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

Haaaa

[Mockylock]

Microsoft: "You want to go together on a new 'standard'?"
China: "Sure, whatever."
Microsoft: "What's wrong?"
China: "Can we still pirate software?"
Microsoft: "Sure, whatever."

How about...

[omgamibig]

...yet another freakin format? Seriously!

Re:How about...

[edittard]

Standards are great, you can never have too many of them.

OSPC?

[WrongSizeGlass]

One Standard Per Child?
Open Standards are great! ... let's start a organization to develop a lot of them.

Re:hey retard ./ editors, it's != its

[WrongSizeGlass]

Their, their ... its not worth getting you're self upset about it. Its the tone of you're comment that infers there doing it on purpose.

Re:hey retard ./ editors, it's != its

[Anonymous Coward]

it's /. not ./

retard

What's the big problem?

[asciimonster]

I don't know why these people take so long to make their standards (or "standards") into one unified format. I did it in 2 minutes. Here it is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<gandunifieddocumentformat xmlns="...">
    <ODF>
        <!-- ODF stuff -->
    </ODF>
    <OOXML>
        <!-- OOXML stuff -->
    </OOXML>
    <UOF>
        <!-- UOF stuff -->
    </UOF>
</gandunifieddocumentformat>

DONE!!!

Re:Why?

[morgan_greywolf]

If someone comes up with a way to fill the role of the word processor or spreadsheet in a way stunningly better than Microsoft has, then substantial numbers of people will start chafing at vendor lock-in. As long as most competitors are just making "me too, and you can run me on more OS's" products, they'll have a niche, but not a big push for change.

But OpenOffice.org Writer is stunningly better than Microsoft Word, in many, many ways, unless you're one of those people that simply must have Word's outline view. Better bullets and numbering, better support for templates, support for conditional formatting, and better support for master documents are just a few of reasons why I use OpenOffice.org Writer instead of Word for my writing projects, despite having access to both at home.