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."

Comments

Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent

[tomstdenis]

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.

Re:Battleship

[Wylfing]

As soon as they switch from a war mentality to a peace and cooperation mentality things will go a lot smoother.

I think it is almost the opposite. Microsoft has always been at its best when it was not in control of the market, and had to fight for success. I remember very, very fondly Word 2.0 on DOS. That was a thing of beauty, and it came out of the need to compete with WordPerfect and Wang and all the other word processors on the market in those days. Microsoft weren't trying to lock out new competitors in those days, they were participants in a competitive landscape. That is what is missing -- that idea that they are participants in a fray, not the idea that they should enforce the Pax Microsoftia where no competitors are allowed.