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.

Comments

Evolution for Windows?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

what is truly needed is a fully supported Evolution on Windows.

How about an (ABI compatable) Exchange-equivilant for linux?

15 Billion Dollars A Year At Stake

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the yearly revenue for Microsoft Office is about 15 billion which is about one third of the total revenue Microsoft makes every year. Correct me if I'm off. Over the past five years or so Microsoft's stock has been essentially stagnant. And Microsoft has had to make huge cuts over many of the preceding quarters to hit their street expectations and keep the stock from tanking.

Even a modest hit to the Microsoft Office revenue due to the upgrade treadmill from the format lock-in would have a massive effect on the company. Over the years Microsoft used their rapidly growing stock to keep salaries down and attract people with the lure of huge gains from their option grants. If office software revenue starts falling and Microsoft exec options start turning worthless I think you will start to see dramatic cuts at the company - the multi-billion dollar Xbox fiasco, the Zune mess, and many of the other let's throw money at new markets to try to get the stock moving attempts that Ballmer and others have tried since the stock peaked back around 2000.

I have to imagine that Microsoft will fight this move to open office formats with a fury never seen before. This isn't just extra billions that Microsoft won't miss, it is the multi-million dollar retirement money for a whole lot of execs up in Redmond under direct assault by a bunch of dirty hippies.

Re:15 Billion Dollars A Year At Stake

[SnprBoB86]

There is plenty of good information on motivation, etc. here: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/default.aspx

A great summary of arguments can be in this post: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/09/ 21/interoperability-of-the-office-open-xml-formats .aspx

Reguarding your particular question, that post states:

"If you look at my blog, I probably spend less than 5% of my time discussing ODF. The only reason I talk about it is that people have asked me why we didn't use it as our default format. A simple "it wouldn't work" answer obviously isn't good enough, so I had to show specific examples to help explain my view."

In this post: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/07/ 27/679703.aspx
Brian lists a whole bunch of examples of why it "wouldn't work" with references to previous posts with more details:

"
The OASIS ODF technical committee claims it's still over a year away from defining spreadsheet functions and tables in presentations, and no mention of solutions to the international numbering issues or even simple things like character highlighting.
"

Re:15 Billion Dollars A Year At Stake

[ajs318]

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.

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 ..... till he finds himself up against his own mother!

Visionaries

[Deadbolt]

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?

Evolution for Windows

[Coryoth]

So what is needed is Evolution for Windows eh? Kind of like this? I don't have Windows around anywhere to try it out, but it looks like it runs fine. I expect it still has a few kinks to be worked out, but it is certainly up and running, so not only is a port in progress, it looks like it is even usable already.

Re:Evolution for Windows

[julesh]

but it is certainly up and running, so not only is a port in progress, it looks like it is even usable already.

Having recently tried to use it, I'd say no. There are several major issues:

* Redraws are nightmarishly slow (admittedly this could be because I'm using an old PC, but I haven't seen any application redraw this slowly before).
* Initial configuration doesn't seem to work entirely correctly: if you need to change between SSL modes for an IMAP connection, you have to restart the program, but nothing tells you this. This may or may not be a Windows-only issue, I don't know.
* It stores its files in a subdirectory called ".evolution" of your user profile directory, not your application data or local settings directory. If you're using roaming profiles, this just plain won't work.

Nail in the coffin?

[280Z28]

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.

Re:Who didn't know this?

[Anonymous Coward]

//Microsoft made a new format (instead of using ODF) because they thought they could do it better, not because they wanted to lock people into using Office 2007.//

That is not correct. Microsoft's supposedly "open" format in fact avoids "open" as much as it can. For example, where OpenDocument uses SVG for graphics, which is itself a W3C open format that any vendor may use, in the Microsoft format Office Open XML (OOXML) they could have used SVG, but no, they could have used CGM, but no, what did they use? WMF. That is right, a buggy Microsoft proprietary graphics format, the one with the security hole, WMF. WMF relies on the Microsoft GUI API to render properly, as WMF has embedded metadata meant for calls to the Microsoft GUI API.

That is not the only thing in OOXML like that. If there is an open format for anything, Microsoft avoids it. Microsoft's OOXML is as packed as can be on dependencies that the underlying platform on which any application runs is a Windows platform.

Microsoft wanted to lock people in all right. It will be impossible to achieve perfect fidelity with OOXML on any platform other than a Windows platform.

If you have documents saved in OOXML format, you will be locked in to Windows platforms.

What you need is a calendaring system that works

[cheros]

The stranglehold is in the calendaring AFAIK.

Nail in the coffin, my foot - MS wanted this

[SnprBoB86]

This will do squat for putting any nails in anything.

Microsoft wanted this. Infact, Microsoft helped Novel do this: http://www.novell.com/ctoblog/?p=43
And the Microsoft Open XML developers were more than helpful to advertise this: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/03/ 02/openoffice-support-for-the-openxml-formats.aspx

This is a GOOD THING for everyone. OpenOffice.org users get interopability with MS Office. MS Office meets many government required interopability and open XML format requirements. Win-win.

Let's keep the absurd commentary out of the summary and in the modded down comments, please?

The worrying thing is Novell's reputation

[jkrise]

Throughout it's existence, Novell has never been a credible threat to Microsoft over a reasonable lenth of time. Their agreement with Microsoft further reinforces the suspicion that Novell might not be realy competing, rather they might be collaborating with Microsoft to further extend the monopoly situation and exclude genuine choice, and freedom of software. Some concerns:

1. Does Novell's translator work well with OO.org, or Novell's version of Open Office only?
2. Like Mono's port of VB, is the usage of the translator covered by the patent deal between MS and Novell?
3. Why did Novell abandon the Netware range of products?

This does not appear to be a nail in the coffin of Office, it seems to be an extended lease of life for a dying format and bloatware from the 800lb gorilla.

-

Evolution

[dotpl]

We don't need Evolution for windows, we need something other than the pile of crap that Evolution is.

Disclaimer: I use Evolution.

Re:Who didn't know this?

[slashbart]

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

Dude, there has never been this pixel perfect rendition between different Word versions, not even on Windows, let alone if you also include the Mac versions. I absolutely don't buy your argument as a valid reason for all the renderAsWord1OnMacintosh1984 attributes

That's not flamebait

[Reality Master 201]

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

Missed something basic

[g2devi]

> OpenOffice.org users get interopability with MS Office.

The problem is, this translator is "lossy", meaning that any translation will lose information *both ways*:
http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/features.html

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).

Real-world test - Fails with OO.o

[AYeomans]

It's fascinating how slashdot still prefers opinions to facts.

I downloaded the odfconverter-1.0.0-2.oxt file and tried to install into OpenOffice.org 2.1.0 for Windows (as downloaded from openoffice.org web site, not the Novell version).

I had to use Tools -> Extension manager (not Package manager), and when installing, had several pop-ups stating "This media-type is not supported: application/octet-stream". OKing these showed the odfconverter installed into "My extensions". And "Microsoft Word 2007 Document (.docx)" was added to the list of files in File -> Open.

But trying to open a .docx file (the Windows Vista Product Guide failed, with nothing happening or displayed.

Anyone want to try the other options of Linux, OO.o 2.0.4, Novel OO.o 2.0.4 and report back?