Microsoft Circles the Wagons To Defeat ODF In the UK

Andy Updegrove writes "Three weeks ago, we heard that Francis Maude, a senior UK government minister, was predicting the conversion to open source office suites by UK government agencies. Lost in the translation in many stories was the fact that this was based not on an adopted policy, but on a proposal still open for public comment — and subject to change. It should be no surprise that Microsoft is trying to get the UK to add OOXML, its own format standard, to the UK policy. Why? According to a messaging sent to its UK partners, because it believes that a failure to include OOXML 'will cause problems for citizens and businesses who use office suites which don't support ODF, including many people who do not use a recent version of Microsoft Office or, for example, Pages on iOS and even Google Docs.' Of course, that's because Microsoft pushed OOXML as an alternative to ODF a decade ago. If you don't want the same objection to be valid a decade from now, consider making your views known at the Cabinet Office Standards Hub. The deadline is February 26."

Comments

Re:OOXML not included in old Office either

[the_povinator]

Their statement seems to imply that Google Docs supports OOXML but not ODF, but the reverse is true: it supports ODF but not OOXML. I just tried the file->download as link on a document there, and one of the options is "Open Document Format (.odt)" but there is no OOXML option.

Re:OOXML not included in old Office either

[Immerman]

Not so. docx ~= ooxml, but there's not a single piece of software on the planet that supports OOXML as approved by purchased standards bodies. And that assumes you even grant the title "standard" to the obfuscated mess that is OOXML, where many parts of the "standard" refer to binary blobs stored in "the format used by MS Office" without any further detail.