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Evolving ODF Environment: Spotlight on SoftMaker
Andy Updegrove writes "In this fourth in-depth interview focusing on ODF-compliant office productivity suites, I interview Dr. Martin Sommer, of Germany's SoftMaker Software. Most people know about OpenOffice, StarOffice, and KOffice, the ODF poster child software suites. But there are also other products available as well, including this one, which bundles word processing and spreadsheet capabilities (with more modules on the way), runs on both Windows, Linux and mobile platforms, is designed for home users, is available on-line, is localized in many languages - and is dirt cheap, besides. It's also been selected by AMD for use in connection with its ambitious "50x15" plan, which hopes to connect 50% of the world population to the Internet by 2015. This interview series amply demonstrates how a useful standard - in this case ODF - can rapidly lead to the evolution of a rich and growing environment of compliant products, providing customers with variety, choice, price competition, and proprietary as well as open source product alternatives - in stark contrast to the situation that has prevailed in office suite software for the last many years."
If ODF is the reason for this new plethora of Office products, then why is
"Reading and Writing Word documents" the very first feature they all brag about.
As much as I wish ODF were widely used, the reason OOo, Star and the rest
exist is because of MS Office pricing. And these products do little to erode
the prevelance of the
me a document in anything other than Word. I'd be amazed if it happened.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
How is a file format "slow"?
ODF is a format which can now be relied upon from now into the future. Something not to be sniffed at when archiving (or exchanging) information. Why do you think it's being demanded by government offices all over the world so soon after becoming a draft?
MS lost the war on the 3rd of May 2006. They just don't know it yet. ISO 26300 commoditises the format of word/spreadsheet/database files. It's a lynchpin which has just been pulled from MS Office (and therefore Windows). From now they're going to have to compete on price and merit.
Independants can now take advantage of that without having to run to keep up with the doc format, though that's still going to be an issue for a few years as ODF replaces doc as the standard format. That's the catastrophe, slow at first and accelerating out of control rapidly as the market does what governments couldn't.
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What we have here gentlemen and lady who wandered onto the wrong site by mistake, is a good old fashioned goldrush.
Folks hear tell there's some erosion happening in the Microsoft foothills, and they want to stake a claim.
Next comes a marketplace awash with Wannabe Microsoft Office clones, all trying to eke some small living off the Open format that can be like the holy 'doc', and which they desperatelly hope is a way to get a decent market share. Sorry guys, the junkies aint switching, it's create an entirely new market or die.
I use ODF for *everything*, it's great, but these companies have got to realise, if all they can do is ape Office, then they're going against a battleship in a rowboat.
ODF brings a chance to create something new, a way to store documents in a unified format that means there will never be a place or time when they cannot be accessed. Not just the next few years, but centuries from now.
Microsoft have *never* offered this, unless the entire world plays their tune, and in spite of what you may have been told, there have been area's in computing where microsoft has never been able to venture. Without that they couldn't hope to dominate documents of all types, and you know they'd like to.
ODF can though, it has one huge advantage. Being an Open standard, it can be modified in full public view. Things will only ever be added if they enhance the document format itself, not to suite the perceived needs of a single vendor.
The only way to really exploit ODF is to break away from MSOffice like atributes, and start making something different and new.
First sentance is a bit sarcastic ;)
GF's machine. She wanted access to some spreadsheets of mine and owns office which she normally uses on her laptop. In this case, I was using her desktop.
Needless to say. MS Office was not a workable solution because it didn't play nice with standards. Any number of alternative solutions were available, none of them Microsoft's. Other products that use a proprietary format can at least fall back to accepted standards as an alternative to work in normal environments... Microsoft Office does not. When even the small, open source products provide a trivial solution (or at least make a valiant attempt) to what in my mind is a fairly mundane computing task, I would expect a mature product to be up to the task. Microsoft's suite is not. For my purposes it is an inferior product, as I don't care how well it can intermix fonts and indent my letter, if I can't even read my letters, written to a standard, with their product, then their product sucks.