Microsoft's Free, Online Version of Office To Premiere This Week

walterbyrd writes "Microsoft will offer an online version of Office 2010 for free. I have to wonder, will this remain free indefinitely? Or is Microsoft just trying to firmly establish its OOXML standard, then go back to business as usual?" Probably a harder sell after Google's acquisition of DocVerse.

Comments

Re:Is it safe?

[grcumb]

What you say is right but not relevant to this discussion. The parent had commented on the comment of the GP that once you have a file in MS format, your ass belongs to them.

Yes, that was exactly the intent when MS created its own proprietary document formats. There was a time when WordPerfect was happy to convert to and from Ami Pro, when Star Writer exported just fine to Word. Microsoft changed all that by relentlessly leveraging compatibility to feed their revenue stream.

This may be true whether it is a file in Word format, PDF or an even more proprietary format from Apple. So it is not something unique to MS.

Agreed. That's why I mentioned both Adobe and Word formats in the same sentence. I don't think either one is particularly appropriate (although PDF as a published specification is a great deal easier to work with when doing document conversion).

And as to your 25 year time frame, I can still read the oldest document produced by Word on the latest MS Office.

That's hard to believe, and not entirely relevant. What I'm talking about -as a minimal scenario- is a situation where the original software just doesn't exist any more. Twenty-five years ago in 1985, Word was something called Multi-Tool. I sincerely doubt one of its files would open in Office 2010 without significant effort from a developer.

And lastly, who's stopping you from storing files in XML format in Office?

Nobody. That's exactly what we do. The problem is that we work with legal documents from over 20 countries and hundreds of different sources. We have a limited amount of development resources (mostly just me) and we need these documents to be available forever, effectively. If people could actually settle on a standard that really was a standard, if people could actually agree to look slightly farther down the track than their own desktops, we could actually spend time building new searching capabilities, ontologies and frameworks to make the data way, way more useful than it is today.

Instead, I spend all my time dealing with half-assed, unstructured formatting brought about by the fact that people are content to use a second-rate implementation of a deliberately obfuscated format.

Other vendors may be guilty of this, too. But Microsoft has done it longer and more effectively than most.