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.