What Does the Microsoft ODF Converter Mean? 177
Andy Updegrove writes "It's been a week now since Microsoft announced its ODF/Office open source converter project - time enough for 183 on-line stories to be written, as well as hundreds of blog entries (one expects) and untold numbers of appended comments. Lest all that virtual ink fade silently into obscurity, it seems like a good time to look back and try to figure out what it all means. In this entry, I report on a long chat with Microsoft's Director of Standards Affairs Jason Matusow, and match up his responses with the official messaging in the converter press release. The result is a picture of a continuing, if slow and jerky, evolution within Microsoft as those that recognize market demands for more openness debate those that want to follow the old way. This internal divide means that the proponents of change need to point to real market threats in order to justify incremental changes. This adaptation by reaction process leaves Microsoft still lagging the market, but has allowed those that favor a more open approach to gradually turn the battle ship a few degrees at a time."
Duh (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of: (Score:4, Insightful)
Along with text, RTF, and older MS formatting.
And just like all those other options, they won't use it.
Re:Duh (Score:2, Interesting)
If they wanted an open-source project, they should have published an open-source application. Furthermore, the ODF converter doesn't hook into the save-as dialog. Why? Because plugins in office don't support that.
If they wanted ODF compatability, they should have PATCHED THE FILE DIALOG, not do some Open-Source song-and-dance to turn some RMS fanboys' faces red and Redmond fanboys' pants white.
Re:Duh (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm -- there's other converters that plug into the Save As dialog. I suspect this is just a packaging issue that they haven't gotten to because they're only at version 0.01 or whatever.
I'm Glad You Figured it out. (Score:2, Troll)
When they quit acting the same old way, I'll quit telling you about it.
Oh, Boy! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Oh, Boy! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think it's funny at all. Look, for lots of everyday uses, Microsoft Word isn't a bad program. Outlook, Excel, Powerpoint-- these all have their valid uses, and they all do a pretty decent job.
Is it good enough that I'd want to spend hundreds of dollars for it when there are free alternatives? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on what I'm doing and what I want, but I've spend money on Photoshop and Acrobat, and those also have free alternatives. I could imagine Microsoft Office remaining successfull if Microsoft starts selling it based on its own merits.
However, as someone running an IT department, I'm trying to migrate to OpenOffice where ever I can. It's not so that I can save a couple hundred dollars here and there, but I'm just entirely sick of the abuse Microsoft heaps on its own customers. All the vendor lock-in, piracy checks, and all the rest-- it hurts my company's flexibility. It worries me that my company might find itself in a position where it can't access its own data. I'm annoyed by the idea that Microsoft's default format isn't real XML, which would be easier for our databases to generate/process.
So what I'm saying is, yes, I'd like Microsoft to use/support real open standards. I'd like their systems to play well with others. I'd like to see a better version of Office for the Mac, and a version for Linux-- there have been times when I would have bought Office for Linux, even though Evolution/OpenOffice is working well enough.
I'd like Microsoft to do those things specifically because I kind of like Microsoft Office, and I'd like to keep using it. However, I can't, in good conscience, put my company's future at Microsoft's mercy because some executive in Microsoft is a childish prick who insists on leveraging their monopoly to the point of hurting their own customers. It's unacceptable.
Re:Oh, Boy! (Score:2)
Now I'm probably too used to OOo after using it and StarOffice for years. Plus I like the openness in design. Of course being a SOHO, I have a lot more flexibility in the matter than a corporation would. However Linux MS Office would be very helpful for a
Re:Oh, Boy! (Score:2)
Re:Oh, Boy! (Score:2)
It might be helpful now, but I'd say open source office packages will be capable of handling the macros and cruft sooner than MS will make Office cross platform. VBA is already partly supported in Novell's version of OOo, and is under heavy development for the mainstream version. http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/VBA [openoffice.org]
Beating Microsoft to the punch... (Score:2, Informative)
Today I saw this: www.officeviewers.com
You answered your own question (Score:3, Insightful)
While I'm sure they will come out with a useful tool of some sort, the bottom line is free marketing (IMHO).
It means... (Score:2)
Re:It means... (Score:5, Insightful)
Tom
Re:It means... (Score:3, Interesting)
Just create your resume in HTML and rename it to
Re:It means... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It means... (Score:2)
And please don't copy my sig. I own the copyright on it and will invoke the DMCA!
Re:It means... (Score:2)
You've obviously never used any Acrobat product other than the free reader:
Acrobat Family - Product Comparison [adobe.com]
Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:5, Interesting)
When will "professionals" realize that Word is not meant for all documents? It's great for short documents, posters, etc. But for real professional looking documents it's hard to beat a typesetter like TeX [or LaTeX].
This has nothing to do with bashing MSFT and everything to do with bashing the "one size fits all" mentality.
Tom - Who hates writing a book in Word but will do it anyways because its good for the resume.
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:3, Interesting)
Though I do admire the geek-pride of using TeX for that. I used to Blog in TeX, often because I didn't like MathML and was talking about math.
What I'm talking about moreso are books [even non-math books] and papers. It's so much cleaner to write them in LaTeX with the book class macros then in Word. For one thing, TeX handles all the layout for you, so the even/odd margins [e.g. where t
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
Believe me, it's not my choice.
Another thing I didn't mention is source code. My books have tons of real code in them. In my first book I wrote a perl script that inserts [nicely] source code in the TeX source. So I can regenerate the book
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
Why don't save your work in RTF until you convert the final draft to DOC? I haven't tried it but I imagine with appropriate markers you could parse the RTF sufficiently to drop in blobs of code. Use a makefile and dependency management should be easy. Alternatively, VB macros checking file dates or OLE though that could get messy.
Having said that, agreed; I've used both LaTeX and MSWord for large documents and after the initial learning curve LaTeX is more reliable, easier to use and gives a superior resu
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:5, Insightful)
TeX is a 30 yr old system still used today for a reason. Not saying the commercial side is bad but if you're working on a budget and need precision nothing beats TeX. Not only that but TeX is CVS friendly which comes in handy if you work in a team.
Besides, academia is moving towards Word for the very reason I cited. "oh it can do anything". Look at the recent LLNCS call for papers. They used to only accept photo-ready postscripts. Now they accept
And to add to that, writing a book in Word is cruel. You never get to see the final product and the flow/layout is just awful. When I was working on my first book I could easily make a modification then see what the final product would look like. Regenerating the entire 320 page book takes a mere minute [less really]. As an author it's encouraging to know what your presentation will look like as you work on it.
With my second book I will know what my pages look like a mere week or two before it hits the printers. That gives me very little time to review the layout and submit feedback. So I may get stuck with a book that really doesn't reflect what I wanted to accomplish.
Tom
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
"OSS" has nothing to do with this argument, Mr. Open Sores.
And to add to that, writing a book in Word is cruel. You never get to see the final product
And that's just the point -- most people don't want to see the "final product" until the editing cycle is complete and the publication is in the production phase. For a publication with an establshed DTP workflow, "camera ready" is a hindrance, not a help.
TeX might be the greatest publication tool in
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
Automatically inserting smart quote characters only makes sense in a WYSIWYG environment (which TeX is not). If it did that, there would be now way to override the default choice if necessary. Besides, if you have an editor like emacs that changes the " key to insert `` or '' as necessary, it doesn't matter.
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
Joking, right? The parent is absolutely correct -- in professional environments, Quark, InDesign and Framemaker are used far more often than TeX. In fact, outside of publishing long documents with complex formatting requirements (e.g. academic texts), almost nobody uses TeX. I ca
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
I suppose if you are willing to spend the time you can get properly laid out document in Word as well. just from what I've seen the typical user doesn't spend
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
Well, power IS usability. As easy to learn, easy to remember, familiarity... Maybe you should define better the problem you are trying to solve.
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:3, Interesting)
People often comment on how nice my documents look, my response is, it's because I don't use Word. Microsoft Word has always been terrible at creating attractive documents. It doesn't follow typesetting rules. I use Apple Pages now, used to use WordPerfect. Both produce documents that look much better than a standard Word document. In fact WordPerfect of ten years ago produced better looking documents than the current version of Word
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
Glad to hear there are proper editors out there. I've dabbled briefly in FrameMaker and it's decent too for layout. I dunno, my affinity for TeX comes from the fact that it's free and once you get over the initial learning curve, really easy to use.
I wonder if Pages will be ported to Linux?
Tom
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm currently working in an office environment. Personally, I haven't used MS Word here yet - for every document I've created I've either used LaTeX (great for citations, macros, and breaking things into chapters) or Pagemaker (great when you want to do layout by hand.)
Everyone else in this building, however, uses MS Word as their Blunt Instrument to do whatever task they have to get done. They use Word primarily because it's what they know, it works (albeit poorly) and in the end, they're uncomfortable with computers. To a lot of the general population, even an office population, computers are still magic black boxes. I'm not sure if there's a way to combat that fear. How many people can change their own oil? Fix their own TV?
We're geeks. We learn the most efficient way to do things because that is in our nature. Most people won't bother. They just want to get the damn job done, even if they end up wasting more time in the long run.
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
I think the trick is to have a good technical case and a good business case. You won't switch the world in an instance but you can certainly move things in the right direction.
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:5, Insightful)
I've spent a good deal of time in both Word and LaTeX and hear this all the time from geeks who still use LaTeX for everything.
It's worth pointing out that LaTeX is not the most efficient way of doing most documents. It is very good at handling citations, but that's it. For everything else, it is inefficient compared to a word processor. And, word processors could have excellent support for citations, if there was a market for it (a few thousand acadmics who expect all software to be free is not a market).
To back up that statement a bit, consider the process of createing a document in LaTeX. Usually, you open up a text editor, write your document using LaTeX's markup language and 'compile' the document. Once its compiled, you look at it in xpdf, find the layout/grammar bugs, and repeat. At some point, you start breaking the document out into sub-files that contain sections or complex equations, and it's not uncommon to have a main.tex file that builds the final document, usually with the aid of a makefile.
Given that workflow, can you see any reason LaTeX would appeal to geeks? Think about it. It's exactly the same way we learned to develop code in school! Edit, compile, run, subroutines, makefile. It _appears_ to be the most efficient way because it maps nicely to something we do on a regular basis. But, most people stopped using text editors and makefiles when IDEs matured. Here's the secret: Word processors are the IDEs of layout.
Let's look a little deeper. To do any basic formating in LaTeX, you have to surround your text with markup. That's extra typing, which is not terribly efficient. And, when you're reading heavily marked up text, you have to filter out the markup to make sense of things. To catch any layout errors, you rely on a viewer for feedback, which adds a roundtrip between the viewer-editor-web. I threw Web in there, because if you've ever tried to do any _real_ layout in LaTeX, you'll need to hunt down the secret incantation that solves your problem. Then there's spell checking. Sure, FlySpell is nice in Emacs, but it's hardly state of the art. Grammar checking? Don't even thing about it (yeah, I know this is of limited usefulness, but it helps sometimes).
Now, go back to a word processor. There's no extra markup to type, layout problems can usually be resolved by tweaking a few settings available from the context (right-click) menu, there's no compile-debug cycle. Styles (even in Word) can be defined to change the look of a document instantly (as long as you know how to use them, but the same is true for LaTeX). For complicated documents, word processors do start to show their rough edges. But, LaTeX doesn't scale that well, either. And, that's a customer issue, most people just don't do enough complicated layout for it to matter. Output formats? "Save as..." (and don't try the human readable claim - how often do you really go back and edit things outside the program you created them in? Be honest.)
So, next time you find yourself claiming that LaTeX is the best way to do everything, take a step back and make an honest evaluation of your workflow.
-Chris
WYSIWYM document processor (Score:2)
Re:WYSIWYM document processor (Score:2)
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
I had to use LaTeX in school (CSE grad, out in the working word now), and absolutely hated it. Yeah, it was cool if I wanted to build a document from scratch. I hear it's really good for academia and math graphics and crap. But for writing a goddam letter or resume or book report or anything else 99% of the world is going to do most of the time, why in the blue hell would you use that instead of something like Word/WordPerfect/OO? For what we did in class with LaTeX (project documentati
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
Yes, but only because they were all VB kiddies. "Most people" is not an interesting metric when talking about complex tasks, like programming or publishing. Word is the VB of publishing. It's used by semi-literate people to bash out some crud that nobody else with any sense would want to touch, even with gloves and tongs.
Most non-crappy programs are still written with (smarter) text editors and makefiles (or make-equivalents, like a
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
What about all the people who make retarded blanket statements that won't stand up to a moment's scrutiny? On slashdot, no less? What would you call them? "Most" of them are trolls...
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:5, Insightful)
not all easies are created equal (Score:2)
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
But in the long run, it is. If you use the right kind of markup, its easy to change styles in TeX/LaTeX/... quite easily across an entire document. In most WYSIWYG word processors, much of the formatting tends to be ad-hoc, so needs to be adjusted, brought up to date, in multiple places. Furthermore, indexing the document on specific terms (for example, dates - there may be a dozen dates in a document all of which have different meanings - how do you decid
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
Dude...that's like saying,
"How many people can build their own birdfeeder? Build their own House?"
Fixing a TV requires replacement of high-voltage electronics. Good diagnostics require at least a multimeter, and preferably an oscilliscope...and if you do it wrong the high voltage could kill you.
Changing oil requires an oil filter, a screw driver, and a pan, and if you do it wrong you'll usually just get oil all over the place (although a friend of
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
I prefer strap wrenches to remove the oil filter.
That is, if it doesnt come off by hand.
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
Unless that task involves numbers, in which case they use MS Excel as their Blunt Instrument. I've never yet seen a case where Excel was the right tool to use, but they do it anyway (using spreadsheets as a database even with MS Access installed, argh!).
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
The problem I see is that most people don't want to have to look at markup. A lot of people flat-out don't get the idea. Text that you write in, but it won't show up when you print it...?
I agree, though, that Word isn't well-suited for all purposes. I'm excited to hear about some of the su
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd like to think that "professionals" have no problem grasping that Word isn't really good for anything. Office drones and beginners may get by with writing shopping lists and memos in Word, but I consider it unfortunate that their sheer number perpetuate the notion that Word is the tool to use for generating documents of any type.
But for real professional looking documents it's hard to
A publishing company that used Word (Score:3, Interesting)
Their stock and trade is Securities and Insurance Course ware. When I started there, they were in the midst of a massive project to migrate from Word perfect to Word for all heir courses.
That's right, they maintained 200 plus page securities courses in Word, running on Windows 95 and 98.
One problem with this was the fact that word always formatted the document for your "Default Printer" which in this case caused things like floating text boxes and gr
Re:A publishing company that used Word (Score:3, Interesting)
Then they tried sending a Publisher file to their preferred printing company. (Financial Campus' owner was a part owner of the printing firm)
It turned out their hardware couldn't use Publisher files, and the Publisher generated EPS files were apparently a Microsoft Specific variant on EPS that their systems couldn't parse.
So Publisher was similarly discarded, and the owner continued to insist Word was the "Best tool for the job."
Avoid the tangent and move straight to the bash (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, big migrations never happen overnight. Let's say that an executive has made a commitment to move his organization over to ODF. If Microsoft were to continue stiffing ODF acceptance, the first action would be to start rolling out and training an alternative tool, like OpenOffice. On the other hand, if Microsoft has announced an ODF plugin is coming, the first action is to stand pat, and wait for it. At this point, 3 things may happen:
1: Microsoft delivers an ODF plugin, and the migration moves onward.
2: The executive moves onward to a new position, and the ODF migration can be safely ignored and/or rescinded.
3: Things continue as-is until the deadline approaches and there's still no ODF plugin. At this point the business can either go into some sort of panic mode or make the first, perhaps of many, perhaps indefinite, ODF migration deadline postponements.
Note that all it takes is the promise of an ODF plugin to defer the whole "ODF threat". It's easy to add "schedule slips" and other such to slow the entire migration plan to a crawl, possibly even to increase its cost until everyone cries "Uncle" and decides that Office licenses until Doomsday are cheaper.
Re:Avoid the tangent and move straight to the bash (Score:2)
My reckoning is this: In order for ODF (or indeed any XML based file format) to support embedding things like images, it must by definition allow you to embed binary blobs, right? (You can prove this in OO.o by choosing to embed images when you save a file).
I can envisage the Microsoft converter doing a reasonably good job of importing, but the export will be "produce a Word document, encode it as a binary blob and wrap it in ODF".
Seriously. The reason why is simple:
1.
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
When people figure out that character justification is the main feature Wordprocessor lack and how you can tell if a newspaper is using Word or a real publishing product for their articles.
Most people don't get it; however, the suggested products you list for replacements also have severe limit
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:2)
For really quick things [e.g. emails, usenet posts, etc] I agree that plain ol' simple text is the best.
Tom
Duh (Score:3, Funny)
Battleship (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's the problem. The public perception is still Microsoft as a weapon of war. And it's the perception because that's still how Microsoft operates. Going beyond the open/closed debate they need to stop treating IT as a battleground. As soon as they switch from a war mentality to a peace and cooperation mentality things will go a lot smoother. For as long as they make a fight out of things there will be trouble. Maybe one day they'll learn there's actually money to be made while at peace with others.
Re:Battleship (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it is almost the opposite. Microsoft has always been at its best when it was not in control of the market, and had to fight for success. I remember very, very fondly Word 2.0 on DOS. That was a thing of beauty, and it came out of the need to compete with WordPerfect and Wang and all the other word processors on the market in those days. Microsoft weren't trying to lock out new competitors in those days, they were participants in a competitive landscape. That is what is missing -- that idea that they are participants in a fray, not the idea that they should enforce the Pax Microsoftia where no competitors are allowed.
Re:Battleship (Score:2)
Rule of Acquisition #35 Peace is good for business.
Re:Battleship (Score:2)
Oh wait... it only looked like the battleship was turning. It's not.
That's just the cannons slowly swinging around.
-
Re:Battleship (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't like to think of business as a battle. Every conflict is not a war. But Microsoft chooses to make it one.
Re:Battleship (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Battleship (Score:2)
Do you think Microsoft was the only one making microcomputers accessible to the general public? Please. If anything, Microsoft was behind the curve on usability - assuming that's what you mean by "made it so that every retard on the planet can and does use a computer". And even this late in the game, they are far from the only usable option (and far from pe
Re:Battleship (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Battleship (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a load of crap. There are valid reasons for disliking Microsoft at the moment. They try to push proprietary, patented file formats/codecs/protocols into the community so that everyone feels pressure to use Microsoft software.
I don't mind if Microsoft software is crap, because I can just choose not to use it.
I don't mind if Microsoft software is proprietary, because I can just use something else.
I DO MIND when Microsoft forces their users to try to exchange files with me that are in formats that Microsoft have made sure I can't read, either through secret specifications or through legal (software patent) pressure.
If Microsoft played nice, they could get along well with the Slashdot community. Have you ever considered why Microsoft has Internet Explorer? They don't make money by selling it. It's not really a decent browser - other browsers are better. So why do they have it? Why not just bundle Firefox or something else with Windows? IE is a power grab. Its sole purpose is to be incompatible with web standards so that websites are written specifically for IE and won't work well for users of other operating systems.
Re:Battleship (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Battleship (Score:2)
Much like general public perception of the Cable Company is most definitely negative -- nobody likes monopoly institutions, but that doesn't mean people want to get rid of them. It's not a cause for anyone except some upper middleclass kids too cowardly to leave their parents basement and find an actually meaningful place to devote their energies.
Re:Battleship (Score:2)
Re:Battleship (Score:2)
Re:Battleship (Score:2)
Depends on the Implementation (Score:5, Insightful)
Depending on how Microsoft chooses to implement it, it can be a Good Thing or a Distracting Thing. For example:
- They can throw up dialogs like "If you save in this format your document may look like crap later" (sort of what they do now)
If they stick to previous behavior, the converter will work, but it will be annoying enough to implement that a lot of people and organizations won't bother with it.Re:Depends on the Implementation (Score:2)
This is one of the biggest problem I have with open standards. Basically anything anyone wants to add to their word processor will now have to either have to be part of the standard, degrade in some way, or simply not be added. We're stuck with the lowest common denominator syndrome and no one wins here. If Microsoft adds a feature that's not part of the standard they'll be accus
Re:Depends on the Implementation (Score:2)
Re:Depends on the Implementation (Score:2)
Re:Depends on the Implementation (Score:2)
some sort of OpenOfficeConverter??? (Score:3, Interesting)
I realize that OpenOffice has got an incredibly complex build system, and just sitting down and modifying is more than a simple task. However, it IS open-source, so I was wondering if anyone has considered this possibility:
What about a nice, self-contained version of OpenOffice, but with all of the GUI stuff stripped out, which instead of opening the editor, simply opens a little drag'n'drop dialog box. You select your desired "output format", and drop any document supported by OpenOffice into this window. This would include ODF files, Word docs, RTF, etc. It would then perform the equivalent of "Open" and "Save" in OpenOffice, in whatever format you specified.
Voila, instant converter!
I would think this would be a baby-step towards having a nice universal document converter. It doesn't strike me as totally necessary to have it as an Add-in to Word, at least not immediately.
Yes, this would use OpenOffice's reverse-engineering MSdoc parser for converting to ODF, rather than using Word's native code, but I imagine it would be a good start anyways, and easier to do.
Anyways, I've tried to build OO before and quickly ran out of RAM and disk space, but maybe someone would be up to the task.
Re:some sort of OpenOfficeConverter??? (Score:2)
"Director of Standards Affairs" (Score:4, Funny)
Presumably his title is Director of Standards Affairs because Microsoft's relationship with standards is only ever a quick fling, and someone usually gets fucked.
Two camps (Score:2)
Thank goodness... (Score:2, Interesting)
Somewhat OT: Randall Schwartz (Score:2)
Let's start calling it "MS XML" (Score:3, Insightful)
It's the sensible thing to do.
Re:Let's start calling it "MS XML" (Score:2)
Re:Let's start calling it "MS XML" (Score:2)
it doesn't matter (Score:2)
Whichever it is, it doesn't really matter. Microsoft Office will have good support for reading/writing ODF, if not from Microsoft, then from third parties.
Whether Microsoft's converter works and is usable will tell us something about where Microsoft is heading; but for figuring that out, we'll have to wait until the convert
Re:Can they extend the format? (Score:5, Informative)
OO.o has extended ODF for its own purposes since the ODF spec itself is incomplete (e.g. lack of a standard for storing spreadsheet formulas).
And how about this little gem?
http://opendocumentfellowship.org/applications/ko
"Our tests show that OpenOffice and KOffice have some problems opening each other's OpenDocument files. Also, support for drawings is a bit incomplete."
I wouldn't be surprised if MS ends up with better ODF support (i.e. more compliant to the spec, as opposed to just trying to mimic whatever OO.o does) than most ODF-native suites.
Re:Can they extend the format? (Score:3, Insightful)
You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Seriously, it has almost never been in MS best interest to adhere to standards and MS has a long history of bastardizing standards. While I fully expect them to "extend" functionality in the specification, I am pretty sure that will not be "compliant" with the specification.
Re:Can they extend the format? (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't you remember java?
Re:Can they extend the format? (Score:2, Insightful)
OOo is okay for me (Score:2)
I sure hope Microsoft makes it easy for others to exchange documents with me.
Re:Can they extend the format? (Score:3, Interesting)
This will give Microsoft a chance to embrace and extend ODF, so maybe in a few years everyone will be using Microsoft's ODF format. If the format isn't capable of doing everything that existing formats already do, then it isn't ready to be a standard yet.
So I'm going to use OpenOffice, you will use KOffice, and my boss will use Microsoft Offic
Re:Can they extend the format? (Score:2)