ODF Support In Google Drive

An anonymous reader writes: Google's Chris DiBona told a London conference last week that ODF support was coming next year, but today the Google Drive team unexpectedly launched support for all three of the main variants — including long-absent Presentation files. You can now simply open ODT, ODS and ODP files in Drive with no fuss. It lacks support for comments and changes but at least it shows progress towards full support of the international document standard, something conspicuously missing for many years.

Comments

Exporting?

[loosescrews]

Did they finally fix exporting as ODF?

Re:This is huge

[SpzToid]

Plus, Microsoft Office just became less relevant and must now play catch up in order to remain competitive.

This is huge news for the ODF Standard, and for all the municipalities, universities, etc. who must break free of Microsoft Office Lock-in and 'taxes'.

Google is very strategic.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Everyone knew as long as MS-Office franchise is delivering money to Microsoft in fire hoses, there is no way anyone can compete with it in *any* sphere. It will sustain losses year after year to deny revenue to the competition. Once the competition folds it has the market for itself. Look how long it was able to sustain losses to gain dominance with XBox franchise. Everyone knew that. Many people had ideas to attack it, but lacked the resources. People with resources, I am looking at you Sun microsystems, lacked the competence to pull it off.

Google went about it strategically. First it peeled of the low hanging fruit, people who don't need all the bells and whistles of a full suite with Google docs/apps. Then it leveraged the central server doing the edits, to create a collaborative edit features that were well ahead of MsOffice when it was introduced. Priced it cheap, pitched it to the enterprises. When it was forcing Microsoft to scramble to offer collaboration tools, Apple helped in the upgrade tread mill battle. In an earlier era, the top exec gets the latest and greatest laptop every six months with latest Office pre-installed and starts belting out documents in the latest format. IT will upgrade rest of the corp. But Apple took all the top execs with its iPad, and now PC is not the latest toy these top honchos were getting. Side effect: The corporate upgrade treadmill slowed down significantly.

Now it is going for the last section that really needs all the bells and whistles of a full fledged office suite. Instead of spending the money to reinvent the wheel inside google docs, it is just using the well established code base of OpenOffice and the ODF. Even though Microsoft lost the mind share and the market share in percentage terms, its cash cows were producing milk at the same old prodigal rate. Cutting off a significant portion of the MsOffice revenue stream is important for Google's business ops in other spheres. Else Microsoft will under cut it. It even tried to pay people to use Bing.

Google does not really want to make much money off its google docs franchise. It uses it just to crimp the revenue stream of Microsoft. It is making money elsewhere.

Re:This is huge

[petermgreen]

Latex has it's good and bad points.

good points
maintains mental distinction between input and output
maintains a reasonable level of semantic information
reliable and reasonablly fast for large documents
produces really nice typeset output
handles equations well
handles captioning and cross-referencing well
makes a reasonable job at layout before tweaking

bad points
only a few image formats work, with traditional latex it's EPS or bust, pdflatex is a bit better but it still pretty limited with PDF being the only vector format supported (which is fun as most pdf creators don't want to create arbitary sized pdfs so you often have to print to pdf then use a seperate tool to remove the borders) and the only bitmap formats supported being png and huffman jpeg (at least in my experiance artimetic coded jpeg doesn't work and gives an unhelpful error message, that caused some head scratching)
the layout engine is reasonablly smart but not smart enough to get a layout i'm happy with without tweaking and the compile-build-view cycle gets annoying during layout tweaking.
the whole system feels like hacks built on top of hacks. The parameters to hyperef to avoid ugly boxes don't work in all versions (not sure if they work in the latest now, I certainly remember having to downgrade when working on my thesis because of this). Hyperref links go to the float caption rather than the float itself unless you add another hack package called hypcap but that in turn requires further hackery to work with custom figure types (such as figures placed by the side of the text rather than inline with it..
table handling leaves a lot to be desired requiring significant manual tweaking for any nontrivial table.
there are way too many markup sensitive characters, this means that significant editing is often required after pasting in plain text.
requires running a bunch of tools in the right order and sometimes multiple times to process a document

Thats my experiance from writing a phd thesis with the thing anyway.