Microsoft announces ODF support

Microsoft has announced support for an open source document format called ODF, Open Document Format. Microsoft will also offer its own Open XML document format with the release of Office 2007. This announcement follows an announcement of support for the popular PDF format as well. Microsoft is really trying hard to support all the popular document formats and give customers a choice in how to handle their documents.

Microsoft Office is used by millions of customers in many different market segments all over the world. They all have slightly different needs, and no one document format can satisfy all of them. Microsoft is supporting as many of the popular formats as is reasonable, based on customer demand. Competition and choice in technology and document formats is always good for the customer.

However, predictably, the open source zealots are still not satisfied...and never will be. They have a very different agenda, and are not constrained by real customer demands. They live in a theoretical, Utopian world, where everything is black and white. Yes, I am a little frustrated with them.

Microsoft has an installed base of tens of millions of customers, many of them still using 9 year old versions of Office. Microsoft does everything possible to ensure backward compatibility with older versions. Customers expect to be able to open a Word document authored 10 years ago and still have perfect fidelity of all the characters, formatting, and styles.

Unfortunately, ODF does not support all of these formats. Just the basic stuff. That isn't good enough for customers who invested in Microsoft Office 10 years ago. Bob Sutor from IBM still doesn't understand this, or conveniently chooses not to. Standards are more about politics than technology...and the arguments take on a similar political tenor. Disappointing, but predictable.

You may remember that Adobe recently forced Microsoft to drop native support for PDF even though it encourages other document authoring tools to support PDF. Again, disappointing but predictable. A compromise was worked out where Microsoft will have a PDF tool available for free download. Is this what is best for the customer? No, but this is what Adobe forced Microsoft to do. Hmmm...I wonder why? Here is a theory.

Comments

[Ben Langhinrichs]

I'm a bit confused by your comment. I am not an open source zealot, and in fact am head of a software development company, so I understand the issues of supporting older versions and such. What I don't understand is the comment "ODF does not support all of these formats. Just the basic stuff." and specifically what was in MS Office ten years ago that Microsoft will support with Open XML and ODF won't support. Open XML is not inherently more backwards compatible than ODF, is it? Besides that, I have to tell you that Word, at least, has not always donw the greatest job of reading older versions of... Word. I have friends in a law firm that uses Word extensively, and if a document is too old and has a lot of formatting, they often go elsewhere (to WordPro, of all things) to read the older Word documents.

Now, it is possible you are talking more about active content (VB?), but I haven't seen the qualitative difference between Microsoft's support of older versions that would justify this comment otherwise.

[Don Dodge]

With Microsoft Office 2007 customers will have lots of choices in document formats; OPen XML. ODF, and even PDF. There is no need to argue about which is better. Customers will decide for themselves.

Open XML is a better path forward for long time Microsoft customers because it does a better job of backward compatibility, and has better performance characteristics.

BTW, specifically what formats or characters did your friend at the law firm have problems with? Most of these "issues" turn out to be myths, or worse, fabrications. Tell me please, what specifically did your friend have a problem with?

[Ben Langhinrichs]

I answered more completely on Bob Sutor's blog (this is getting confusing), but the problems I have personally seen have to do with complex tables, which can get corrupted, or with documents that won't open, and my guess is that the complex tables had to do with it. I have seen this a few different times, and asked my friend who related his firm's approach, although I have no way of verifying his experience.

In my case, these were quite old Word docs opened in Word 2003, as I am not currently using the beta Office product.