Study Touting OOXML Over ODF Is Debunked

The Burton Group, an IT research company, published a study urging that enterprise organizations adapt OOXML rather than ODF. Their reasons include things like "ODF is controlled indirectly by Sun," "MS Office is cheaper than OpenOffice.org," and "OOXML improved many problems of DOC." The Burton Group also claims that although ODF is well-designed, OOXML is better suited for the specific needs of enterprise organizations. The study claims to be impartial in that Microsoft didn't pay for it. Ars Technica now has up a pretty thorough debunking of the Burton study. Ars wonders how the Burton authors can so blithely overlook Microsoft's vote-buying in Sweden, while wielding unfounded accusations of chicanery in Sun's direction.

Comments

Re:must not have been a hard job

[jorghis]

> "OpenOffice is more expensive" (free? wtf?),

License fees dont begin to cover the real cost of software. You need to have an IT department to support it, you have to train users on it, etc. A $100 dollar license fee seems negligable pretty fast when contrasted with the IT budget for a company and any productivity gains/losses that result from using different software.

This is often referred to as TCO (Total Cost of Operating) and salesmen love it cause they can always put up graphs that indicate that their product is clearly the best from that perspective. A lot of people roll their eyes when they hear this term because they dont think much of the aforementioned salesmen's BS. But it really is foolish to factor licensing fees into your decision about what software to use from a cost perspective unless those fees are truly exorbitant.

Re:must not have been a hard job

[Psych0_Jack]

Sun has an ODF plug-in for MS Office 2000-2007. It's not like using ODF means you are forced to use OpenOffice.org. Isn't that the point of an open format, no vendor lock-in?

Re:Paid by Microsoft

[Grishnakh]

Not necessarily. There's a lot of companies out there, including Burton, who are MS "partners", and earn all their income by pushing and supporting MS products. They don't need to be explicitly paid off to spout pro-MS FUD; they stand to profit through increased use of MS software, so they're happy to spout FUD for free.

For instance, if McAfee published a report that said that Linux and MacOSX are highly susceptible to viruses, and that virus infestations of such machines are common, it'd be pretty obvious that they didn't need to be paid off by MS to say these lies. Their entire reason for existence is the poor security and virus susceptibility of the Windows platform, so it's in their best interest to make people believe Windows is the best platform, and that every computer should have anti-virus software installed.

giggle:

[Stephen Samuel]

TFA read:

Open XML is "more complex than ODF, but it's not unnecessarily complex for the contexts it was designed to address," Not unnecessarily complex?!!? freaks! The recent Errata for OOXML is almost six times the size of the full ODF documentation -- and, even then, OOXML docs are missing critical parts!

I'm surprised that the authors don't expect to get laughed out of the hall when they present this report -- even if it is on Microsoft soil.

Re:must not have been a hard job

[ozmanjusri]

It's no problem de-bunking the report, Burton are obviously in the pay of the monopoly.

Burton are Microsoft boosters from way back.

They did a hatchet jobon Google for MS not so long ago, and when they're not slandering Microsoft competitors, they're out flogging Sharepoint Services.