Donnerstag Juli 06, 2006

The Power of the Masses
As you most likely already know by now, Microsoft today joined the growing family of ODF-supporting applications by announcing an Office Open XML / ODF conversion plug-in for Microsoft Office. If this is news to you, you can find the announcement here.

Microsoft's recent decision illustrates the power of the masses. As you can read in Microsoft's response to the Valoris report created for the European Commission, Microsoft had no intention to give their file format to a standards body in 2004. BTW, at that time, Microsoft also still believed that plain XML is superior to zipped XML and tried to present zipped XML as a somewhat closed format. Just weeks ago, Microsoft claimed that they would never support ODF within Office 2007 (see this).

Now, due to the recent pro-ODF decisions by the Massachusetts ITD as well as the Belgium and Danish government in addition to open standards efforts in Brazil, Malaysia, India, Germany and elsewhere, Microsoft changed the strategy. Microsoft first decided to give the format specification to ECMA and now announced to provide a plug-in for ODF.

The good news are that Microsoft joins the growing selection of ODF-supporting applications which includes ODF implementations like OpenOffice.org, Novell's edition of OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, IBM Workplace, Google Writely, Softmaker's TextMaker, AjaxWrite, KOffice, AbiWord/Gnumeric and others. Thus, if customers standardize their internal and external workflows on ODF they have a choice between multiple implementations, including ones that are open source and can be used for free. Customer also get the benefits of an open standard that is supported by the more than 220 members of the ODF Alliance, that is specified by companies and projects like Adobe, IBM, Intel, KDE, Novell, and Sun, and that has implementations available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and FreeBSD.

Microsoft claims that ODF has less functionality than Office Open XML, but Microsoft is invited to join the OASIS ODF TC to get their requirements (or the ODF limitations, as they like to position it) included in the ODF specification. I'm sure that Microsoft will do (will have to do) exactly that, if "the masses" standardize their workflows on ODF.

As part of the ODF plug-in announcement, Microsoft likes to position ODF as being inferior. Microsoft talks about "gaps" with respect to formulas and accessibility. I, as you can imagine, disagree with their assertion!

First, ODF got approved by the OASIS and ISO members as it is. Thus, all the work that is currently being done by the various OASIS sub-committees should be seen as the natural evolution of an accepted standard. Second, it would be easy to just define formulas by documenting what one specific implementation does, which actually seems to be Microsoft's approach. The OpenOffice.org source code is openly available and in some sense formulas are already defined via the available source code, at least if you believe Microsoft's approach is the right approach. If you don't believe in Microsoft's approach, you should be happy with the work being done by the multi-vendor formula sub-committee at OASIS that is currently defining formulas with a focus on optimizing functionality and interoperability between different ODF implementations.

For ODF implementations that leverage technology from OpenOffice.org (e.g. OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, IBM Workplace, AjaxWrite, etc.), formulas should not be an issues at the moment anyway. Other implementations like KOffice haven been collaborating with OpenOffice.org and others for years, and thus I wouldn't expect serious issues there as well. Textdocuments and presentation files typically don't use formulas and thus should not be part of the formula discussion.

As you can read here, accessibility on the file format level will be addressed by the OASIS ODF TC shortly. With respect to accessibility from an application point of view, the success of ODF is increasingly seen as a unique opportunity for making accessibility tools affordable by people with disabilities. You might want to read this, this, and this. As you can see, ODF accessbility is actually in very good shape!

Finally, if you want to learn more about the history and the benefits of ODF, you should take a look at this draft document. More details about some of the ODF implementations can be found in the different interviews by Andy Updegrove (KOffice, OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, Textmaker). AFAIK, an interview with IBM will be added by Andy shortly.
( Jul 06 2006, 03:42:10 PM CEST ) Permalink