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.