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Sun Asks China to Merge its Doc Format With ODF

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the peanut-butter-in-my-chocolate dept.

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."

3 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Numbers game by Random+BedHead+Ed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Playing the numbers game, if a country as large as China were to adopt ODF (via harmonizing with it), it's game over, and ODF wins. That wouldn't spell the end for Microsoft's XML standard, but it would be a major setback, globally speaking. I wish him luck.

    1. Re:Numbers game by cduffy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Since when was MS Office an alternative to ODF?

      Office is an application suite. ODF is a document format. They're apples and oranges. With appropriate plugins, Office will interoperate with ODF documents -- just as any number of other applications will.

      Claiming that OOXML is better than ODF because MS Office is better than OpenOffice is disingenuous; there's no reason MS Office and ODF can't be used together, and quite a bit of money and development time is being poured into making that an effective solution (thanks in no small part to .ma.us).

  2. Re:I can't wait by ror · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If Microsoft lose their hold on the document format then there would be little to tie people to office, and through that, windows. Every time I try and 'sell' openoffice to my family they scoff and say "but it's NOT office" despite the fact they're using office 97 that can barely handle office 2000 documents.

    There is a perception that people NEED office to function, getting ODF widely accepted would be a huge blow to Microsoft.