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."

Comments

Re:BTW, ODF is a file format

[Amouth]

i wish i could post back to my own comments on this last time..

when reading a document like ODF (and anything based on XML) you have to read the whole file in to understand any of it (i know this isn't exact but i don't want to type it all out) with a binary format like a doc file.. what you need first is first.. you can understand a section by jumping to it and geting just that portion instead of the whole thing..

it is the same with saving.. updating portions of the file instead of the whole thing.

ODF is nice in that it is human readable and easy to write code to read and write them BUT it is slow.. you can only optmize so much in code.. if your working with a bad layout you can only go so fast

MS has spent years optimizing the doc format ODF was not thought out for speed.