Submitted by The battle between the OpenDocument Format and Microsoft’s Open Office XML was long, and here and there rather nasty, but it appears as if we finally have a winner. The company behind OOXML already conceded by announcing it would implement support for ODF in Office 2007 SP2, but now it has also said it quite literally: ODF has won.Microsoft’s national technology officer, Stuart McKee, speaking at a panel at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, said:
ODF has clearly won. We sell software for a living. The ability to implement ODF in the middle of our ship cycle was just not possible. We couldn’t do that during the release of Office 2007. We’re looking forward and committed to doing more than [ODF-to-OOXML] translators.
This is one of the first times that dominant player Microsoft has been unable to impose its standard upon the rest of the industry, and that can be seen as a major victory for competition. As Sun’s Douglas Johnson said: “The office-suite market has been ruled by one dominant player after another, but those markets were never governed by good open standards practices. What has happened is that this dominant-player market has actually been upset and opened to competition that didn’t exist before.”
Microsoft will deliver ODF support with the second service pack for Office 2007, scheduled for the first half of 2009.
Yeah, well it’s up to implementation really.
Microsoft can say they support anything, but if it’s not fully and standards compliant implemented, the value of it’s inclusion is deminished.
Something about proof and puddings comes to mind.. hmm, I’m hungry.
Edit: Fixed a spelling error.
Edited 2008-06-19 21:28 UTC
Exactly.
If they implement ODF, but slightly off spec or with *cough*mistakes*cough*, then you would have ODF and MSODF.
You won’t see Microsoft concede to release their grip on your data. Only when a significant number (say 10 percent) actually care if they can open their archived documents easily in 10 years and/or without paying money for the latest (possibly only available) version of MS Office will real standard implementation be dominant in the market. Which will make the data inter-operable, increasing competition, which will be beneficial to everyone – except Microsoft.
That is exactly why Microsoft has not, and will not concede. They will eventually lose, but you will not see them give up. If they did they would likely be facing shareholders in court.
When what is best for a corporation is not best for society or best for the advancement of the market that that the corporation operates in – the corporation is bound by law to maximize profit, even if that means stymieing advancement, even to such extremes as using all their power to actively damage their current markets if they believe will result in larger quarterly earnings.
Edited 2008-06-19 22:06 UTC
Not quite.
As soon as Microsoft released a MSOffice product which claimed to support ODF, and use it as the default format, with a view to allowing governments to purchase MSOffice because it had support for standards, then the first thing that would happen if the MSOffice would be subjected to a complaince test.
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument_Compliance_Testing
Imagine that … a test to see if a given program complies with a standard or not.
This is so foreign to “Microsoft think” that most Microsoft supporters would probably not even realise that such a possibility existed.
If Microsoft claim that certain features of an Office suite are not supported by ODF … but other Office suites which did use ODF did support that feature … then in that way also is Microsoft’s claim demonstrated to be false. It is just that Microsoft haven’t bothered to implement it.
Anyway … if MSODF did not pass the compliance tests, or did not include some features that other ODF Office suites did support, then what you would have is an Office suite from Microsoft that implemented file saving poorly, and several alternatives that cost a lot less which implemented it correctly …
Any fair tendering process for a government purchase would either reject non-compliant MSOffice with MSODF, or if it didn’t such a decision would be trivially easy to appeal …
The only way for MS to compete in this arena is to implement ODF correctly.
Edited 2008-06-19 23:34 UTC
Quote: “Any fair tendering process for a government purchase would either reject non-compliant MSOffice with MSODF, or if it didn’t such a decision would be trivially easy to appeal …”
And you believe in the tooth fairy and santa claus don’t you? Trivially easy to appeal? If that was the case, Microsoft should never have been able to hijack the recent ISO process for OOXML approval as an ISO standard. But – they did. Money talks. Shall I remind you of the Massachusetts debacle? I didn’t see anyone appealing the decision to out the IT guy there, or kill off ODF and replace it with OOXML.
I agree that it *should* be an easy thing to appeal [and win], but what happens in fantasy, and real life are generally quite often opposites.
Dave
Sorry but no. M.$ is still the monopoly when it comes to office suites (at least market share wise) and that means that THEIR format will dictate what will be used.
What M.$ did was very wise from their perspective. They seem to be cooperating, and the governments will have no reason to switch to non M.$ office suites now (price not withstanding, this is irrelevant to governments, because the people who decide what to buy are in 99% corrupt, they get a slice of the price).
What this means is that from now on, Office XXX will be used in governments with “but they support ODF” excuse, but the ODF they support will not be the ODF we support.
Simple as that, and pretty damn smart. You have to give them credit for these things, no other company even comes close to their evil geniality(tm)(R)(c).
Sorry, but no.
Microsoft’s opportunity to scuttle ODF was to join in the OASIS committee right at the start when they were invited to. The could have then sabotaged any harmony of purpose right from the start, and made their own implementation concurrently with others (such as OpenOffice and KOffice) … and made their implementation in such a way as to exploit any ambiguities and make sure that interoperability did not work.
Then Microsoft could have simply abandoned the format, or let it stagnate … citing as a reason that the format did not work when it came to interoperability and it was not as powerful as OOXML anyway.
Microsoft’s problem right now is that, despite their saying that ODF is not capable enough to be an Office file format, they are very short of being able to cite features which it does not support. If Microsoft now try to claim that ODF does not support interoperability … there are a number of Office suites including OpenOffice and KOffice that give the lie to that claim too.
Any attempt extend & extinguish (they have done the embrace now) of ODF will be easily seen as sabotage.
ODF is shown to be an open, freely implementable, interoperable and capable format. Despite constantly trying, Microsoft have not been able to stop it so far, and I think their chance to do so has passed.
I think Microsoft might have painted themselves into a corner, and they could well be left with no choice but to implement ODF properly.
Edited 2008-06-20 10:12 UTC
You didn’t get it. It’s not about sabotaging ODF itself, it’s about piggy-bagging Office into governments (or letting it stay would probably be more fitting) without really sacrificing the lock-in.
M.$ will provide some non-compliant ala-ODF format to it’s office suite and that’ll be enough for the government ****-heads to give it the stamp.
It’s not about ODF itself.
You didn’t get it.
It would actually be easier, probably far more effective, and cause far less trouble anti-trust-wise, and in the end serve exactly the same purpose, for Microsoft to make a compliant ODF format.
How would that hurt them?
Microsoft -> non-compliant ODF … governments can still mandate a standards-compliant ODF product be purchased.
Microsoft -> compliant ODF … cuts off the commercial air-supply of competing open Office suites for businesses … there is suddenly no compelling reason for governments to get OpenOffice and Microsoft can resume making rumbles in the background about “open source software violates our patents” (but never actually showing where) without risking further trouble and fines with anti-trust committees any more.
But why would they release the lock-in? That doesn’t make sense to me. If I were at the decision table of M.$ I’d most certainly do anything to keep Office in the government BUT also keep the lock-in as much as possible.
IMHO making a “not-so-compliant” ODF capable Office possibly with “neutral” stamp-giver (yes it’s compliant, we say so) would be the best solution.
You must understand that 99% of government officials who do the choice are morons. They get a paper saying “must be ODF compliant” and they look at it, ask the person who’s trying to sell them the solution, get a “yes and here’s 1000$ for your trouble” and we’re done. Nobody can get blamed, not easily anyhow.
Of course people can get blamed … considering that it is easy enough to test compliance.
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument_Compliance_Testing
If I were a Sun person, and I had tendered StarOffice, or if I were an IBM person, and I had tendered Lotus Symphony, or if I were Corel, and I had tendered WordPerfect, and a clerk had awarded the contract to Microsoft Office and it didn’t actually comply with the openDocument standard … you can bet i would protest long and loud and kick up an almighty stink.
If I were the clerk, and I had given a high-profile government contract to Microsoft and I hadn’t even bothered to check compliance of their offer when an easy test was readily available to me and lawsuits were threatening over it all … I would be quite concerned for my job.
As I said … the easiest thing for Microsoft would be to actually comply with OpenDocument … then things would be more or less status quo except that no-one (including EU commissions) would any longer have a legitimate anti-trust beef with Microsoft.
Even FSF weirdos could not complain … and since there would be no longer any real impediment to people running free software … they would probably be glad of it all anyway.
Yeah…we all know how it went when they should implement HTML.
You missed a spelling mistake.
Haha, fanks.
I’d like to see it… It would be really great if they incorporated ODF into all of their office products. Imagine being able to just edit your work documents (created in MS Office) at home on your linux box, while still being able to open them at work without the formatting being messed up…
Wishful thinking, maybe…
Bring me that day, and I’ll promise, finally I’ll buy something from Microsoft
Probably a game, but still, I’ve never bought any software directly from them (well, I have through preinstalled stuff, and trough companies I worked at, but you get the point), but I promise I will, if this would ever happen 
Its, about time… and with all the greif there are getting from the EU, and now possibly China. and many Goverments are starting to say they want ODF and PDF formats used. it was only a matter of time before this happened.
-Nex6
Like I’ve said before, talk is all fire and motion, and like I’ve said before, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I can’t see any Office features that Microsoft is committed to supporting and contributing to ODF, other than the level of functionality of RTF. Yes, we’ve had all this before with RTF.
What is that based on? Keeping a market that you have already cornered is all about formats as lock-in, and this has been played out during the eighties and nineties.
I thought ODF had won? 😉
Ahhhhh, and there we have it. Nothing has changed, and isn’t going to change. Nothing to see here, move along.
I am not so sure,
On one hand your probly right. on the other, native support for ooXML ISO version will not appear until
the next version of office while native support for ODF
ISO version will appear in office 2007 sp2.
we dont even have an alpha on the table yet for the next office version so its at least 3 years away. and thats saying nothing goes wrong at ISO with all the appeals.
and, more and more Gov’s are stgart to “back” ODF and PDF. what we have now is a standards war just like with the blue ray vs hddvd…
more and more ODF, is looking like its gaining traction.. but in the end who knows…
my bet would be for ODF.
-Nex6
Why? Has the last twenty-five years of such software not been enough to convince you?
There are those of us just about old enough to remember Office’s support for RDF. I am so non-plussed by this covering of old ground it isn’t even funny. We’ll see what complete support future Office versions have for ODF, but past history dictates that you’ll have someone create a document in Office, try to save it in ODF and there will be an absolute torrent of warnings about loss of formatting and/or loss of functionality and such a document for the receiver will appear nothing like what the sender intended. Worse, ODF documents produced with other software will be washed through that cycle.
Put simply, Microsoft are going to sit back and implement ODF as-is, they will contribute no features of Office to the format whatsoever and simply throw their arms up in the air when users have formatting issues. When people are forced into saving in OOXML to preserve their formatting and functionality, Microsoft will say “See? That’s what users have picked and the market has chosen”.
Predictable as hell.
Nice.
I am also, long in the tooth…
and have dealth withsome of the same issues over and over and over again. hell…
I am going thru it now, with some users using there own copys of office 2007 and saving stuff in ooxml and then sending it to the rest of the enterpise and wondering why no one can open it.
I am *hoping* things will be different this time, we can hope can’t we?
besides, many people and goverments want ODF, and if microsoft gives them a half assed support for it they wont use it and will instead use OO.o, Iwork, abiword etc which does have good and correct support.
Microsoft, does not really have much choice, this time. thats the beauty of it.
-Nex6
Once again what this would mean is the MSOffice implemented ODF very poorly, and there would be several much cheaper Office suites available which implemented it far better.
Any governement wishing to purchase software via an open tender process (which is normally mandated) would have to reject MSOffice if it did such a poor job of saving to and loading ODF.
Any purchase decision via open tender which did choose the more expensive MSOffice (which also had demonstrable flaws) would very easily be able to be challenged.
another by the book execution of embrace, extend, extinguish in the making?
In the end. it’s the user that won. 🙂
It reminds me of that video from the 80s when BG says “Apple IS the architecture for MS to develop” or something like that. I just don’t buy it.
This sounds kind of cool. I can imagine a variety of angles:
1. Microsoft is doing this because they want to provide a useful, open standard and it’s the right thing to do.
2. This might make the EU look at MS in a better light.
3. MS believes that Office software is opening up, and they have no choice but to do it or their product will be worthless some day.
4. As long as they use another format by default, they don’t actually care too much. Maybe they don’t plan on putting much effort in to supporting the format correctly anyway.
Some are *ahem* more likely than others
… Of course, it’s probably a combination of some of the above and a million things I’d never even consider 😉 I think MS looked pretty slimy with the ISO standards process so I’m glad to see them backing down on OOXML.
Does this mean that us Mac users will see this also in a future update of Office 2008, or will we have to wait until Office 2011 like we have to for VB script?
Also, I’m wondering if Apple will implement this for future iWork releases.
will support ODF perfectly. Why? They’ll just incorporate OSS code in Office. They’ll make it so it doesn’t open up Office proper, but I bet they won’t write a single line of code…
Microsoft has a real aversion to taking in extant OSS code (except under a separate license from the authors), so that’s unlikely.
Look, MS isn’t going to stop supporting OOXML. It’s also not going to stop supporting its binary doc formats. So, really, who “won” here? It’s MS. They get to claim they are supporting open standards, and they take away the one club that OSS opponents were beating it with. And here’s the rub: ODF won’t be able to round-trip all Office content (eg. controls, embedded content) without some modification to the standard so, in all probability, MS will put up some kind of message that says “Saving in this formay may result in loss of some content, blah, blah, blah…” When users see that, they’re going to be hesitant to use ODF and risk losing some of their data. And, if it does result in loss of fidelity, users are going to be seriously pissed. So, really, who won here?
I would say that the battle is far from over. Microsoft would like us, and the EC in particular, to think that they have capitulated. I seriously doubt that they have. As others have indicated, it really hinges upon the quality of their support of ODF.
I remain cautiously optimistic because that seems the most constructive stance to take. But I’ve been in this game too long to be naive.
I’m not sure that a lot of speculation is particularly helpful at this point. We must watch and wait to see what actually happens. Frustrating, yes. But sometimes that is the only reasonable thing to do.
That’s a good question… I don’t have the full context of the quote from the article, but I have a strong feeling that it’s only half of the quote. The Microsoft perspective seems to long have been that no one loses if both formats are out there and supported. It could be said that “ODF has one” and “so has OpenXML.” There will be some features in Office that will not be representable directly in the current ODF (extension mechanisms aren’t a really good way to ensure interoperability). We’ll see how the committee works to remedy this situation.
I too am leery about embrace and extend. But I’d love to see them implement ODF correctly, and the lessening of lockin that would accompany them doing so. So why would they? Among other possible reasons, picture the marketing coup should they be able to implement it better than OOo.
If they had a good ODF implementation and still had that accessibility stuff they are supposed to be better at (I wouldn’t know) I can see that being a good marketing point. Whatever the possibility of that, as long as MS thinks they could do it, that could be a strong motivation for them.
And that would be awesome. Office suites competing on features, and on being the best at implementing standards? That would be great. So would winning the lottery. I’ll be keeping a skeptical eye open but I am excited to see how it plays out. So someone remind me where WordPerfect is sitting on the ODF issue?
this news is pure FUD
I have no doubt that Microsoft will not fully comply with the ODF standard. My doubt is why they will not comply. Will it be because they do not wish to, or they are not capable of compliance.
It is easy enough to test compliance.
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument_Compliance_Testing
Microsoft could make a stab at ODF, test it against the test suite, note where it was wrong, and work on that bit and try again. Eventually, in a “room full of monkeys with typewriters fashion” Microsoft might hit upon a working solution.
… joking.
Seriously, OpenDocument is not obscured. It is meant to be implementable … and indeed to be implemented. There are three or four open source reference implementations.
In addition, when Massachusetts were first talking about OpenDocument, they unofficially asked some Microsoft engineers “how difficult to implement ODF in MS Office?” and they got an unofficial reply … not that hard, a couple of months tops.
I would like to point out to those of you saying Microsoft won’t implement full compliance: NO application has full compliance/support for ODF. Not a single one.
http://www.opendocumentfellowship.com/applications
Yes, that is correct … the ODF format has more power & flexibility than any current application implements. However, if MS Office can achieve 4 stars like many other suites can, meaning “Works well even on complex documents” … everyone will benefit.
BTW: so much for those Microsoft fans who tried to claim during the “great format debates” that OpenDocument was “just OpenOffice.org’s format”.
Edited 2008-06-20 14:42 UTC
Yes, they should certainly shoot for 4 stars.
Though how automated are the tests? Is it possible for biases to come into play when evaluating? Because if it is, you know it will happen.
Where did Microsoft state that “ODF has clearly won” ? Am I missing something?
Lot of countries are not buying the MS office expensive vapourware. If ODF becomes a mandate standard, how can MS compete, since OOo is *the* software that follows that standard and its free. It will take a few years, the teh change has already happened. MS will never be able to compete with OOo in government (just on the basis of cost). btw a lot of people will fight to death if MS Office gets awarded a government contract
One can only hope…
This seems like a bit of a problem… it’s just software, why fight to the death? It sounds like you’re advocating zealotry rather than superior software.
atleast today there is some decent choice, before few years there was non. microsoft main worry is that if a large no of people start using open office, its ms boltware office will loose the market share dominance and leadership. they will become just another company….
OpenDocument Format:
The OpenDocument format (ODF) is a free and open file format for electronic office documents, such as spreadsheets, charts, presentationsand word processing documents. While the specifications were originally developed by Sun, the standard was developed by the Open Office XML technical committee …
One objective of open formats like OpenDocument is to guarantee long-term access to data without legal or technical barriers, and some governments have come to view open formats as a public policy issue. OpenDocument is intended to be an alternative to proprietary formats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
Microsoft Office 2007 to Support ODF – But Not OOXML:
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/05/21/1818237.shtml?tid=109
“When will the ODF feature be available? We don’t know. I’ve heard through the grapevine that we might be looking at 6 – 9 months. A formal planned ship date would obviously be useful to receive. [Update: The press release posted later in the day to the Microsoft Web site (reproduced in full below) states that Service Pack 2 (SP2), which will include support of the additiona formats, is “scheduled for the first half of 2009.”] ”
Microsoft Spokesman Says ODF “Clearly Won” Standard War:
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/06/20/137216.shtml
SUN ODF Plugin:
Sun ODF Plugin 1.2 for Microsoft Office for Windows:
http://www.sun.com/software/star/odf_plugin/index.jsp
http://www.sun.com/software/star/odf_plugin/specs.jsp
Ref.
http://why.openoffice.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_document_markup_languages#Offi…