ODF Vs. OOXML File Counts On the Web

mrcgran writes "In eight months since Office 2007 was released to the general public (10 months since release to enterprise customers), there are fewer than 2,000 of these office documents posted on the Web. In the last three months, 13,400 more ODF documents have been added to the Web, with only 1,329 OOXML documents added. It would be hard for the Microsoft camp to spin ten times as many ODF documents added as OOXML documents, especially since 34% of those new documents were added on Microsoft.com. That isn't what I would call good traction for Microsoft's overwhelmingly dominant office suite."

Comments

How many Copies of 2007 are truly out there?

[imcclell]

Another question is, what the market share of office 2007 vs an ODF compliant suite? If there's 10 million people with ODF capabilities, and only 1 million with OOXML, doesn't this make sense?

The question is not how many now, but it's how many will there be 5 years from now.

Re:Microsoft is competing with itself

[Volante3192]

Especially if you have any legacy Word 1.0 or 2.0 documents that can't be upgraded to the latest format for contractual reasons

Offtopic, but I'm just too curious... Would it be possible to explain why these can't be migrated to a newer format? I'd think that'd be dangerously unwise.

I'm surprised that more people don't just use .ODF, it's a published, open standard that is as trivial to write a parser for as it is to just unzip the file and look at the XML directly...

Cause we all know how much a success that is; just look at HTML!

Re:Microsoft is competing with itself

[dmpyron]

Of course it's about "standards". Even Microsoft "standards". I've had two professional associations I belong to say that they won't accept anything in WTF the 2007 format is. This is for the benefit of both the office staff and also the referees. I'm still running 2000. That's what the ACM (you know, the computer people) require. The IEEE recommends 2000 but will also accept 2003. The ISSA hasn't taken an official stand, yet. But everything coming out of them is 2000.

There's no "ODF" category.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Nor is there a F/OSS category, or a GNU category, as far as I remember when I last tried to submit a story.

Seems to me, "Linux" is as good as anything to describe this.

Re:Microsoft is competing with itself

[ozmanjusri]

They just have to make a better, more intuitive, easy to use word processor.

MOOXML isn't about competing with other office suites. It's about preventing competition from thousands of specialised document creation tools.

If ODF becomes ubiquitous, it will be easy for specialised tools to create documents which can then be opened/parsed by the office suite or by other tools (ie databases, document managers, aggregators etc) in the chain. Instead of having a few easy targets to embrace, extend..., Microsoft will have to contend with a whole ecosystem of document tools.

Of course, having that flexibility will be an immense improvement for businesses and other computer users, but less profit for Microsoft means it must be fought with all the tools their monopoly position can muster.