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Google Pleased With ISO OOXML Decision
yogi writes "In a blog post from this Friday past, Google welcomed the ISO decision not to fasttrack OOXML. They also (once again) voiced their public support for the ODF standard. 'Technical standards should be arrived at transparently, openly, and based on technical merit. Google is committed to helping the standards community remain true to this ideal and maintain their independence from any commercial pressure ... Google supports one open document format and calls on industry participants to collaboratively work on ODF. With multiple implementations of one open standard for documents, users, businesses and governments around the world can have both choice and freedom to access their own documents, share with others and pass onto future generations.'"
At my day job, my officemate just got Office 2007, which he was pleased as punch about... at first. Then he realized that no one else on any platform, using any software, can read Office 2007 files. He might as well write them in crayon, for what that's worth. He can select an earlier format, but then it saves as read-only.
At this point, my endless nudging about this whole Open Document Format thing is starting to make more sense for him. In fact, he'd be pleased to replace Word. However, he and some other co-workers are power Excel users, and are very reluctant to even consider replacing it.
Can anyone out there make a convincing case that Calc or Gnumeric are just as good as Excel, even for advanced users?
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
But is it different this time around? With HTML, CSS, Kerberos, Java, and all the other embrace,extend,extinguish campaigns they do, there is no ISO standard for HTML, CSS (Both w3c standards), Kerberos (just an RFC), and Java, (a standard which is just owned by another large corporation), for any of these other things. However, with ISO standards, isn't there a bit more enforcement of whether or not something adheres to the standard? Don't they actually check that products that say they meet some standard actually meet the standard? Don't they take legal recourse against products that use there standards incorrectly? Maybe I'm just wrong here, but I don't think that ISO has built up such a large reputation for standards by just letting things slide, and having their name slapped on products that don't adhere to the standard.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
If google is in full support of the ODF format, why don't they support the ODF file type within its search engine? Try http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=filetype%3Aodf+the&btnG=Search
I presume you are referring to the fact that Google is doing business in China, in compliance with the law. Since the law there is the Red Chinese government, this means Google is in compliance with a government that is, shall we say, unfriendly to Chinese dissidents.
Methinks you are a bit too harsh. AFAIK Google has complied with the orders for censorship, but have not done anything that helps track and punish people. IIRC Google declined to offer Google Mail because they knew the Red Chinese government would demand access to the email data to help track down dissidents.
Google had two options: don't do business in China, or do business in China. If Google didn't do any business in China, the Chinese would have had to use some other search engine, perhaps one put together by the Chinese government. Any other search engine would also have censorship imposed. And, as was pointed out on Slashdot in a discussion of this issue, Google did the bare minimum to comply: if you misspell Tien An Man Square you still get any web pages with the misspelling; and even when you spell it correctly, and Google is censoring your results, Google displays a message saying something like "some pages were not shown, to comply with government policy".
Google in China doesn't blaze with the pure white light of the angels but it doesn't glow red with hellfire either.
Google's interest mainly lies in being able to parse, represent, and produce files in the standard format, I think, regardless of who controls that format. They can certainly parse either format to get the majority of the textual content. It would be difficult to represent content in OOXML, but not ODF; and it is apparently significantly easier to modify ODF documents than OOXML, so I assume generating them is likely easier, too.
That's sufficient reason for Google to back ODF. Of course, the fact that it detracts from one of their competitors helps.
Right now, they have the best I've used. The format lock-in is a nice bonus for them, but realistically there's nothing even close to Excel, and Word does the job at least as well or better than every competitor I've tried. Naturally, this is just my opinion, just as your post was only yours.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
I love Excel, but Word is a buggy piece of shit.
So much that they gave up on trying to fix the crashes, now they have created some "crash recovery" stuff that will recover the documents you lost with the last crash. If you're lucky, the "recovered" document will not be filled with hieroglyphs.