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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.
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.
The stranglehold is in the calendaring AFAIK.
Insert
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!
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).