MS Office to open file styles

[GavinX]

I was just browsing the BBC website and saw this article.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5153350.stm

Seems a bit late now on the part of Microsoft........ I wonder if the pressure is beginning to tell on those guys there. In any event, it all seems good for software freedom.

[bwkaz]

When I read that, one sentence in particular stood out:

Microsoft said it started building the software tools in response to requests from government customers. Yeah, exactly. Notice it wasn't requests from some generic group of users or customers (which are not necessarily always the same people), but from, specifically, government customers. I think the important difference there is that governments don't necessarily have to interoperate with anyone else. So they don't have to use something that will read Office-binary-format files, like any other business does; they can decide on a file format and then require any potential vendor to have support for that format. So there's a possibility of real competition -- and only then does Microsoft actually do what the user wants.

(As opposed to the WGA notification tool...)

[IsaacKuo]

Actually, this is just Microsoft's business as usual. See Playing the Standards Game the Microsoft Way (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1985410,00.asp).

First, consider what Microsoft will actually be offering. It's a set of third-party, add-on utilities that will enable Office users—first only Office 2007 users, but later users of other Microsoft Office programs as well—to read and write in ODF.

It is not a set of programs, open-source BSD license or not, that anyone else will be able to use. The Translator will only work with Microsoft's own proprietary programs. You can't use it, as it is, as an independent bridge between Microsoft's formats and ODF.

There are two key phrases here. The first is "third-party." Jason Matusow, Microsoft's director of standards affairs, came right out and said Microsoft was not contributing code or providing architectural guidance for Open XML Translator.

In other words, if it does a crummy job of translating to and from, don't look to Microsoft to clean up your slightly mangled documents.

Now, the author of this article is a long time Microsoft critic, but his suspicions echo the exact same suspicions I had when I first read about this Microsoft announcement of "ODF support". It's simply about doing the absolute minimum to comply with government demands for interoperability while at the same time sabotaging that interoperability.

So Microsoft lets some third party develop a plug-in to translate between Microsoft's proprietary formats and ODF. They don't contribute any code, so that gives them a semblance of plausible deniability. In any case, it's enough so that any legal action will take years after the damage has already been done, and they'll probably just get another slap on the wrist anyway when all is said and done.

In the meantime, Microsoft continues to add "features" to their proprietary Office formats, which make it difficult for the third party plug-in developers to maintain proper translation between the formats. These "features" might even include purposeful sabotage to prevent proper translation--who would ever know? It's closed source, after all.

It's just another transparent scheme by Microsoft. If they actually wanted interoperability, then they'd build in native capabilities to open and save the files in ODF. Instead, they're just doing everything in their power to destroy ODF--same old, same old. And we all get to suffer for it, same as usual.