Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Wins Industry Standard Status for Office
everphilski writes "The International Herald-Tribune reports that Microsoft has won industry standard status for Office. EMCA International, a group of hardware and software makers based in Geneva, approved the MS file formats with only one dissenting vote - IBM. IBM backs the OpenDocument standard, which was approved by the ISO in May of this year." From the article: "Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president for open source and standards, called Microsoft's Office formats technically unwieldy - requiring software developers to absorb 6,000 pages of specifications, compared with 700 pages for OpenDocument. 'The practical effect is the only people who are going to be in a position to implement Microsoft's specifications are Microsoft,' Sutor said."
IBM is worse than Microsoft. They have done far more to stifle competition and the "Open Document" format is just an extension of this.
Look at the history. Look at the facts. Open your eyes.
Because that's a biased point of view only held by one member of the voting council which has vested interests in the format that lost ?
MS's format is technically superior, and produces smaller file sizes because of the compression algorithms. It is also going to be more widely used because despite the best efforts the OSS community Open Office just can't compete with Office 2007 in the work place. And yes, before I get slammed as a troll, I'm not saying there are no downsides to the MS format... but it does allow for more features.
The big downside (for slashdotters) is that Open XML is a MS product and not "owned" by the Open Source community. People on this site hate it, not because it's bad or worse than ODF, but because it's MS's creation.
For you anti-ms people i have a question, a hypnotical really. If you had cancer and were on your death bed and "Satan" creates a cure for cancer, do you take it? Your only option is die or take the cure. But the devil made it... what do you do?