Well, I don't really think that an open document format is bad, at least not for users. Bernard Golden has an interesting write up about it. The only people that I can see not benefiting from moving towards an open standard are the people who currently have the market share using a closed format. It's not really rocket science.
All the power to Massachusetts' decision to go with OpenDocument since being the first to make the bold move has to be hard. As soon as that move goes well, hoo hoo, it's going to be a huge slide for MS as everyone saves 500$ a workstation.
I don't know if anyone reads my blog anymore, but I had a pretty good writeup about one article I read.
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There's a lot of really weak arguments being thown around by those at MS, as to why we should stay with MS Office. None of them make sense.
I think that Microsoft will eventually just have to break down and start using the OpenDocument format. People are tired of being jerked around, not being able to read files from one version of MS Office to the next, let alone read it in any other program. There's probably a lot of people who would still use MS Office, because it's a really good office suite. Right now, I'm using Open Office, not because I think it's better than MS Office, but because it's sufficiently good for my needs, and because I don't agree with the idea of Microsoft owning my data, and the only way for me to access it, is through their software.
The only disadvantage to an open format that I can think of is the same thing that happened with the early HTML versions.
ReplyDeleteThey had proper specs, but both major browser vendors didn't fully implement them, and added their own proprietary tweaks to. (Anyone who had to work with Netscape's "LAYER" elements will remember this. It was *far* superior to anything IE had at the time, but it wasn't cross-browser compatible.)
If Microsoft really wanted to kill OpenDocument they could easily do the same thing here. Ie, support enough of it (or all of it) to claim that they support it, but then start doing things their own way or making their own enhancements that competing products would have to support.
I think with all the anti-trust legislation against microsoft, plus the fact that they've really done their homework this time, and set up policies and regulations for actually using the rights to the open document format, that Microsoft, or anyone else, would not get away with this. I think OASIS would have Microsoft to court in about 4 seconds if they put out a half-assed embrace, extend and extinguish version of OpenDocument. There's a lot of governments getting really tired of Microsoft and their shenanigans, most noticeably the EU. The open source movement is getting a lot of powerful companies on their side, and they aren't just going to sit back and let Microsoft try to do what they've been doing for so many years.
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