Novell Releases OO–OOXML Translator 157
Tookis writes in with news that Novell has released an Office Open XML (OOXML) translator for OpenOffice.org. The article argues that, though this move may represent a nail in the coffin of the franchise known as Microsoft Office, and therefore a Good Thing, what is truly needed is a fully supported Evolution on Windows.
hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
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...the article is just confused (Score:2, Insightful)
Apart from the good news of an OOXML translator for OpenOffice.org, that was a terrible article!
It seems the author is a noob who is only just putting his toe in the water with a first install of OOo. After anouncing the news of the translator, he then starts rambling on about Evolution on windows, whatever.
Who said it was the goal of the open-source community to crush Microsoft??! While it may be true that many in open-source folk don't like Microsoft, I think it would be more accurate to say that the
Evolution for Windows? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about an (ABI compatable) Exchange-equivilant for linux?
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Re:Evolution for Windows? (Score:4, Informative)
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Of course, with the recent patent deals with Microsoft, expect Novell to cooperate a lot more in supporting Microsoft's closed source, proprietary tools, and MS-violated standards.
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Exchange frontend servers handle the connections, while backend servers store the mailboxes. Evolution connects to Exchange via OWA (Outlook Web Access), which can be installed on yet another server. The s
15 Billion Dollars A Year At Stake (Score:5, Interesting)
Even a modest hit to the Microsoft Office revenue due to the upgrade treadmill from the format lock-in would have a massive effect on the company. Over the years Microsoft used their rapidly growing stock to keep salaries down and attract people with the lure of huge gains from their option grants. If office software revenue starts falling and Microsoft exec options start turning worthless I think you will start to see dramatic cuts at the company - the multi-billion dollar Xbox fiasco, the Zune mess, and many of the other let's throw money at new markets to try to get the stock moving attempts that Ballmer and others have tried since the stock peaked back around 2000.
I have to imagine that Microsoft will fight this move to open office formats with a fury never seen before. This isn't just extra billions that Microsoft won't miss, it is the multi-million dollar retirement money for a whole lot of execs up in Redmond under direct assault by a bunch of dirty hippies.
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You'd imagine wrong. Microsoft is fullly supporting this because they have opted for a more traditional (and ethical) approach to competing in this generation of office suites: simply having a superior product. Office 2007 is leaps and bounds easier and more plesant to use than Office 2003 and it produces prettier results to boot. Let's not even talk about how Office 2007 compares to OO.o....
Re:15 Billion Dollars A Year At Stake (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:15 Billion Dollars A Year At Stake (Score:5, Informative)
A great summary of arguments can be in this post: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/09
Reguarding your particular question, that post states:
"If you look at my blog, I probably spend less than 5% of my time discussing ODF. The only reason I talk about it is that people have asked me why we didn't use it as our default format. A simple "it wouldn't work" answer obviously isn't good enough, so I had to show specific examples to help explain my view."
In this post: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/07
Brian lists a whole bunch of examples of why it "wouldn't work" with references to previous posts with more details:
"
The OASIS ODF technical committee claims it's still over a year away from defining spreadsheet functions [msdn.com] and tables in presentations [msdn.com], and no mention of solutions to the international numbering issues [msdn.com] or even simple things like character highlighting [msdn.com].
"
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OO can save as doc but not one person at MS is smart enough to make word save a document as OO xml.
That's not flamebait (Score:5, Insightful)
figure out the various office formats and save their docs to them. Why can't MS work that out
Schlubs (Score:4, Insightful)
figure out the various office formats and save their docs to them. Why can't MS work that out
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sentence with proper intonation, such that the indented reading is clear.
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Oh, and double points for the lacking a sense of humor. Congrats!
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a language can take a potentially ambiguous orthographic representation and determine
the proper reading from it by use of pragmatic factors, world knowledge, and an understanding
of intonational features that would be present in a spoken rendering of said sentence.
Finally, there's nothing wrong with my sense of humor; I just didn't find the post funny.
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They can. They don't need to. Next question.
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Despite what Steve Ballmer bellowed lately there is no "11" on the knob for WGA and OGA. Indeed it is not likely for anyone at Microsoft to even paint an "11" on the WGA/OGA knob. That's because they view copyright infringement as a way to lock out competitors. As Bill Gates said in 1998, about the Chinese being the largest copyright infringers: "As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They
Re:15 Billion Dollars A Year At Stake (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine a small company, Mom + Pop Software Ltd. They manufacture someting called Cheap Office. It can't boast all the features of MS Office, but it has most of the ones people actually use. (It also defaults to A4 paper, so your printer won't insist for you to press the "paper" button after printing each page.) So it's ideal for writing everyday letters, doing accounts and keeping track of your CD collection, and it retails at £50. Now, our hypothetical customer John Thomas (who has letters to write, accounts to do and a CD collection to keep track of) sees Cheap Office and figures he could save £450 by buying it instead of MS Office. But then he figures he could pirate MS Office and save £500. If enough people do that, Mom + Pop Software Ltd. go out of business, due to piracy -- even though nobody has ever pirated a Mom + Pop product!
This is how Microsoft have traditionally killed off the competition. But unfortunately, Open Source software isn't susceptible to the same technique. If people aren't making heavy use of OpenOffice.org, nobody has lost anything. In fact it could give the developers time to move on and produce something different. (Watch that dark horse KOffice, too. It isn't even pretending to be like MS Office -- which could well turn out to be its salvation.) I'm sort of reminded of an episode of King of the Hill, in which the kid starts kicking people in the bollocks and grows to think he's unstoppable
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Having used word processors for more than 15 years, I can confidently say that there is nothing prettier than Office 95, insofar as word-processing is concerned. The mail client (LookOut) is total crap, and has been so since it first launched.
Users don't waste time making documents pretty; they use word p
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Open Office might be Free software but that doesn't mean dirty hippies are involved.
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from what I've seen, ECMA appears to have been one of them... Microsoft are having a little more trouble with ISO though...
Visionaries (Score:5, Insightful)
Sarcasm aside: I am sick to death of people going, "I want this for my computer, therefore everybody else wants it too, and therefore the only rational course is what I say." Have you considered asking the users what they wanted? Instead of assuming that "the users" want "full-featured desktop apps", do you think it might be worthwhile to check with them if that's true? Maybe they're already using gmail and love it. Maybe they don't even know about Google Calendar. Maybe they haven't ever heard of Zimbra.
Why should I, as J. Random Developer, bust my hump porting Evolution to Windows (which I couldn't do anyway as I know zip about Windows programming) just because this clown says what's good for him is good for everyone else?
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From the blog:
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WTF? That (MS) blogger is on crack.
Not only was it a war, it's a dirty war that's not over yet.
We've had accusations of corruption [siliconvalleysleuth.com] for State official's daring to consider ODF, Microsoft paying people for favorable wikipedia edits [macdailynews.com], Alleged attempts by IBM to influence OOXML standardisation process, etc etc etc.
It's not over yet folks. There's billions of dollars at stake. Of course its a war, of course its a dirty war.
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Too right; the writer of TFA sounds like a moron.
I can almost hear the Linux crowd jumping up and down screaming: "Move over to Linux and you can have it all - OpenOffice.org plus the Linux-based equivalent to Outlook, Evolution." My answer is yes Evolution is what I want - but I want it on Windows.
The problem is that the year of the Linux desktop has still not arrived.
Bullshit. Sounds like a quote from someone who hasn't even tried. Maybe he should try switching [hardocp.com] to Ubuntu for 30 days and report back.
Evolution for Windows (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Evolution for Windows (Score:5, Informative)
Having recently tried to use it, I'd say no. There are several major issues:
* Redraws are nightmarishly slow (admittedly this could be because I'm using an old PC, but I haven't seen any application redraw this slowly before).
* Initial configuration doesn't seem to work entirely correctly: if you need to change between SSL modes for an IMAP connection, you have to restart the program, but nothing tells you this. This may or may not be a Windows-only issue, I don't know.
* It stores its files in a subdirectory called ".evolution" of your user profile directory, not your application data or local settings directory. If you're using roaming profiles, this just plain won't work.
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I remember at one point people were tracking down various performance issues with Reiser4. Now, Reiser4 fsync performance sucks balls, although that really isn't a huge issue with most of what I use it for. But nothing makes it look worse than crap like Evolution -- case in point -- resizing the columns. As you drag, it does its opaque/animation thing, so you're dragging it 5-10 pixels at a time, and the window and
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My point is that when porting software to a new operating system, changing its behaviour so that it respects local platform conventions is desirable.
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Yes, OK, it works. Barely. The problem is that it stores temporary cache information in this directory, which should be stored in the 'Local Settings' directory so that it *isn't* copied. This resulted in login times on my network of in excess of five minutes after I'd been using it for a few weeks.
(many other F/OSS apps do the same & they work with our roaming profiles).
I've had exactly the same problem with GIMP
Microsoft lawyers are licking their chops (Score:1, Interesting)
2. Novell buys liability nightmare language/runtime implementation
3. Novell does patent deal with Microsoft
4. Novell releases patented information for Office translator
5. Microsoft starts raising legitimate lawsuits against both Novel (mono) and everyone else (using Novell precedent of signing patent protection agreement)
6. . . .
7. Loss!!!
Wake up, little Suse. . .
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Either we'll have a good migration path, or Microsoft will demonstrate its definition of "Open" very clearly to governments and ODF will win over a lot more governments.
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So, you are saying that Novell entered into a patent deal with Microsoft, so that they could get sued by Microsoft for infringing patents? I don't think that makes any sense. Novell's lawyers did read the contract, after all.
Your argument that other parties could get sued, however, is plausible in theory.
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Microsoft's angle is probably something else - lawsuits against other people, or insurance against Linux taking off (by making money off of it through Novell), or by getting legitimization through Novell (as shown in TFA), etc.
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That is true, it is for a limited period of time. It may also have clauses to cancel it beforehand (we simply don't know). Yet, this isn't a useful angle to use against Novell, I don't think. After all, Microsoft are paying Novell more for Novell's patents than vice versa. So patent litigation against Novell wouldn't be wise; Novel
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Novell is a worthless piece of shit company IMO, but the open source community has no one to blame but themselves for letting that little shit Miguel de Icaza do all of this damage.
You guys threw your little temper-tantrums over Java and now you are paying the price for that stupidity.
And now Java is GPL, so all us C# open source developers go back to writing Java programs. Microsoft knows as long as Mono is playing catchup, it can't attack mono or it will piss of us "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!." If that does happen, there is a perl one liner waiting to be written that will translate all the open source C# code into Java.
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Step 1: Translate keywords... Check
Step 2: Transform camel-case styles... Check
Step 3: Transform properties into get/set methods... Check
Step 4: Convert events and delegates into some hideous mess of interfaces and anonymous classes... uhhh... Might be more than a line of Perl.
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Step 6: Profit!
I'm willing to take the hit for this one. Everyone should do this once in their posting life.
Nail in the coffin? (Score:4, Insightful)
Techies love to complain about things like the ribbon, but everyone I see actually use it loves it.
MS Office isn't going anywhere. Neither is OpenOffice. And apparently neither is the Drama Llama [280z28.org].
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I'm not so sure. Using ribbons to tie up the hair is so 18th century. Nice-looking girls have switched to prettier things like hair-bands
Besides, do female techies exist? And if so, do they read Slashdot???
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Sure because nobody ever has run Turbo Tax, Quicken, iTunes, Photoshop, AutoCAD, Google Desktop, Lotus Notes, MATLAB, non-MS games, (10,000 other non-MS apps) on Windows.
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The vast majority of sane people would have no idea what you are talking about. A small minority of people would know what you are saying and would agree with you. Many people who know what you are saying disagree with you because (to use myself as an example) I don't particularly mind being "trapped" in an OS and/or office syste
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a nail in the coffin (Score:2, Insightful)
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There is always room for another "Death of Microsoft" post on the Slashdot front page.
What you need is a calendaring system that works (Score:5, Insightful)
Nail in the coffin huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft came out with a fast release and quick delivery iterations.
Yes, they had an advantage by forcing it upon every windows 9X user, but their original release was pitiful, and netscape had an opportunity to deliver a superior product and win the browser majority.
What did they do?
Netscape spent their time working in multiple directions without releasing a core product.
In the end, the mozilla project came out with the superior browser,
Re:Nail in the coffin huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Tell that to the great unwashed mass of users that don't use Firefox because it's not their default browser. But be sure to speak slowly, because they won't understand that the blue E isn't all of the Internet
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I personally haven't had much trouble with OOo.
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Thunderbird (Score:4, Interesting)
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The only ones that are actually usable are integrated into other programs (i.e. Evolution, Kontact, etc.) that don't seem so wonderful if you spend your day using Windows, MacOS, and Linux. (yes, I use a
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I think the bigger problem is that the open calendaring protocols (i.e. CalDAV) are still in their infancy, and not yet very well supported across the board. That will change, of course, but it'll take time.
MicroShafting cynicism aside ... (Score:2)
In particular, I'm hoping that there will emerge a GNOME alternative to Impress, and that AbiWord
Nail in the coffin, my foot - MS wanted this (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft wanted this. Infact, Microsoft helped Novel do this: http://www.novell.com/ctoblog/?p=43 [novell.com]
And the Microsoft Open XML developers were more than helpful to advertise this: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/03
This is a GOOD THING for everyone. OpenOffice.org users get interopability with MS Office. MS Office meets many government required interopability and open XML format requirements. Win-win.
Let's keep the absurd commentary out of the summary and in the modded down comments, please?
Missed something basic (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, this translator is "lossy", meaning that any translation will lose information *both ways*:
http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/features.htm
Also, being a translator instead of an exporter means that a double save will have to happen which has it's own set of issues.
> Win-win.
Actually, it's win-lose since it's the appearance of openness without actual openness, so MS Office devotes will be able to claim that no change in status quo is required (after all competition exists so there's no vendor lockin) but no-one will trust ODF translations into OOXML since they will look bad. Another side effect is that people will move away from DOC which has better support universally (through years of reverse engineering) in favour of OOXML (which has poorer universal support) since "XML is the future". Not good.
But if you're going to support OOXML in OpenOffice despite this last comment, a better approach would be an OOXML *exporter*. The key difference between an exporter and a translator is that an exporter has access to a lot more information about the document (the internal application representation of document) and so the exporter can be more accurate than the translator (which could in theory rebuild those data structures, but in practice won't unless OpenOffice and MS Office are refactored so that the creation of the internal data structures from the file system is available through a library) and an exporter will be faster (no double-save, no external tool, no recreation of even minimal internal data structures).
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Actually, it's win-lose since it's the appearance of openness without actual openness, so MS Office devotes will be able to claim that no change in status quo is required (after all competition exists so there's no vendor lockin) but no-one will trust ODF translations into OOXML since they will look bad. Another side effect is that people will move away from DOC which has better support universally (through years of reverse engineering) in favour of OOXML (which has poorer universal support) since "XML is the future". Not good.
Yes, this was my impression also. But since Microsoft is hell bent on pushing OOXML as the next format, then it was likely that OOXML will be a de facto standard for MS Word in about a year or two once a critical mass of Office 07 installations are in the market. Having some compatibility in Open Office for that format is desirable, but if it is a way way conversion then it could very well be a trap. Much better to have the ability to read and write ODF in Microsoft Office, so that people have the option
Is it safe? (Score:2)
Only Good For Novell OpenOffice (Score:2, Informative)
The worrying thing is Novell's reputation (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Does Novell's translator work well with OO.org, or Novell's version of Open Office only?
2. Like Mono's port of VB, is the usage of the translator covered by the patent deal between MS and Novell?
3. Why did Novell abandon the Netware range of products?
This does not appear to be a nail in the coffin of Office, it seems to be an extended lease of life for a dying format and bloatware from the 800lb gorilla.
-
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Probably both, Novell aren't doing anything drastic (if at all) to OO.o. They're certainly not putting MS patents in their own version - they can't as it's GPL.
Depends. If it's released under GPL or similar, then it doesn't have MS patents in it, and Novell will have checked that. If they're selling the conver
Real-world test - Fails with OO.o (Score:5, Interesting)
I downloaded the odfconverter-1.0.0-2.oxt file and tried to install into OpenOffice.org 2.1.0 for Windows (as downloaded from openoffice.org web site, not the Novell version).
I had to use Tools -> Extension manager (not Package manager), and when installing, had several pop-ups stating "This media-type is not supported: application/octet-stream". OKing these showed the odfconverter installed into "My extensions". And "Microsoft Word 2007 Document (.docx)" was added to the list of files in File -> Open.
But trying to open a
Anyone want to try the other options of Linux, OO.o 2.0.4, Novel OO.o 2.0.4 [novell.com] and report back?
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What an odd question. They didn't. They ported it to Linux. That's what Open Enterprise Server is. SuSE + Netware. And at the same time they built a whole lot more web-service type services off to the side of the 'Netware' box.
By 'Netware' I mean the bundle of core file-and-print technologies that date back to the old-school Netware 4.x/5.x/6.x days: Novell Storage Services file system, Novell Core Protocol for file access, Novell Distributed Printer
Translators are fine but (Score:2)
2- More generally, how well does OpenDoc travel from one program to another, and from one platform to another ? We all know
Evolution (Score:4, Informative)
Disclaimer: I use Evolution.
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Thunderbird's quite a nice replacement, if you just want an email client. I'm guessing you need something more, though.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
What I need more.. (Score:2, Interesting)
My job requires me to program on Linux, and I also prefer using Linux full time as ITservices here has draconian policies here for Windows users (Everyone is a restricted user and they cannot even change their own wallpaper). On my linux box, I have root access, my own wallpaper and mp3 player. There are so few linux boxen here that ITS let me have root access. They aren't well versed enough, and they don'
Franchise (Score:2)
From Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary [cambridge.org].
Office is not a franchise, it is a product, like any other piece of software. Please stop using words you don't understand, it lowers the tone of the entire site and leads to otherwise utterly redundant posts like this one.
It does no such thing (Score:2)
where the hell is it? (Score:2)
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Who didn't know what? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Who didn't know this? (Score:5, Informative)
That is not correct. Microsoft's supposedly "open" format in fact avoids "open" as much as it can. For example, where OpenDocument uses SVG for graphics, which is itself a W3C open format that any vendor may use, in the Microsoft format Office Open XML (OOXML) they could have used SVG, but no, they could have used CGM, but no, what did they use? WMF. That is right, a buggy Microsoft proprietary graphics format, the one with the security hole, WMF. WMF relies on the Microsoft GUI API to render properly, as WMF has embedded metadata meant for calls to the Microsoft GUI API.
That is not the only thing in OOXML like that. If there is an open format for anything, Microsoft avoids it. Microsoft's OOXML is as packed as can be on dependencies that the underlying platform on which any application runs is a Windows platform.
Microsoft wanted to lock people in all right. It will be impossible to achieve perfect fidelity with OOXML on any platform other than a Windows platform.
If you have documents saved in OOXML format, you will be locked in to Windows platforms.
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Re:Who didn't know this? (Score:4, Insightful)
OOXML has to be able to store every piece of data that the word *.doc file format stores
Not true; Office 2007 could have a WMF -> SVG converter in it. Storing graphics as SVG would then just be part of saving into an XML format.
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Re:Who didn't know this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Dude, there has never been this pixel perfect rendition between different Word versions, not even on Windows, let alone if you also include the Mac versions. I absolutely don't buy your argument as a valid reason for all the renderAsWord1OnMacintosh1984 attributes
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I agree with you completely, and raise 2 cents.
Try the same version on the same OS.
I work in the publishing business, and you kan never rely on a word document looking the same on any two computers. Things like OS language, printer margins, the phase of the moon, and even more obscure factors will ensure that it never happens.
OpenOffice is, despite its other shortcomings, a lot better in this respect.
When a customer wan
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Really? So often you can not have correct conversion of WMF to SVG. I don't know why but probably WMF (or EMF to be more precise) can do things that SVG cannot. Now, would you do it if you were Microsoft and did this move did broke lots of current documents of your customers because you couldn't keep the figures the same way they are? Would you as a customer buy Office 2007 if you knew that there is a 1% probability that some of your Office 2003 documents could not be read correctly?
I think the original point was that OOXML is not an open standards based format. Maybe it makes sense in terms of backwards compatibility for Microsoft to keep it based on its proprietary formats, or maybe it is just laziness on their part, or maybe it is because they are still trying for vendor lock in. Who cares? It is still a proprietary format being sold as an open standard, which is misleading and harmful to new customers. Fine let MS maintain backwards compatibility and continue to use proprieta
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So, Word is using all the quirks and legacy formats that it has been using, except now it's "open" because it's got XML wrapped around it. It's not that easy - you can't have it both ways.
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