Microsoft Announces OOXML-UOF Project with China

Andy Updegrove writes "Today, Microsoft announced its own interoperability project to bridge the gap between China's domestically developed Uniform Office Format (UOF) and Microsoft's OOXML. In the continuing tit for tat battle between ODF and OOXML, this announcement tracks the intent of an already-existing 'harmonization' committee, hosted by OASIS, that is exploring interoperability options between ODF and UOF. Like the OOXML-ODF translator project announced by Microsoft last year, the new effort will be an open source project hosted by SourceForge. The announcement is, in one sense, no surprise. Microsoft has been waging a nation-by-nation battle for the hearts and minds of ISO/IEC JTC1 National Bodies, in an effort to win adoption of OOXML (now Ecma 376) as a global standard with equal status to ODF (now ISO 26300). In order to do so, it needs to offset the argument that one document format standard is not only enough, but preferable. With UOF representing a third entrant in the format race, easy translation of documents would obviously be key to lessen the burden on customers of products based upon one format or the other."

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are so many people so satisfied with the status quo of being locked-in to Microsoft products? Why would you want to put all your information in a basket owned by a single vendor who keeps you at their mercy? I don't want to wear any software vendor's handcuffs, even if I trusted them, and I really don't trust Microsoft at all at this point.

The only straight answer I've heard thus far was from one guy who told me it was because he owned stock in Microsoft. Windows & Office, after all, are the only two profitable divisions in all of Microsoft (and they do make one hell of a profit, precisely because of the lock-in).

Competition??

[l2718]

We've been through this before, but why would the user benefit from multiple standards when they are essentially equivalent? The user does not interact with the document on the disk. He interacts with a computer program -- so there is a natural room for competition in the field of word processors, which benefits the user. In fact, a single accepted office document format will simplify this competition and hence help the user.

A design competition for file formats would persumably benefit programmers who write word processors. But once the design is fixed, they too would rather implement one format rather than two. Again, the word processor has an internal representation of the data, and reading/writing to disk can be done in many ways. Of course, having the format be a dump of the internal (binary) data structures of your program would be a big boost -- but that can hardly be said to foster competition.

Re:Why?

[DragonWriter]

Why are so many people so satisfied with the status quo of being locked-in to Microsoft products?

Because for the average user, Microsoft products (at least Office) do the job required, and do it fairly well, and no one is providing anything that, despite file format incompatibility, provides a compelling reason to change aside from "we're a bit cheaper". Without that, no one is going to get up in arms.

If someone comes up with a way to fill the role of the word processor or spreadsheet in a way stunningly better than Microsoft has, then substantial numbers of people will start chafing at vendor lock-in. As long as most competitors are just making "me too, and you can run me on more OS's" products, they'll have a niche, but not a big push for change.

Re:Why?

[presidentbeef]

Because for the average user, Microsoft products (at least Office) do the job required, and do it fairly well, and no one is providing anything that, despite file format incompatibility, provides a compelling reason to change aside from "we're a bit cheaper". Without that, no one is going to get up in arms.

Well...a couple hundred bucks for most home users is a lot just to do word processing, spreadsheets, etc. Compare that to OpenOffice, which is free. That is a huge savings.

I'd say it's more likely that most users don't know the difference between Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office, don't know there are alternatives, and assume that "free" means cheap and worthless.

It's different for businesses, but, if we assume there is an exact clone of Office which is completely free...I think most people would switch rather than to continually pay Microsoft for new licenses and upgrades which are practically forced.

But can those features be incorporated?

[khasim]

I'm sure China would prefer their home grown standard.

The question is whether or not the features of that standard can be incorporated into ODF soon enough for China to adopt ODF as their standard instead of their home grown one.

Or can a big enough chunk of them be incorporated so that they can evolve in parallel and merge some time in the future?

Re:Why?

[cheater512]

There probably should be a 'Get OpenOffice' campaign just like the 'Get Firefox' campaign when Firefox 1.0 was released.

Re:Why?

[eMbry00s]

It would hardly have the same succeess as Firefox has seen. Firefox was vastly superior to the alternative, OOo is not.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about before that, we have a "Make OpenOffice not suck compared to MS Office" campaign among developers?

Re:Why?

[suv4x4]

What this confirms, is that OpenOffice is nice for casual use by amateur users. I really mean people who do a lot of content in Office though, and they would definitely go for Microsoft Office.

It can be comapred to Gimp vs Photoshop. If you want to adjust the levels and remove the red eye of a photo, Gimp's nice (hell, even Picassa is nice). If you want to make a button or background for your web page, then Gimp is again nice.

But if you do complex photo retouch, ton of design, every day, then Gimp is unbearable, and Photoshop is THE app to use (with some other bearable alternatives for limited work, such as Fireworks, Paintshop Pro and maybe a couple others).