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Sun Asks China to Merge its Doc Format With ODF
christian.einfeldt writes "Sun's Chairman Scott McNealy has asked the world's most populous nation to merge its Uniform Office Format with the Open Document Format. Tech lawyer Andy Updegrove thinks that McNealy would not have flown to China and taken this chance of rejection if McNealy didn't think that there was a good likelihood of success."
I disagree. While i prefer and primarily use Koffice and OpenOffice, MS Office wins in terms of user interface, usability, and functionality across the board. It is a superb office suite that wins hands down. Even the biggest linux and FOSS fanboy has to admit it's absolute awesomeness. Sure if an open standard was accepted broadly, ms office sales would drop. But that's because not everyone needs a $150-500 office suite. Most people could get by just fine, with little or no problems with alternative office suites. But MS would still be dominant purely out of quality of software, at least in this regard.
Office is an application suite. ODF is a document format. They're apples and oranges.
You know, I'm happy for you're so naive, it's a bless. Office application suites compete on features, and as such, each is bound to either extend ODF into a mess, or introduce their own formats if they don't have any.
There's a reason why we have "source" formats, and "final" formats. I don't need your browser to support the latest effects and features in Photoshop, since I'll export it to JPG/GIF/PNG for you, that preserves presentation, but not editability.
We already have our "common" document format, and that's PDF. Remember my words that ODF isn't going anywhere. There's simply no reason for it to succeed.