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Office To Become Fully Open XML Compliant (at Last)

Posted by Soulskill on from the super-fast-turnaround dept.

Andy Updegrove writes "Between 2005 and 2008, an unparalleled standards war was waged between Microsoft, on the one hand, and IBM, Google, Oracle and additional companies on the other. At the heart of the battle were two document formats, one called ODF, developed by OASIS, a standards development consortium, and Open XML, a specification developed by Microsoft. Both were submitted to, and adopted by, global standards groups ISO/IEC. But then Microsoft never fully adopted its own standard. Instead, it implemented what it called 'Transitional Open XML,' which was better adapted for use in connection with documents created using older versions of Office. Yesterday, Microsoft announced in a blog entry that it will finally make it possible for Office users to open, edit and save documents in the format that ISO/IEC approved."

2 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. the thought of involving by nimbius · · Score: 0, Troll

    any major multinational corporation in drafting a standard is preposterous. none of the largest technology companies in the world mentioned in the summary have a vested interest in ensuring interoperability between competing products at any level. Each will be forced to create their own bullshit standard when a truly open standards group gains enough participants, or they fail to steer a decent standards group straight into the ground or into their pockets.

    between 2005 and 2008 a completely successful campaign to drag feet, litigate and stonewall any and all attempts toward interoperability was waged between the usual suspects. The people who actually wanted interoperability or a standard started using open office or google docs. Now we get to watch another 4 year pissing contest to see which of these navel-gazing billion dollar industries can shit all over their version of "cloud office" in the pursuit of floating their lock-ins and contracts.

    --
    Good people go to bed earlier.
  2. Tangent: Is open office really stable? by osssmkatz · · Score: 0, Troll

    I was doing a major project in OpenOffice Base a while back, because that was what was specified. Trouble was it wasn't stable.. at least not on my Mac. How can I trust software that crashes? With no respect lost to the open source community, I did a substantial amount of work in OpenOffice Writer and in Abiword on my PC (Windows) without too much trouble.