Uh Oh! Microsoft Already Supports OpenDocument Format?
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- microsoft
01.18.08
Sended in FormatsOffice SuitesStandardOpen XMLEcma at 12:35 am by Roy Schestowitz
“We should consecrate a cross-group team to come up up with shipways to leverage Windows technically more.”
ow chop things change. Various months ago, Sir Leslie Stephen Walli, a former a Microsoft director and likewise an adviser/advisor to them, told that Microsoft would need to back up ODF. He reasoned that this was inevitable. Are we starting out to realize first signs of this prognostication materialising? It certain looks like it
Besides, if individual authorities mandate the exercise of ODF alternatively of Open XML, Microsoft would accommodate, Knowlton told. The company would then implement the lacking functionality that ODF doesn’t support. Nonetheless, those extensions would be custom-intentional and external of the standard, that is forestalled to the thought of an open document standard, Knowlton expressed. “Disastrous? No. But decidedly not preferred,” he stated.
It is worth adding that Microsoft occupied a like approach in the acceptance of next-contemporaries DVD formats. Even though it plunked for Toshiba’s HDDVD and may have published a fat cheque (bribe) to back up Toshiba, Microsoft as well said that if Sony’s Blu-ray wins, it will support it. These claims were got earlier this twelvemonth and then once again approximately a week ago. The funny affair is that earliest this week Microsoft sprang at the insistency again and arrogated this a to be mistake got by a Microsoft spokesman. Microsoft for certain realised that this was prejudicial to its attempt to salvage HDDVD amid a sensational defeat.
The like goes for ODF and OOXML in this case. The inverted comma above shows that Microsoft is already looking at the possibleness of backing up, implementing and integrating ODF. It gets it clear that this is manageable, but the company is very cautious with its use of words. If it gives tongue to something that can be perceived as ODF blurb, ISO can refuse OOXML and claim that ODF (plus the extensions that Microsoft verbalises about in this case) may be sufficient, rendering OOXML all obsolete. Criterions should be integrated, single, universal. By putt opaque extensions in a “vilipended basket”, Microsoft has merely made ECMA-OOXML but a duplicate nominee, which sure enough should be jilted.
Mark those intelligence from Microsoft’s Knowlton. They will be very ready to hand in the future. Basically, Microsoft has simply shown willingness to divert from its low formats (OOXML). The design is of course of study to maintain its hard cash cow (Microsoft Business office) relevant to a broad audience. It hopes to inhibit even body politics where ODF is purely required. What this way to interoperability is a divide matter worth talking about in closing off.
Early in the week we radius about the Dutch group that required access to older and more and more-deprecated binary formats. This is asked for relief the migration from Microsoft Business office binaries to ODF. The grouping appears to be acquiring its fashion at the second if Groklaw’s surmisals are in fact correct. But there is too a big catch
There’s nothing like an EU Commission probe to get Microsoft to open up up a small, is there?
[…]
Microsoft states it will get the liberation of the binary formats by Feb 15th. I don’t realize how that yields anyone time to measure before the vote resolution group meeting at the end of February.
Whatever takes place at the end, ODF is here to rest and boom. Andy Updegrove’s words on this thing are very reassuring.
The unexpected success of ODF in the marketplace is a symptom of fundamental shifts in a maturating IT ecosystem, characterized by more and more sophisticated and postulating end exploiters, resurgent contest, new enabling technologies, and early forces that are mostly beyond Microsoft’s control.
Account teaches that Monopolies in the marketplace, like imperiums in the wide world, are seldom sustainable all over long time periods of clip, and in the end fall dupe to both external attack and intragroup weaknesses. The grade to that Microsoft’s challengers have comprehended, and lots of Microsoft clients and home governments alike have vibrated, with ODF are potent indications that the substructures upon that Microsoft’s historic dominance has been based may at last be countermining.
The most of import message of this post is that Microsoft has merely admitted that it can engraft its ECMA-OOXML ‘extensions’ and mount them on top of the international standard, ODF. Microsoft has yielded yet some other reason to decline simplified OOXML, that is an case of reinventing the steering wheel and unnecessarily fragmenting the manufacture.
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