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Novell Releases OO–OOXML Translator
Tookis writes in with news that Novell has released an Office Open XML (OOXML) translator for OpenOffice.org. The article argues that, though this move may represent a nail in the coffin of the franchise known as Microsoft Office, and therefore a Good Thing, what is truly needed is a fully supported Evolution on Windows.
I think the article is confusing larger memory usage with greater efficiency.
what is truly needed is a fully supported Evolution on Windows.
How about an (ABI compatable) Exchange-equivilant for linux?
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
It's really comforting to know that there are such men as this -- such utter, bigbrained geniuses who deign to drop us mortals a few crumbs of the great bread of awesome.
Sarcasm aside: I am sick to death of people going, "I want this for my computer, therefore everybody else wants it too, and therefore the only rational course is what I say." Have you considered asking the users what they wanted? Instead of assuming that "the users" want "full-featured desktop apps", do you think it might be worthwhile to check with them if that's true? Maybe they're already using gmail and love it. Maybe they don't even know about Google Calendar. Maybe they haven't ever heard of Zimbra.
Why should I, as J. Random Developer, bust my hump porting Evolution to Windows (which I couldn't do anyway as I know zip about Windows programming) just because this clown says what's good for him is good for everyone else?
"Honey, it's not working out; I think we should make our relationship open-source."
Nail in the coffin? Pretty bold thing to say about Microsoft Office. OpenOffice is a great, free product, but IMO it's no replacement for Office in a never-look-back sense. Yes, they should keep putting pressure on MS regarding open formats, but I'm not about to switch from Office 2007 after my [wonderful] experience with it so far.
Techies love to complain about things like the ribbon, but everyone I see actually use it loves it.
MS Office isn't going anywhere. Neither is OpenOffice. And apparently neither is the Drama Llama.
Turning coffee into code.
I fail to see how this can be considered "a nail in the coffin"? Not even the article really talked about what Novell releasing this would do, and why. Am I missing something?
Oh fuck no.. How about a fully supported version for Linux first?
If they could fix some bugs, it wouldn't be such a steaming pile of shit.
The stranglehold is in the calendaring AFAIK.
Insert
Do you remember the classic IE vs netscape battles back in the 90's?
Microsoft came out with a fast release and quick delivery iterations.
Yes, they had an advantage by forcing it upon every windows 9X user, but their original release was pitiful, and netscape had an opportunity to deliver a superior product and win the browser majority.
What did they do?
Netscape spent their time working in multiple directions without releasing a core product.
In the end, the mozilla project came out with the superior browser, but since it took so long to deliver, it fights with opera and safari for 10% of the browser market.
Do I see history repeating itself here in the desktop office app battles?
The reason I use Evolution on my Linux desktops is because it lets me talk to Exchange servers. Thunderbird and KMail are both great if all you need is a GUI mail client that talks POP and IMAP. Evolution does those pretty well too.
But Evolution can also (sort of) speak to Exchange servers (through Outlook Web Access), which is supposed to make it possible to do things like manipulating Exchange calendars, managing Exchange tasks, and using Exchange global address lists. Unfortunately, it's still not all there yet. And from what I've seen lately, it's getting worse. There are some major connector regressions in the 2.8.x release of Evolution that make me regret upgrading to Fedora Core 6 every day. And no one seems to be interested in doing anything about it, the bugs have been open for weeks -- even months.
Outlook is a killer application for business desktop users, and I say "killer" because not having an equivalent for Linux will KILL Linux desktop adoption. Hell, even cell phones work better with Exchange than Evolution does right now.
The reason why OOXML uses WMF and relies on quirks of old versions of Word (and of WordPerfect etc) and all this other stuff is because OOXML has to be able to store every piece of data that the word *.doc file format stores. Because Word has used WMF ever since Microsoft invented WMF (which was long before SVG came along), Word will continue to use WMF.
So why doesn't office support OO documents then?
evil is as evil does
OOXML has to be able to store every piece of data that the word *.doc file format stores
Not true; Office 2007 could have a WMF -> SVG converter in it. Storing graphics as SVG would then just be part of saving into an XML format.
If only it was that easy. The real problem is that Word must without fail remain 100.0% compatible with every previous version, down to the pixel. The feature sets of WMF and SVG are not identical, and a converter with true 100% compatibility is not something anyone is going to whip up in a few days. It may not even be feasible. And after conversion, even if the document looks the same, the structure will be different. The way you edit it will change. The saved undo history will probably have to be thrown away. The interaction with other Word features like Track Changes might be different. etc etc...
People expect their documents to always look and work *exactly* the same, even though they do incredibly boneheaded things that end up relying on every feature and bug Word has ever had. For just one example, a relative of mine who will remain nameless typed out all his Word documents using tabs in place of carriage returns. That's right: between every paragraph, instead of pressing enter, he pressed tab to fill up lines until he got far enough down the page to start another paragraph. He centered text using this method too. Not a single carriage return in the entire document. What do you think that document will look like after *any* conversion at all? The precise to-the-pixel word-wrap decisions made by Word define everything about how that document looks. But if this person upgrades their Word and their documents are messed up, are they going to say "Boy I'm a dumbass, thanks Microsoft for showing me the error of my ways, I'll just retype all my documents now"? I think you know the answer.
This is why the OOXML spec is 6000 pages of hacks like 'autoSpaceLikeWord95' or 'lineWrapLikeWord6'. Not just to be obtuse; not as a grand conspiracy to hinder interoperability and shut out Open Office; not because Microsoft is incompetent. Because people demand uncompromising perfect backwards compatibility, and that's the only way to truly deliver it.
Firebug. It will make your jaw hit the floor.
a superior product. Office 2007 is leaps and bounds easier and more plesant to use than Office 2003 and it produces prettier results to boot. Let's not even talk about how Office 2007 compares to OO.o....
;-)
Having used word processors for more than 15 years, I can confidently say that there is nothing prettier than Office 95, insofar as word-processing is concerned. The mail client (LookOut) is total crap, and has been so since it first launched.
Users don't waste time making documents pretty; they use word processors for 3 things:
1. To create them.
2. To read them.
3. To share them (that includes mail AND print).
Office 95 does all the above to the satisfaction of more than 99% users out there. Every subsequent version has been silly Bloatware and Bugware, and nothing innovative or useful, except maybe Clippie
To create, read and share documents, there are much better packages than Office.... personally, I find AbiWord and LaTex the best packages among the lot.
MS Office is certainly not a superior product for any of the above tasks.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
You think anybody buys that "it wouldn't work" argument?
OO can save as doc but not one person at MS is smart enough to make word save a document as OO xml.
evil is as evil does
That is true, it is for a limited period of time. It may also have clauses to cancel it beforehand (we simply don't know). Yet, this isn't a useful angle to use against Novell, I don't think. After all, Microsoft are paying Novell more for Novell's patents than vice versa. So patent litigation against Novell wouldn't be wise; Novell have more to gain.
Oh, come on. If Microsoft had clamped down on illegal copies of MS Office, then alternative office suites costing one tenth of the price of MS Office would have taken over already by now. Microsoft Office has become the industry standard because, to all intents and purposes, it's free. So people learn word processing (using spaces for formatting) and spreadsheets (using a calculator to add up figures) in their own time using a pirated copy of Office, then businesses have to pay for Office because that's what all their staff know. And people who work in businesses where Office is used get a pirate copy to use at home, because that's what they know from work. It's a vicious circle.
..... till he finds himself up against his own mother!
Imagine a small company, Mom + Pop Software Ltd. They manufacture someting called Cheap Office. It can't boast all the features of MS Office, but it has most of the ones people actually use. (It also defaults to A4 paper, so your printer won't insist for you to press the "paper" button after printing each page.) So it's ideal for writing everyday letters, doing accounts and keeping track of your CD collection, and it retails at £50. Now, our hypothetical customer John Thomas (who has letters to write, accounts to do and a CD collection to keep track of) sees Cheap Office and figures he could save £450 by buying it instead of MS Office. But then he figures he could pirate MS Office and save £500. If enough people do that, Mom + Pop Software Ltd. go out of business, due to piracy -- even though nobody has ever pirated a Mom + Pop product!
This is how Microsoft have traditionally killed off the competition. But unfortunately, Open Source software isn't susceptible to the same technique. If people aren't making heavy use of OpenOffice.org, nobody has lost anything. In fact it could give the developers time to move on and produce something different. (Watch that dark horse KOffice, too. It isn't even pretending to be like MS Office -- which could well turn out to be its salvation.) I'm sort of reminded of an episode of King of the Hill, in which the kid starts kicking people in the bollocks and grows to think he's unstoppable
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Please. Office isn't going anywhere. As long as there are Microsoft-loving managers, MS Office will be overwhelmingly dominant. Frankly-- and bear in mind that I hate MS-- Office is a far sight better than OpenOffice.org, which I've always found to be bloated and amateurish.
This whole "OOH OFFICE IS GOIN' DOOOOOOOOWN" mentality strikes me as wishful thinking.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
That's a good point. Some dudes at sun with a bunch of schlubs in their underwear at home can
figure out the various office formats and save their docs to them. Why can't MS work that out
> OpenOffice.org users get interopability with MS Office.
l
The problem is, this translator is "lossy", meaning that any translation will lose information *both ways*:
http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/features.htm
Also, being a translator instead of an exporter means that a double save will have to happen which has it's own set of issues.
> Win-win.
Actually, it's win-lose since it's the appearance of openness without actual openness, so MS Office devotes will be able to claim that no change in status quo is required (after all competition exists so there's no vendor lockin) but no-one will trust ODF translations into OOXML since they will look bad. Another side effect is that people will move away from DOC which has better support universally (through years of reverse engineering) in favour of OOXML (which has poorer universal support) since "XML is the future". Not good.
But if you're going to support OOXML in OpenOffice despite this last comment, a better approach would be an OOXML *exporter*. The key difference between an exporter and a translator is that an exporter has access to a lot more information about the document (the internal application representation of document) and so the exporter can be more accurate than the translator (which could in theory rebuild those data structures, but in practice won't unless OpenOffice and MS Office are refactored so that the creation of the internal data structures from the file system is available through a library) and an exporter will be faster (no double-save, no external tool, no recreation of even minimal internal data structures).
figure out the various office formats and save their docs to them. Why can't MS work that out What kind of an animal is a 'schlub'? And why is it's preferred habitat the underwear of dudes@Sun.com? Perhaps the whole problem could be solved by breeding some more shlubs and setting them free in the underwear of dudes@Microsoft.com?
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Apart from the good news of an OOXML translator for OpenOffice.org, that was a terrible article!
It seems the author is a noob who is only just putting his toe in the water with a first install of OOo. After anouncing the news of the translator, he then starts rambling on about Evolution on windows, whatever.
Who said it was the goal of the open-source community to crush Microsoft??! While it may be true that many in open-source folk don't like Microsoft, I think it would be more accurate to say that the goal of open-source is to produce good free software that is based on open standards that anyone can use, improve and learn from. It's about freedom, not Microsoft bashing.
Sure, Evolution on Windows might be great for some people - but that's another story, can't we just be happy with the good news (about the translator) for the moment?
Ross Kendall Web Consultant and Developer (UK) - Drupal and Open Source Solutions