Microsoft Spokesman Says ODF "Clearly Won" Standard War

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 Its yet unpublished format ISO OOXML will not be supported before the release of the next Office generation.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."

Comments

Re:Consumer vs Professional

[CastrTroy]

How do you explain their buggy implementation of HTML+CSS then? There are multiple Open source projects which support HTML far better than IE. The problem is that they aren't allowed to copy them, because they are mostly GPL (or similar). I imagine the same will happen with ODF.

Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft?

[quanticle]

Even disregarding the fact that most of the world's knowledge is still probably printed out on pieces of paper (in books or otherwise), I'd hardly say that Word documents comprise 80% of our online knowledge.

What about HTML? Does the vast majority of the world-wide-web count for nothing? What about databases? Those certainly aren't in .doc format. PDF files aren't Word formatted either.

And those are just text formats. Lets not even start with things like images, audio and video.