__/ [ thad01@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ] on Thursday 04 May 2006 16:42 \__
> nessuno@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <nessuno@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> "However, Jason Matusow, Microsoft director of standards affairs, said
>> in a statement: '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.'"
>
> Of course the same could be said of RTF or HTML, and yet they still
> manage support those along side their native doc format. Their
> motive is obvious and understandable; they do not want to open up
> a migration path away from MS-Office to OpenOffice. It will take
> a lot more market pressure before they jump on the ODF bandwagon.
>
> No problems. OOo seems to be growing on its own just the same.
Intersting point. If you draw dependencies, interoperabilities and
translation paths, you get somewhat of a tree structure. Microsoft Office
used to lie at the top of this tree (upside-down, leaves at bottom). This
means that other packages could translate the Holy Grail, which was DOC,
XLS, or whatever.
Things have just been reversed. With ISO standard for ODF, OpenOffice is
probably at the top whereas Office needs to catch up. OpenOffice and its
siblings, parents, and cousins (Open Source primarily) can open both ODF
and Office formats. Office is lagging behind and if it ever aspires to
become the superset of all (i.e. contain all translation paths), it simply
must catch up.
As the release of Office was recently pushed back by a few months, it is
evident that there are many other pressures on the agenda for Office. They
must be sweating. I know Mr. Ballmer does. Add yet another factor that
postdates this delay: Office lost their project manager who moved to the
Windows team.
Best wishes,
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz | "Quote when replying in non-real-time dialogues"
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