An interesting view of why Microsoft now says it’s going to add Open Document Format support to Office. I’m not sure I believe it though… Microsoft has a very long history of being less than truthful about why it’s doing things.
An interesting view of why Microsoft now says it’s going to add Open Document Format support to Office. I’m not sure I believe it though… Microsoft has a very long history of being less than truthful about why it’s doing things.
I’ll believe MS Office creates compliant ODF format documents when I see it. Until then, I’ll assume it’ll be either “embrace and extend” or a second-class format, like making a webpage in Word. (ugh!)
🙂 They’ve all but said as much already — that ODF can’t possibly handle all of Word’s formatting requirements, so people who save in that format should expect their files to come out less than perfect. I’m sure that has more to do with the fact they can’t control it (i.e. make arbitrary changes to it to lock other programs out) than any basis in fact.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument#Criticism
Other than table presentation and formulas, both of which are to be added soon, I don’t see anything that would limit Word documents much.
Yes, but you’re not Microsoft. 😉
The problem is the standard is over 800 pages instead of over 2,000 (OOXML)? 😉
No, the problem is that they’re Microsoft! 😀
I don’t think they view that as a problem. 😉
They should. :-p
Well, Bill Gates is leaving in a couple of months. When Ballmer leaves, maybe there will be hope for them.
I confidently predict that Microsoft will change. Right now, it’s a shrewd and evil company that ignores most of its customers’ cries for mercy because listening would cost them more money than it would make. It also takes the long view, and acts to deal with it before most people even think it could be a problem.
After those two are gone, it will become a totally clueless and evil company, that ignores all of its customers’ cries for mercy because listening to any of them might cost a penny or two more which would upset the short-sighted bean-counters who can’t see past the next quarterly results. It will start perpetually reacting to crises that never would have arisen under Gates and Ballmer, and switch the focus from improving its core products (however slightly) to aggressively pushing them on everyone. The quality of their programs (which was never that high to begin with) will plummet, they’ll resort to buying competitors just to shut down competition, and they’ll be forced into ever-more-desperate ploys to keep their shareholders off their backs.
I won’t go so far as to say that they’ll be bankrupt any time in the foreseeable future, but their time as a major industry powerhouse is coming to an end (it’s already headed that way). They’re going the way of IBM — they’ll still be wealthy, and powerful in some circles because of that wealth, but they’ll lack the vision (and the courage to follow it) that makes them a leader right now.
Okay, gotta let the crystal ball cool off now. 🙂
You could be right, Bill Gates is a bit smarter than the typical bean-counter, so’s even Ballmer. When they’re gone, probably the equivalent of Apple’s doldrum-period Pepsi-Cola executives will take over, and Microsoft won’t have a second coming of Bill Gates to save them I suspect – Gates doesn’t have Jobs’ messiah-complex.
Time will tell. In any case, my prediction is now immortalized on the ‘net, so we’ll see in a decade or two how accurate it was. 🙂
If you think Bill Gates’s leaving Microsoft is bad because without him the company is rudderless, the latest Apple rumor is that Job’s severely gaunt appearance for WWDC was because his cancer is no longer in remission. Unfortunately, since he had been treated for cancer nine months before he revealed to stockholders and the public that he had it the first time, the possibility that he’s hiding it, like everything else, is credible. Of course, there’s something a bit tasteless about such a rumor, but he’s a public figure, in a publicly held corporation, and since when did tastelessness stop me?
As I’m neither a stockholder nor (presently) a customer of Apple, that isn’t really any of my business. But if both Apple and Microsoft lose their visionary minds, the computer software industry will almost certainly become a very different place.
Well, if both does, it will be an interesting world. Hopefully not, since I’m a customer of Apple; a bit of my investment and potential livelihood might ride on Steve Job’s continued well-being. Though of course, Macs can run just about any OS. 🙂 One of the good things about Linux is the “run over by a bus” factor.