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UK Forces Microsoft To Adopt Open Document Standards

Posted by samzenpus on from the opening-it-up dept.

First time accepted submitter Barsteward writes Microsoft has confirmed it will start supporting the Open Documents Format (ODF) in the next update to Office 365, following a lengthy battle against the UK government. In 2014, Microsoft went against the government's request to support ODF, claiming its own XML format was more heavily adopted. The UK government refutes the claim, stating that ODF allows users to not be boxed into one ecosystem.

3 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. Cue ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    10% effort into actually implementing this, and
    90% effort into examination how to creatively misunderstand OPF, extend ODF with "open" binary extensions, denigrate users of ODF, or just plain break ODF

    Or maybe it's 1% vs 99%, I don't know.

  2. Lotus by cmurf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Microsoft remembers how they took over Lotus' market share for spreadsheets. Lotus had no obscurity with their file format. Excel could read and write it perfectly. Open formats means the product must be as good or better for the price or users can jump ship. Closed formats are a buffer for mistakes or resting on laurels.

  3. Re:That makes sense by ledow · · Score: 5, Informative

    Have you seen OOXML?

    The reason they had to fork is because the format is SO binary and tied into the old legacy codebase that - even masquerading behind an XML front - there's no illusion of portability whatsoever.

    They were forced to document it, by the EU, and all they did was describe every hack, binary fudge and kludge that went into it so that it was almost impossible to make a compatible format.

    When you're talking Office on Mac, it's not a question of just adding Mac UI code and incorporating another platform into the build process. It's replicating all those stupid bit-wise assumptions made throughout the format. It's like WMF used to be - literally just a description of the Windows GDI commands required to replicate the object on the screen (which is why WMFs were capable of containing executable code!). That's pretty much the best analogue to something like MS's "open" XML formats.

    I'm not surprised that the Mac versions are staggered by several years and not entirely compatible. That's how long it takes to emulate the Windows-specific fudges in the format.

    What MS are scared of is a format that works across all platforms because, then, what's to say you'll bother to buy Office?