Microsoft Announces OOXML-UOF Project with China

Andy Updegrove writes "Today, Microsoft announced its own interoperability project to bridge the gap between China's domestically developed Uniform Office Format (UOF) and Microsoft's OOXML. In the continuing tit for tat battle between ODF and OOXML, this announcement tracks the intent of an already-existing 'harmonization' committee, hosted by OASIS, that is exploring interoperability options between ODF and UOF. Like the OOXML-ODF translator project announced by Microsoft last year, the new effort will be an open source project hosted by SourceForge. The announcement is, in one sense, no surprise. Microsoft has been waging a nation-by-nation battle for the hearts and minds of ISO/IEC JTC1 National Bodies, in an effort to win adoption of OOXML (now Ecma 376) as a global standard with equal status to ODF (now ISO 26300). In order to do so, it needs to offset the argument that one document format standard is not only enough, but preferable. With UOF representing a third entrant in the format race, easy translation of documents would obviously be key to lessen the burden on customers of products based upon one format or the other."

Comments

Re:Why?

[Frosty Piss]

I'd say it's more likely that most users don't know the difference between Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office

This is a commonly voiced anecdote among the FOSS crowd, but in reality it's almost complete self-serving bullshit. It's part of the Open Source mantra that assumes most "users" are complete idiots. And, since in most cases users must pay several hundred dollars in addition to their computer that came pre-installed with Windows, it would be had to miss that the Office Suite is not a part of the OS.

don't know there are alternatives, and assume that "free" means cheap and worthless.

It's difficult for most FOSS evangelists (fan boys) to understand that most people are happy with MS Office because it does what it does very well, even "power users" are happy with its various application components. If it didn't meet or exceed user expectations, people wouldn't pay several hundred dollars for it. While there are other office application suites, most of them fall short of the integrated functionality of MS Office. Excel is a great example where as much as the OpenOffice sheep my bleat, "Calc" simply falls short. FOSS like to go on and on and on about file compatibility issues, but most people don't consider an incompatibility with FOSS applications that very few of their peers use to be an issue.