Mittwoch April 25, 2007

Higher costs due to increased competition
Costs rise when competition increases, right? The more vendors and products there are in a specific market, the higher the prices that customers have to pay, correct? I don't know what business schools Microsoft's employees and their friends went to, but some of them seem to have a strange understanding of the economy, market powers and the impact of competition.

In Rob Weir's latest blog entry I found this link to an anti-ODF / pro-OOXML document. In the document it says "An ODF procurement mandate would also drive up costs for government." As I indicate above, this statement seems to be against any logic to me. Why would increased competition based on one common open standard increase costs? The exact opposite should be true!

O.k., to be fair, in the short term the adoption of ODF might be more expensive than continuing with the status quo, if a government decides to switch to a new application in order to adopt ODF. Thus, there would be some migration and maybe training costs. However, mid to long term the cost savings due to increased choice and competition should be huge!

Due to the fast growing adoption of products like OpenOffice.org (about 500K downloads per week with about 50% new users) Microsoft was already forced to lower the prices for some of their products. That's most likely the reason why they came up with the Student and Teacher Edition and later on with the Home and Student Edition, and why Microsoft is now planning to offer low-cost versions of Windows XP and Office in developing countries.

In addition, the adoption of ODF does not necessarily mean switching to new products. With the various ODF plug-ins (including Sun's), even Microsoft Office users can adopt ODF without having to migrate to a new application.

The anti-ODF document makes a few more false or at least very misleading claims. According to the document, Microsoft's OOXML is better for people with disabilities. I don't want to speak for the people with disabilities, but from what I hear more and more people with disabilities actually see ODF as a huge change, even though they initially were afraid of ODF. The adoption of ODF enables the usage of open source desktop platforms for which a growing number of open source accessibility tools like Orca, GOK and Dasher exist. Thus, with ODF there is a chance that more people can actually afford accessibility tools in the future. Peter Korn's blog is probably a good starting point for learning more about this topic.

Then there is a claim about formulas missing in ODF. Yes, ODF 1.0 allowed arbitrary formula languages. However, ODF 1.2 which will be finalized later this year, will address this gap. The current drafts can be found here. In contrast to just documenting how one specific implementation handles formulas, which would have been a trivial task provided you have people who can type fast, the formulas in ODF are defined based on best practices and state of the art knowledge.

Yes, Microsoft's OOXML supports custom schemas, i.e. "data customized for specific purposes", but so will ODF 1.2. However, due to the fact that ODF is being used as the default file format by at least two open source implementations, there will be broad application and vendor support for these features for ODF. OOXML's custom schemas are, AFAIK, only supported by Microsoft Office, i.e. one single vendor. Since OOXML support is still not available on Mac OS X, it's even questionable if and when custom schema support will become available on platforms other than Windows.

Finally, the anti-ODF document says "ODF, on the other hand, was designed to represent information created by two applications, StarOffice and OpenOffice, that are not widely used." The statement is wrong in two ways. First, ODF was not designed to be application dependent but application and vendor agnostic. Check out this ODF white paper for details about the openness of ODF. Second, OpenOffice.org is already widely used! Just look at this wiki page or do Google searches like this one, this one, this one, or this one. Also read this ("Science cannot at present accept files in Word 2007's .docx format.") and this ("We currently cannot accept files saved in Microsoft Office 2007 formats."). You will notice that Microsoft's OOXML does not play a significant role, yet. In contrast, ODF is already used widely as the hundreds of published ODF documents proof.
( Apr 25 2007, 11:20:33 PM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [3]

IBM's Rob Weir about ODF and OOXML
IBM's Rob Weir just shared some more insights about ODF and OOXML in his blog. Worth reading!
( Apr 25 2007, 09:40:55 AM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

Gartner gives Sun "positive" rating
Gartner just gave Sun a positive rating. Here is their one-line summary:
"Sun Microsystems' improved revenue, substantial progress toward sustainable profitability and return to Unix server market leadership warrant an increased vendor rating of "positive.""
Sun's open source strategy definitely strongly influenced this positive rating.
( Apr 25 2007, 09:23:52 AM CEST ) Permalink