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Does ODF Have a Future?
qedramania writes "Linuxworld seems to think ODF is a dead duck. Is the Windows monopoly too big and too entrenched? Other than diehard Linux fans, does anyone really care if they have to keep paying Microsoft to do basic word processing? It seems as though the momentum is towards a complete Microsoft monoculture in software for business and government. You can bet that big business and governments will want more than just reliability from Microsoft in return for their acquiescence. Does ODF have a future?"
What motivation do other countries have to send their tax dollars to Redmond so that they can write local laws?
ODF is not going to take off in the US until AFTER the rest of the world has adopted it. So let's look at what other governments and such are adopting Linux / ODF.
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The MS-Office monopoly has so far been nearly impossible to beat. But things can change quite rapidly. Terms like vendor-lock and interoperability will eventually penetrate the skulls of the thickest CIOs and CTOs.
It would help if the supporters of Free Software and Open Software would stop fighting the internecine battles and start uniformly supporting Open Standards. Even before you mention the word Open Standards, immediately others pushing Free Software agenda and Open Source agenda push their pet projects, creating an impression it is all one and the same and one can not have Open Standards without also Open Source and Free Software. They are different.
You might not agree that replacing MSFT monopoly with some kind of duopoly (like it is with Intuit-Quicken and MS-Money). But it is definitely better than the monopoly. Once the customers are educated about the vendor lock and compatibility the duopoly will naturally break down. Eventually there will be enough space for Free Software, Open Software, and Close source software to coexist.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
First of all "Linuxworld" is anything but. They should be required to change their name to "MicrosoftFUDsterPretendingToRepresentLinux." This would at least clue readers into the fact that they're anti-Linux.
LinuxWorld is just trolling and spreading FUD with their "just too big, why bother, you can't win, give up, don't try, it'll never work, it can't happen, you're just wasting your time, resistance is futile" rhetoric
Their words are as dog farts. They are not to be considered!
Then there were text editors tied to document preparation systems. Anyone remember RunOff/Runnem?
Then there were integrated full word processing software that you could load onto your general purpose computers. WordStar anyone? Surely you remember Word Perfect!
All of these existed and flourished well in their time, and all existed before MSWord, whose first incarnation on the PC/XT was wretched!
To say that MSWord can never be dethroned is bunk! MS loves to hear this talk, since you're defeated and they win before the battle has even begun. Previous solutions lost out when something better and cheaper came alone.
The more MS hikes the cost of MSOffice, the more they make it more difficult to use (WGA on Office anyone?), the more they remove MSWord from the virtually free Works package, the more Open Office improves while maintaining its low, low cost of Free, the more OEM's cut costs by preloading OO so that you have it right out of the box, the more MS has to worry about.
Talk defeat, and that's what you'll get. Then only MS will be cheering.
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ODF isn't there to dethrone MS as the word processor of choice, to think so is a bit foolish. It's there to provide a format that *everyone* can use. I will continue to use MS Office because I think it's a superior product, but ODF allows me to *save* my MS Office documents to format that *anyone* else can use, but more importantly convert from when I want to read my own documents in 20 years.
Remember, ODF is not a platform, word processor, gizmo, Office killer, etc. It's only a standard in which to format documents.
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Right at the end, the article suggests an alternative:
Earlier on, the article talks about how it's too expensive to "rip out and replace" MS Office with ODF. Well yeah. Often in technology, a new technology doesn't have to be better - it has to offer something compelling that the old one doesn't, such as a lower price, convenience, mobility, or networking. The new technology gains a foothold in its niche, then starts to expand beyond it - without necessarily ever completely replacing the older technology. Thus we have cell phones displacing land lines, YouTube pressuring television (despite its crappy quality), MP3s replacing CDs, laptops gaining on desktops, digital cameras edging out film, etc.
So it seems to me that the strategy of perfect emulation is a strategy for failure: if ODF does exactly th same thing, is the freedom it offers enough to compel organizations to switch? (We might say yes, but then we know the consequences of lock-in and we don't have to make the up-front investment.) On the other hand, for all its weaknesses, HTML offers all sorts of things that Word lacks (e.g. accessibility and reformatting for differetn devices, universal browser support, Net-friendly, strong semantics), and is probably good enough for most uses. Thoughts?
Folks, this is the heart of the matter. This is what needs to be understood by both sides of the argument:
What the poster misses is that people don't ... D O N O T accept or reject a file format. They, with the small subset of geeks on /., don't give a flip about file format. They accept or reject a program.
For ODF to be accepted, it has to be part of a program that most users have installed.
Program acceptance is usually established by:
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"File format isn't what people are worried about when purchasing software, it's the software itself!"
That's not the debate here!
We're talking about the format being used to create and store publicly owned information. The government is funded by the citizens. The citizen should not have to pay an additional Microsoft tax in order to access government documents. The government SHOULD BE worried, even though they probably are not. Even if ODF is adopted as the standard, MS has the option of supporting it in their applications along with everyone else. The reverse isn't true if the government decides to institutionalize vendor lock-in.
Which I really don't understand, because usually, MS Word will mess with the formatting if you open it up on a computer with a different printer. PDF really is the best for resumes, because it means that how I see my resume, is exactly how everyone else will see my resume. I don't want to get turned down for a job because somebody looked at it in a different version of ms word, and the formatting was messed up, or the text ended up being a little bigger, and something got pushed off the page, which left one page blank, except for that 1 line that got pushed. It's probably not a good idea to judge how good a candidate is based on how their resume looks, and not the content inside, but when you post a job, and get 500 resumes in 2 days, you have to weed through them pretty quickly. Throwing out any resumes that have really bad formatting is a way good start.
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RTF is outdated. It's like HTML3.2 on the web: it's capable of recording formatting decisions but not of indicating structure.
A properly prepared word-processing document these days, whether written with Open Office Writer, Word, or any other decent wp-program, is prepared using styles. You can't do that with RTF. It was inevitable that someone would come up with an XML-based format at some time, because RTF is just too inflexible and incapable of structuring a document.
A rule of thumb when trying to replace one product in the marketplace with another is that the new product needs two tangible advantages. ODF needs to have one "gotta-have" feature that non-technical people can understand and appreciate in order for it to successfully beat out Office.
Yes, ODF is theoretically cheaper then Office. However, the productivity boost of spending $500 / employee is a bargain when the employee's time is worth $50 / hour! (Remember, a guy making $20 an hour really does cost the company $40-$50 an hour.)
The "Open" aspect of ODF is too abstract for many people to understand. To the non-technical person, Office "just works".
Thus, in order for there to be a demand for ODF, there needs to be tangible features that work better with ODF then Office. What tangible features could people appreciate from ODF? Here are some suggestions that come to mind.
Thus, to repeat, in order for ODF to really succeed it needs to have easy-to-understand features that non-technical people will desire. Competing on price alone won't beat Office.
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In the past this has meant "whenever a competing product looks like it is gaining parity with Word"
This is completely unacceptable for a long-term document archive solution. It's not an open format, so you have to rely on Microsoft making "converters" for older iterations available, or reverse engineering. In addition, you have to realize that since the formation is closed, your reverse-engineered implementation may not correctly handle some "features." And that when MS decides to change things, your solution may not correctly handle the new "improved" format.
Not that Microsoft would intentionally break compatibility, of coure... What is it that the Office team says? "RTF isn't done until OpenOffice won't run"
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I'm a writer and I've been gradually convincing some of the other writers I interact with to try out Open Office. Most who try it never go back to Word.
It's hard to sell a file format. What people buy into is the product that uses the file format. The best way to spread ODF is to continue to improve the products that use it, so people will choose them over the alternative.
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I think you're all overlooking something important here. Regardless of whether Microsoft wins the battle against ODF, they've already left the door open for OpenOffice and other products. Why? Because in order to plug OOXML as the supposedly "open" standard, they had to document it and not patent it. Compared to the ridiculous amount of energy that had to go into reverse-engineering doc/xls/ppt, this makes life much easier for the free world. Even if OOXML ends up becoming dominant (I refuse to ever call it a standard), we still win.
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Do you have a link to the Linux version? How about the Mac version?
Why not use a document exchange format that is natively supported on many platforms and which has a free viewer for Windows?
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The basic RTF spec is about two pages long, and about as complex as HTML 1.0. Like HTML, it defines a simple way of extending it. Word can export documents as RTF that include all of the formatting of the original. The catch? That nothing else can read them. Remember early on in the last browser war where IE and Netscape both defined large numbers of extensions to HTML? Imagine a situation like that, but with half a dozen browsers. Now imagine the browsers also edit the document, and strip out any markup they don't understand. That's pretty much the situation with RTF.
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See, no matter how much those of us who like and use Open Source bitch about this, if 90% or more of all of the computers in the world are running Windows, then to almost that proportion of users, there only is Windows and Office.
In their mind, it's unfathomable that you don't run it. IT installed their software, and that was Office. That's what it's always been. Everyone send them files, and those are office. They're not interested in, aware of, or looking for a document exchange format which is natively supported on many platforms.
I mean, really, you may as well ask Joe User to send you e-mails written in Esperanto because the e-mail would be readable by that theoretical 'anyone' who speaks Esperanto (which is practically nobody in the grand scheme of things). They're going to look at you and say "Esper-what-o?" -- because they have no idea it exists, what it's for, or what the hell you're talking about. To them, you're speaking in Martian and make no sense whatsoever.
We can advocate, and try to gently nudge people into the direction we would like to see. But, in the end, users simply overwhelmingly don't have a clue about the issue, and they don't care. This is true about almost all forms of open file formats -- I mean, go up to some random Windows user and start railing on about how ogg vorbis is the teh b0mb and WMA is teh sux0rs. They're not going to care any more than they will about ODF vs Office files.
I hate it as much as you, but the sheer size and inertia of the installed base of Office users is going to make it awfully difficult to supplant it as a file format of interchange. Don't expect it happen overnight -- Linux has been almost ready to start displacing Windows for about 15-16 years now.
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Different versions of Office (at least when they're a couple versions apart) also do this with binary files.
It's what happens when your data files are a nearly-straight dump of your bizarre in-memory data structures-- maintaining compatibility while changing the code at all is extremely difficult.