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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."
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."
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
One Standard Per Child? ... let's start a organization to develop a lot of them.
Open Standards are great!
Because for the average user, Microsoft products (at least Office) do the job required, and do it fairly well, and no one is providing anything that, despite file format incompatibility, provides a compelling reason to change aside from "we're a bit cheaper". Without that, no one is going to get up in arms.
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.
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.
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!!!
There probably should be a 'Get OpenOffice' campaign just like the 'Get Firefox' campaign when Firefox 1.0 was released.