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Microsoft Spokesman Says ODF "Clearly Won" Standard War

Posted by kdawson on from the it's-just-better dept.

Elektroschock writes "At a Red Hat retrospective panel on the ODF vs. OOXML struggle panel, a Microsoft representative, Stuart McKee, admitted that ODF had 'clearly won.' The Redmond company is going to add native support of ODF 1.1 with its Office 2007 service pack 2. Its yet unpublished format ISO OOXML will not be supported before the release of the next Office generation. Whether or not OOXML ever gets published is an open question after four national bodies appealed the ISO decision."

7 of 289 comments (clear)

  1. The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sadly, no, this is not the end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft. I guarantee that ODF will not be the default format and that Microsoft's implementation of ODF will clearly be some variation of 'embrace, extend, extinguish,' just like everything else they do.

    Still, it feels good to hear a Microsoft employee admit that OOXML lost.

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    1. Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? by Jason+Levine · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, it doesn't mean that Microsoft will make ODF the default format. It does mean, however, that I could send an Office 2007 user an ODF document that I made with OpenOffice.org and they would be able to open it. They, in turn, could save their file as ODF and send it over to me if I ask for all documents to be sent in ODF format. This represents a serious hole in the "must send everything DOC to ensure compatibility"* lock-in.

      * Yes, I know that DOC had troubles across Office versions, but still sending DOC was your best bet if you wanted the party at the other end to be able to open and edit the document you were sending.

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    2. Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, it doesn't mean that Microsoft will make ODF the default format. It does mean, however, that I could send an Office 2007 user an ODF document that I made with OpenOffice.org and they would be able to open it.

      And render correctly, just like if you created a W3C-compliant HTML 4 document with a W3C-compliant CSS style sheet that displays correctly in every other browser other than IE, right?

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    3. Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? by Vellmont · · Score: 5, Insightful


      Yes, I know that DOC had troubles across Office versions, but still sending DOC was your best bet if you wanted the party at the other end to be able to open and edit the document you were sending.

      Your statement, taken as a whole is correct. I just don't believe the last part "and edit the document you were sending" comes up very often. I can't think of one time I've been sent a document that someone wanted me to edit during the whole 18 years I've had internet access. 99.99% of the time I get documents someone wants me to review, but not edit in any way. In those cases I'd much rather get a PDF.

      If it's a collaborative editing situation, I'd rather use something like Google docs (and have).

      The bigger deal for a single document format is really just archival purposes. I want to be able to save a document today, and open the same document in 10 years with totally different software, on a completely different OS and computer. You're not really even guaranteed of doing that TODAY with .doc.

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    4. Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? by peragrin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      your getting ahead of yourself. First it is Embrace.

      What is MSFT doing right now? Embracing ODF, next comes a slow extension of ODF to make it MSFT only.

      1) Embrace --- MSFT is doing this part now
      2) Extend -- wait about a year for this to start happening
      3) Extinguish --- OOXML rulez. in about 2010 or when the next version of Office Ships.

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  2. Wait and See by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Now we shall all have to wait and see if MS plays nice with ODF because they are scared of the EU, or if they try to extend and break the standard to prevent true interoperability, as they have done with HTML, CSS, etc. since being late to the Web standards game.

  3. Re:That's It???! by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Given the lengths they went to, first to fight the very notion of an open standard format, and then to push OOXML, it seems hard to believe that this is over.

    I'm as happy as anyone else if it is, but it's very unlike MS. To my knowledge, this has happened only once before, with HTML, and we're still paying for the fallout of that one.

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