpenDocument, I just remember back to when they were on the Technical Committee at OASIS forming the standard. They then left that committee. If they truly cared about OpenDocument, they would have stayed on the TC and made changes to it.

    I see this as an attempt by Microsoft to slander this format and try to further their own semi-OpenXML format.

    --
    Jason Faulkner
    Eastern US Press Contact
    OpenDocument Fellowship

    --
    Jay | http://oldos.org
  7. Format Slow? by jimktrains · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Since when is a format slow? I could write an interperter for the MS format that is 3x as slow as the ODF. What are they defining as unsatisfactory and on what kind of documents?

    --
    "You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm." - S. G. Colette
  8. False dichotomies by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 1, Insightful
    XML is fundamentally slower than binary formats...
    I hear this kind of speach a lot and it concerns me. It seems to me that basically all data files (or network packets, etc.) are binary formats. What's really in question is what kind of higher-level data structures are imposed on those binary formats.

    ODT XML files are binary files. So are old Word 2003 .doc files. So are Microsoft's new XML files. So it's pointless to claim that a "binary" file format is faster than an XML file format. Perhaps that MS guy meant to say, "XML-based file formats are slower than non-XML-based file formats." At least this is a coherent claim, even if it's not necessarily correct.

    The other big mistake: file formats aren't fast or slow. The algorithms for reading and writing them are (or aren't) slow. Marino Marcich of the ODF Alliance implicitely made this point when he said that different ODF-capable applications have different performances. Perhaps you could, in a fit of brilliant computer science analysis, prove that no reader for a particular file format could parse it as fast as Word 2000 can parse a .doc file, but no one has made that claim.

  9. in RAM? by Lord+Ender · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You only need to write it to disk when you hit "save." When the document is open, and living in RAM, it doesn't even have to be kept in ODF!

    --
    A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
  10. It seems you're trying to load an XML document... by SpinyNorman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If Microsoft are saying that they can't read XML documents efficiently then I guess we have to believe them, but if that's really true it says more about their lack of programming skill than the the difference between reading a binary vs text (or XML flavor #1 vs flavor #2) document on a modern processor.

    If a Windows-capable PC has enough oomph to render clippy in 3-D translucent splendor for Vista, then it's certainly fast enough to load an XML document.

  11. Translation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful
    The Open XML format is designed for performance. XML is fundamentally slower than binary formats so we have made sure that customers won't notice a big difference in performance.
    Translation: Open XML is not a document format as such, it is an XML representation of how office sees the document, this makes it fast for Office, slow for anything else and unreadable for humans. We at Microsoft are really exited about Open XML...
  12. Study = 1 Blogger running one test by Tsu+Dho+Nimh · · Score: 2, Insightful
    One blogger, with one test protocol. Read George Ou's blog on it.

    He had a humongous spreadsheet (a couple hundred megabytes) and was tracking the load time.

    He whined about the memory OO takes, and didn't mention that MSOffice pre-loads its stuff on startup, so you are loafing MSOffice stuff whether you need it or not.

  13. Uhmm... by Egonis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You mean to tell me that parsing a file at an average of 200k of data is too slow on 1.0+GHz processors?

    OPTIMIZE YOUR CODE!

    I know that there are many variables here, but seriously... how slow can it be? I use OpenOffice 2.0 on an Athlon64 3200+ and I have no issues, in fact, I find it much quicker than M$ Office

    1. Re:Uhmm... by 955301 · · Score: 2, Insightful


      I moved my office admin machine to OOO during version 1.x, and that thing is a 633Mhz P3. These guys are fools throwing poo. Nothing more...

      --
      You are checking your backups, aren't you?
  14. Oh noes! by Sj0 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Oh noes! That document took 5.3 seconds to load and 10.2 seconds to save! Sure, I've been working on this document for 20 hours straight, but that's a LONG time to wait!!!

    --
    It's been a long time.
  15. ODF is faster because... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The document you can open will always open faster than the one you cannot.

    So regardless of the speed of any particular implementation the freedom ODF gives us ensures it always will be able to be opened.

  16. Re:For those two people not in the know... by BenjyD · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If that is the case, it's an implementation issue, not a file format one. There's no reason to keep the XML tree in RAM, or to rewrite the whole thing on save.

  17. Oh Right... by Greyfox · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Like performance has ever been a cocnern of Microsoft's. If that were the case, window frames would be handled outside the application so that you could still operate on the window if the application freezes up. If that were the case, Outlook would gather mail in a separate thread so that when the exchange server stops responding I'd still be able to read and compose local email. Or minimize its fucking window. If that were the case, no application could sieze control of eveything else going on at the moment to tell me it's done searching and that I should now click OK.

    In fact, until this very day I didn't even realize that performance was even in Microsoft's dictionary, and like so many other words Microsoft uses I don't think it means entirely what they think it means. Newsflash, Microsoft, "innovation" does not mean "steal other people's ideas." "Security" does not mean "It'll be taken over before you can download the first update for it." And "performance" doesn't mean "the entire fucking system stops for 30 seconds when some application decides to stop handling its windows controls." Now STFU and go back to pushing your poison kool-aid on unsuspecting consumers before Apple eats your lunch.

    --

    I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

    1. Re:Oh Right... by Al+Dimond · · Score: 2, Insightful

      On the other hand, when they came up with Windows NT they implemented the Win32 API in the kernel to avoid the extra context switches required by a more userland-centric GUI (not to mention an X-style client-server model). They traded off flexibility and security (though, to be honest, security is hard to get when you require as much hardware access as GUIs do these days) for performance because they found the performance hit too much to bear, and at the time they just might have been right.

      As some other posters have mentioned, I've seen Windows and Office run quickly on systems where, say, KDE under Linux and OpenOffice wouldn't be nearly that fast. On a P3 in the 400MHz range with plenty of RAM, Office feels just as "snappy" as GVIM.

      In fact, some of the things you complain about in your post may have at one point been helped performance even though on modern hardware they hurt it. That doesn't make them things that shouldn't be complained about, but I hardly think that Microsoft is a company that can be said to not care about performance. They make their stuff perform very well in general on the computers they think it's important to run well on.

  18. Fileformat performaces by VincenzoRomano · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There is something true in that study, indeed.
    Personally I already have seen this kind of numbers, even though I've never minded to measure them.
    Why? Simply put, because it matters very little.
    Compared to Windows 3.11, Windows XP needs 100 times more disk space, 10 times more RAM and 10 times more time to boot.
    Compared MS to Word 5.5, MS Word 2003 if slower and bigger.
    Today I wouldn't revert back to Windows 3.11 and would not choose Word 5.5. What'd be the most important features expected in a document file format? In my opinion:
    1. compactness
    2. openness
    3. flexibility
    No "access performances", though.
    Because the time needed to load a document, when you do real office work, weighs by far less than the time you spend on it while working.
    And when someone sends you a file written with a different version of the software or even with a different software, how much time do you spend to make that file readable and printable?

    --
    Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
    For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
  19. Well... is it $200 slower? by popo · · Score: 5, Insightful


    Because "free" still means more to me than an additional 1.7 seconds.

    --
    ------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
  20. Eh? by belg4mit · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If it it were technically true, so what?
    Why the hell does a text editor need to block the UI while writing to disk?

    --
    Were that I say, pancakes?
  21. Deliberate Confusion Between File and App by mpapet · · Score: 2, Insightful

    MS did this right again.

    They deliberately confuse the application with the file format.

    Psycologically reinforcing the perception that everything in a computer is vertically oriented and "incompatible" unless it comes from our application.

    They understand the immense threat that a viable alterative (file format in this case) presents. PHB gets idea, "If this is iteroperable, gee I wonder what else is?"

    Beautiful.

    --
    http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html