ODF Plugins and a Microsoft Promise of Cooperation 262
Andy Updegrove writes "Last week, the Massachusetts Information Technology Division (ITD) issued a Request for Information (RFI) on any plugins that might be under development to assist it in migrating from a MS Office environment to one based upon software that supports ODF. The RFI acknowledges the fact that it may be necessary or advantageous to see some of the code in Office in order to enable the types of features that the ITD is looking for. Conveniently, Jason Matusow, Microsoft's Director of Standards Affairs, had this to say on the occasion of ODF's approval by the members of ISO and the IEC: "The ODF format is limited to the features and performance of OpenOffice and StarOffice and would not satisfy most of our Microsoft Office customers today. Yet we will support interoperability with ODF documents as they start to appear and will not oppose its standardization or use by any organization. The richness of competitive choices in the market is good for our customers and for the industry as a whole." Presumably such support will include helping the plug-in developers that will assist Massachusetts migrate from a MS Office environment to one based upon ODF-compliant office productivity software."
So uh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Gosh, not that I'd like to insult the integrity of a company with such a spectacular record of interoperability and standards compliance as Microsoft, but I really just can't think of anything obvious that their closed document format offers beyond lack of compatibility with anything but their own products.
Excellent (Score:4, Insightful)
This is extremely significant news. What this means is that, after years and years of MSO having no competition, years after they basically wiped out wordperfect etc... There is now significant competition to Microsoft Office, and they are being forced to acknowledge it.
Hopefully this will mean that Microsoft will start developing some new revolutionary stuff in Microsoft Office instead of just resting on their laurels (sorry but I don't think any version since 6.0 has been that huge of an upgrade compared to going to 6.0). This is good news. We are all going to get better products instead of everyone just copying each other's minor features.
Open Office is here to stay. They have succesfully gotten a multi-billion dollar company to acknowledge them as a serious competitor just like Linux forced them to acknowledge that windows has competition. Microsoft no longer has the monopoly they did a few years ago.
Genuinely interested (Score:5, Insightful)
Nearly all the users in our office are doing standard officey things in MS Office. None of them use features that aren't present in OpenOffice - in fact, hardly any of them use MS Office as anything more than a glorified typewriter with a handy spell checker.
Re:Genuinely interested (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't disagree that people use features in MS Office that aren't present in OpenOffice - however, I disagree that it's "most people".
Re:Kooks. (Score:5, Insightful)
It is more like Microsoft must provide ODF compatibility or the state government as well as local governments will not be buying Office. Notice that this promise came after they tried to bribe and threaten the state government to back down on its ODF requirement.
Failure to reverse the ODF decision means that no matter what decision Microsoft makes they will lose the Office monopoly. Bill Gates can choose to keep a piece of the action or lose everything.
delusions about ms office (Score:5, Insightful)
I am constantly amazed by the sort of mass-delusion people seem to have about MS office, intentionally perpetuated by ms - the idea that ms office is a framework of acceptably workable office productivity applications. Wrong wrong wrong.
Each and every office application is buggy, has gaping holes in terms of usability (for example the Access report designer makes adding columns to data a nightmare - you have to align line elements to the pixels manually, or use the severely clunky grid system), and makes any use beyond bare minimum severely frustrating (my job is to work with Microsoft Office and I'm at expert level with it so I know those only too well).
Microsoft dominate the market, and they have abused it as most public companies in a monopoly would do. The software is incomplete and as far as I'm concerned unacceptably faulty but it's the best out there given that they have had virtually no competition. Now that's changing, they act as if their so-far monopolised customer base would find other software unacceptably bad. It's ridiculous.
Thank God for open source giving people a more usable, workable solution not only for portability's sake but to finally give us an alternative so we can all show ms what is and isn't acceptable. In my opinion it isn't there yet - but it's only a matter of time before Openoffice exceeds MS in terms of functionality I'm convinced of it.
I know I'm probably gonna be modded down for trolling/off-topic/etc. but I feel so strongly about this - please can we all stop acting as if their software is acceptable. In any other industry a company producing such faulty goods would have gone out of business, and rightly so from the customer's point of view. We're only encouraging Microsoft to not bother fixing anything time and time again if we stay complacent, and yet again us customers' will be cheated out of decent software. They could do it. They have very talented people working for them. But they only understand the language of commerce - so let's make the competition strong and force them to change their ways. It's time for change.
/rant
Re:Genuinely interested (Score:4, Insightful)
Can I get some of what you're smoking? The commenting is one hell of a mess. Oh yeah, it looks all shiney and look! colours! on the surface, but have you ever tried to really _work_ with it? The only use is within small workgroups where a little bit of improved communication would make it superfluous anyways.
I've tried working with both commenting and versioning in a non-trivial environment where several different - and at times hostile - parties are involved. You can forget about it. We're currently using
In
And let's not even speak about versioning. 20 year old CVS beats it with one arm tied behind its back.
Almost all of Words advanced features are half-assed at best. I'll celebrate the day its market share plummets to insignificance.
Re:So uh... (Score:1, Insightful)
But Microsoft chose not to participate and bet on their own formats.
But hey, the ODF specifications are not set in stone. MS can join the ODF comitee and work on an improved OpenDocument 1.1 standard.
Re:So uh... (Score:1, Insightful)
Although I can see that that's an interesting question in its own right, don't get misled and ignore the separate question of which features ODF doesnt support.
He's trying his tired old rhetoric of implying that ODF==Open Office. Don't fall for it. If ODF is lacking then ODF needs to be improved. Whether Open Office supports the features isn't so important.
Re:Before we get the usual FUD and Tinfoil Respons (Score:3, Insightful)
The two examples that you provide are probably used by 0.01% of Microsoft Word documents. I would not call them "real world" examples.
Re:Before we get the usual FUD and Tinfoil Respons (Score:5, Insightful)
If Microsofts wants to support ODF, and needs more features, all they'd have to do is propose extensions and present a well founded argument for why they should be allowed. They haven't.
In essence, Microsoft likes to whine about this, because it serves their purpose to keep ODF adoption rates down, but they show no interest in doing anything about it.
Re:let me be the 1st to say ... (Score:5, Insightful)
They can't win, can they?
Re:People don't need most features (Score:1, Insightful)
That may have been true way back in the heyday of the nineties, but as you yourself pointed out, that was ten years ago. This is 2006, not 1996, and things have changed. I am confident that there is not a single feature (Excel flight simulator aside... But I hear that doesn't work in recent versions...) that does not get used somewhere by someone to accomplish something they're trying to do at least once in a while, if not every day. Wake up, the nineties are gone, so is clippy (ok, almost gone from Office 2003, and will be gone from Office 2007 for good), as well as your reality. After all, do you really think that the Office team doesn't get enough feature requests so instead they spend their time coming up with worthless features solely for the purpose of adding more checkboxes to the list? And if you really can't come up with enough new features to occupy a dev team for a couple more product cycles, that's the best compliment I've ever heard that you can make to a product team: your product is done, it's perfect, time to retire!
Re:Genuinely interested (Score:3, Insightful)
(* Note that I said primarily; please don't take me to task because not only geeks read slashdot, or because you personally are not a geek but are a regular - I didn't say that no non-geek reads the site, just that most of us are geeks...)
Re:So uh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, although rarely.
VBA scripting
Yes.
object insertion
Yes.
cross-referencing
Yes.
Ever used these features? No? That's probably why they're not in OpenOffice.
Just because *you* don't use a feature, or know anyone else that does, doesn't mean that no-one uses it.
Say what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Genuinely interested (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Before we get the usual FUD and Tinfoil Respons (Score:2, Insightful)
Fix the huge problem first and then aim for new features. I'm a little doubtful that a significant amount of the population will start using much of what is added at this point to the very mature product that is an office suite but even if some do, they'll still have the option of using a document format that only Word can read for it and using ODF when they don't need those features.
Embrace & Destroy (Score:4, Insightful)
Transparent as it is, the strategy is remarkably effective. The masses blame the standards-compliant software for "not working", not Microsoft for having poisoned the standard. The courts will sit on their hands and a couple of billion-dollar buyouts will silence the commercial opposition.
Re:let me be the 1st to say ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So uh... (Score:3, Insightful)
>
> And, it is an important element of FUD
Is it just me, or is there a certain irony to be observed in the above statements?
- Oisin