Erwin's StarOffice Tango

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Donnerstag Juni 02, 2005

"Microsoft Opens Office File Formats"
I just found this:

"When questioned about why Microsoft did not use the OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) OpenOffice.org XML file format Paoli answered, "Sun standardized their own. We could have used a format from others and shoehorned in functionality, but our design needs to be different because we have 400 million legacy users. Moving 400 million users to XML is a complex problem.""

Microsoft seems to ignore that the OASIS OpenDocument format was designed to be vendor and implementation agnostic. Just read the following quote from a KOffice developer:

"But I definitely think the OpenOffice.org file format was a very good basis for the OASIS format, since it was designed, from the start, as a file format that should be as independent as possible from the design of the application. It reuses standards like XSL/FO, CSS, HTML etc. as much as possible, so the goal is to make the OASIS format another one of those formats, where the application used to edit the document doesn't matter."

"The Microsoft Office Open XML Formats are backwards compatible to Office 2000 and those versions of Office that are supported will be issued updates to read the new formats. Gartner estimates that only 1.6% of customers in the United States will be using versions of Office that predate Office 2000 by the end of 2005 with even less in Europe."

Just look at the OpenOffice.org statistics to see where the OASIS OpenDocument market share is going!
( Jun 02 2005, 08:57:25 AM CEST ) Permalink

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