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What Does the Microsoft ODF Converter Mean?
Andy Updegrove writes "It's been a week now since Microsoft announced its ODF/Office open source converter project - time enough for 183 on-line stories to be written, as well as hundreds of blog entries (one expects) and untold numbers of appended comments. Lest all that virtual ink fade silently into obscurity, it seems like a good time to look back and try to figure out what it all means. In this entry, I report on a long chat with Microsoft's Director of Standards Affairs Jason Matusow, and match up his responses with the official messaging in the converter press release. The result is a picture of a continuing, if slow and jerky, evolution within Microsoft as those that recognize market demands for more openness debate those that want to follow the old way. This internal divide means that the proponents of change need to point to real market threats in order to justify incremental changes. This adaptation by reaction process leaves Microsoft still lagging the market, but has allowed those that favor a more open approach to gradually turn the battle ship a few degrees at a time."
Embrace, extend, extinguish? At least that is what everyone here is going to say, so I don't even see why the editors bothered to post this story. It's slashdot, we always have the same response to news about microsoft.
Philosophy.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
I can keep using microsoft office forever if they support, fully and properly ODF. Actually that is only a semi-funny thought as I actually do enjoy using microsoft office as compared to the alternatives.
Not so good times for Microsoft anymore... :-)
Today I saw this: www.officeviewers.com
"...183 on-line stories to be written, as well as hundreds of blog entries (one expects) and untold numbers of appended comments"
While I'm sure they will come out with a useful tool of some sort, the bottom line is free marketing (IMHO).
...that you can convert ODF documents to and from Microsoft products with a simple plugin, I hope. Otherwise, I will have to keep on converting to .doc whenever I have to send out my CV.
I'll avoid the typical MSFT bashing and move on to a tangent.
When will "professionals" realize that Word is not meant for all documents? It's great for short documents, posters, etc. But for real professional looking documents it's hard to beat a typesetter like TeX [or LaTeX].
This has nothing to do with bashing MSFT and everything to do with bashing the "one size fits all" mentality.
Tom - Who hates writing a book in Word but will do it anyways because its good for the resume.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I feel good about Microsoft's willingness to adopt a more open model even if only for one or two projects. This is quite a step forward for the software giant and I think there will be many more to come.
:-)
That being said, I'll still use LaTeX
Bah, it's only an illusion. Microsoft's behaviour is not an accident, it's by design. This will only last for as long as it gives positive PR (a few weeks at most). Then it will silently fade into oblivion. That will be the sign that the captain is still at the wheel.
It means: there will be yet another way for desk potatos to potentially send me emails that aren't loaded up with some bell or whistle or whatnot that breaks them under anything other than the very newest version of MS Office.
Along with text, RTF, and older MS formatting.
And just like all those other options, they won't use it.
Someone had to do it.
It means Open Document Format...geez, some acronyms are just easy...
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turn the battle ship
And that's the problem. The public perception is still Microsoft as a weapon of war. And it's the perception because that's still how Microsoft operates. Going beyond the open/closed debate they need to stop treating IT as a battleground. As soon as they switch from a war mentality to a peace and cooperation mentality things will go a lot smoother. For as long as they make a fight out of things there will be trouble. Maybe one day they'll learn there's actually money to be made while at peace with others.
Developers: We can use your help.
It means nothing at this point. It's only usable with Word 2007 and .Net 2.0. They are probably just trying to put on a show till all the government pressure is behind them.
Opening an ODF in MS Office will most likely work great. But, there will prob'ly be unexplainable and there-by unuseable and unfixable problems with converting Word/Excel functions to ODFs.
Depending on how Microsoft chooses to implement it, it can be a Good Thing or a Distracting Thing. For example:
- They can throw up dialogs like "If you save in this format your document may look like crap later" (sort of what they do now)
If they stick to previous behavior, the converter will work, but it will be annoying enough to implement that a lot of people and organizations won't bother with it.Imagine if Microsoft Office had the ability to create PDF files from any application without the dependancy on an Adobe plugin? Well, they already proposed that to Adobe and were denied. This is the solution, eventually PDF documents will become obsolete!
I realize that OpenOffice has got an incredibly complex build system, and just sitting down and modifying is more than a simple task. However, it IS open-source, so I was wondering if anyone has considered this possibility:
What about a nice, self-contained version of OpenOffice, but with all of the GUI stuff stripped out, which instead of opening the editor, simply opens a little drag'n'drop dialog box. You select your desired "output format", and drop any document supported by OpenOffice into this window. This would include ODF files, Word docs, RTF, etc. It would then perform the equivalent of "Open" and "Save" in OpenOffice, in whatever format you specified.
Voila, instant converter!
I would think this would be a baby-step towards having a nice universal document converter. It doesn't strike me as totally necessary to have it as an Add-in to Word, at least not immediately.
Yes, this would use OpenOffice's reverse-engineering MSdoc parser for converting to ODF, rather than using Word's native code, but I imagine it would be a good start anyways, and easier to do.
Anyways, I've tried to build OO before and quickly ran out of RAM and disk space, but maybe someone would be up to the task.
and MS in general. Too bad i don't have any mod points.
I used to work for a company now called Financial Campus.
Their stock and trade is Securities and Insurance Course ware. When I started there, they were in the midst of a massive project to migrate from Word perfect to Word for all heir courses.
That's right, they maintained 200 plus page securities courses in Word, running on Windows 95 and 98.
One problem with this was the fact that word always formatted the document for your "Default Printer" which in this case caused things like floating text boxes and graphics to move around the page. Every time someone worked with the files on a new computer they had to start by reformatting the document for their desktop. (Shared printers were a novel concept at the company, which was another part of the problem.)
I tried to get the company to at least try Quark, Pagemaker and the like. It got shot down for two reasons. First, they couldn't pirate them as easily as they could Word 98 and 2000, so it would be too expensive. The second reason blew my mind.
The owner told me: "I never even heard of these things. What do you think Word is for anyway? Do you think they became the biggest company on the planet by selling crap? I'm not shelling out hundreds of dollars for something inferior to Word."
The company owner had a very clear and definitive, "If it's from Microsoft, it MUST be the best product available" attitude.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
does Internet Explorer follow it?
Presumably his title is Director of Standards Affairs because Microsoft's relationship with standards is only ever a quick fling, and someone usually gets fucked.
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Open Office has worked okay for me. I do write occasionally, and I am usually impressed with some feature I find in bits of OOo, that handle the functionality that is expected (when exchanging digital documents).
I sure hope Microsoft makes it easy for others to exchange documents with me.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Wouldn't they use Outlook?
The "existence" of the ODF plugin might really mean the exact opposite of what everyone would like it to be. In fact, it might mean the same thing as "Posix compatibility" or "Kerberos" did.
In other words, big migrations never happen overnight. Let's say that an executive has made a commitment to move his organization over to ODF. If Microsoft were to continue stiffing ODF acceptance, the first action would be to start rolling out and training an alternative tool, like OpenOffice. On the other hand, if Microsoft has announced an ODF plugin is coming, the first action is to stand pat, and wait for it. At this point, 3 things may happen:
1: Microsoft delivers an ODF plugin, and the migration moves onward.
2: The executive moves onward to a new position, and the ODF migration can be safely ignored and/or rescinded.
3: Things continue as-is until the deadline approaches and there's still no ODF plugin. At this point the business can either go into some sort of panic mode or make the first, perhaps of many, perhaps indefinite, ODF migration deadline postponements.
Note that all it takes is the promise of an ODF plugin to defer the whole "ODF threat". It's easy to add "schedule slips" and other such to slow the entire migration plan to a crawl, possibly even to increase its cost until everyone cries "Uncle" and decides that Office licenses until Doomsday are cheaper.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I love this quote from the article
"OpenXML and ODF were created for two very different purposes, and OpenXML is far superior to ODF."
If two things are created for two very different purposes how could one possibly be better than the other? Allow me to butcher a common colloquialism.
The apple and the orange were created for two very different purposes, and the orange is far superior to the apple.
Well, if MicroSoft have a Director of Standards Affairs, then I'm sure it won't take threehundred people years to comply with a simple EU-ruling, now will it ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
It seems to me that there are two camps inside Microsoft: the developers and the management. The developers seem to want to do cool things. They are reaching out to the development community. (With open source, coding4fun, blogging, channel9, etc). But the management is still trying to hold on to the old ways and the cash cows.
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This is probably going to be modded troll or flamebait, but I really dont mean it to be. In my social circle of geeks there are those who are ODF nazis. They refuse to send me documents in anything but ODF and it pisses the hell out of me. I have held my ground for a while because I, for various reasons, use MS office. Now both sides can be happy. Thank Goodness.
"you .. write .. using LaTeX's markup language and 'compile'.. look at it in xpdf, find the layout/grammar bugs, and repeat."
davecb5620@gmail.com
Heh. That reminds me of something -- For a while I edited Randall Schwartz's monthly Perl column for Web Techniques magazine, and he submitted every single column in PerlDoc format. Even funnier was that, before I got there, nobody even knew WHAT it was. They just told me, "He sends it in some weird format, so you'll have to do a little extra work." What that meant was that they would regularly strip out all his formatting and start over from scratch, using his plain text document as a starting point. Alas, there was no PerlDoc-to-Word plug-in.
Breakfast served all day!
Centralization breaks the internet.
Right here, right now: Let us forever more call what Microsoft refers to as "Open XML" as "MS XML."
It's the sensible thing to do.
Insert witty sig here.
Microsoft may honestly deliver a reasonable ODF converter, or they may create a sham project in an attempt to get the item on their checklist without actually delivering anything usable.
Whichever it is, it doesn't really matter. Microsoft Office will have good support for reading/writing ODF, if not from Microsoft, then from third parties.
Whether Microsoft's converter works and is usable will tell us something about where Microsoft is heading; but for figuring that out, we'll have to wait until the converter and the new version of MS Office are actually out.
Largely, I think people split up into LaTeX vs. word processor camps along much the same lines as they split into the GUI vs. command-line camps. I think everyone decides with their gut on this, but then tries to concoct arguments so they can seem rational. But what I always encounter in these debates is the tacit assumption that willful ignorance trumps knowledge, and any option that requires learning and planning loses out to the lowest common denominator. People don't want to learn, they resent the implication that they should, they consider you arrogant and elitist for suggesting it as an option, and they'll go to great lengths to convince themselves that the easy, non-thinking, non-learning option is just better. Now, I use LaTeX (and the command line) sparingly, don't know either very well, and I'm all about the easy option. However, I know that I'm lazy, and that me being lazy does not mean that muddling around in OpenOffice is really better, either for the product or for my long-term convenience. I use OpenOffice for my school documents, but I really wish I had an impetus to learn and use LaTeX more. Except for tables. Ugh, the tables!
When they quit acting the same old way, I'll quit telling you about it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Note that Microsoft is also patching old office versons to output the new file format, so this should improve your situation. Time will tell I guess. It's always hard trying to walk in the opposite direction to the majority of the crowd, but it's a choice we have.
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