Okay, I promise there will be future posts about topics related to Office 12 that aren’t directly related to Open Formatting brouhaha, but I had to share this article about Peter Quinn, Republican Gov. Mitt Romney’s technology adviser resigning from his position.
Technology
Robin Miller shares his viewpoint on Microsoft's open formats
Robin Miller recently had an article on Slashdot on whether or not Microsoft is still a monopoly. The article actually even questions whether they ever were. That’s not the initial interesting part of his article though. He goes on to discuss the importance of Microsoft beginning to work with more formats.
Microsoft may no longer be able to hire all the top programmers it wants, but there is already plenty of talent among its 60,000-plus employees, and they have done some excellent work in recent years. Windows XP is immeasurably better and more stable than Windows ME or Windows 98. The next generation of Explorer will have many of the modern browser features that those of us who use Firefox or Opera have gotten accustomed to. Microsoft Office may not have some of the features OpenOffice.org users take for granted, like a built-in graphics utility, the ability to act as a front end for industrial-strength free databases like MySQL, and the ability to save your work in 30+ different Open and proprietary formats, including PDF. But Microsoft Office today is a lot better than it was 10 years ago, and the next version may even use a sort-of free XML file format that may not be as open and standardized as the OASIS Open Document Format used by OpenOffice.org, but is less closed and less proprietary than previous Microsoft file formats.
I agree with the vast majority of everything that Mr. Miller states in the entire article. It’s a new day in the hardware and software business. This new day forces companies to react quickly and continually improve, if they don’t there’s someone there to offer something more to your customers than you are currently delivering. This is good! Let’s continue to improve everything everywhere.
More Information on File Formats
Earlier we spoke of the involvement of Microsoft with ECMA standards board and Bob Sutor’s disagreement over Microsoft developing their own standards.
Microsoft’s move to sidestep the OASIS OpenDocument format (ODF) standard by making its own standards submission to the European ECMA standards body appears to contain ‘bizarre restrictions’ and are designed to give Microsoft ‘complete control by tying products’ together, IBM’s standards chief said in an interview Friday.
A recent article at Information Week rehashes alot of what was already discussed, but also adds information regarding Microsoft’s not supporting the full OASIS standards and their reason for developing their own formats.
Microsoft has criticized the OASIS approach. In a statement, the software giant said: “The OpenDocument format would not meet requirements for backward compatibility, for forward compatibility, or for performance, that millions of Microsoft customers tell us that they require.”
“bizarre restrictions”? Yeah, making formats that are backwards and forwards compatible, that’s just nutty!
I don’t know about you, but being able to open all my documents saved in previous versions of Microsoft products would be a pretty important feature I’d be looking for in the new version. At this point, I don’t have any of the details on just how much performance would be impacted by either formats.
I think it would be a great idea for both formats to be supported in Office 12. We already know they’re going to start supporting the ability to save documents directly to PDF format. However, I think it would be something to pursue as an optional free upgrade download later once the initial software has been released.
I’d almost be willing to put money on the fact that even if they supported both, Microsoft’s proposed format would still be the most used file format for items to be saved. See, not everyone is going to upgrade to Office 12, so I think being able to save files into a format that can be opened in older versions of the Office software is a definite must-have feature.