[odf-discuss] IBM responds to OOXML approval

[marbux]

On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 9:25 AM, <robert_weir at us.ibm.com> wrote:

>
> Widely used in the near future by Corel.  I like that one.


Yes, it's a gem. FWIW, back in the day when Corel still had 1,700 developers
and was still a force to be reckoned with, I was the owner/operator of
WordPerfect Universe, <http://www.wpuniverse.com>. I did a *lot* of
WordPerfect tech support and the odd bit of consulting for Corel.

I'm not hopeful for the quality of support WordPerfect will have for either
OOXML or ODF. Back in about 1998 or so, Corel was really feeling the heat
from the law office/government market about  interop with MS Office and
convened a "Legal Summit" in Ottawa to talk things over with some major
accounts. Unfortunately, Corel succumbed to the "I wanna' see exactly what
the other guys is seeing" crowd.  Improved WP Office/MS Office conversion
filters is where the major part of the development budget went for WP Office
2000.

To their credit, they produced a conversion engine that produced a near-PDF
quality replication of a DOC file, but the whole document would fall apart
if you made a single edit. Just too much fundamental difference in the
architectures of the programs and the binary formats. At the architectural
level, Word for example is an object-oriented app whereas WordPerfect
processes data in a stream, interspersed by the occasional object for
subdocuments, styles, etc.

It didn't help that in 1999, Corel closed the old WordPerfect Corp. campus
in Orem and pink-slipped every single former WP Corp./Novell developer, so
WPO 2000 was the first version produced by the perennial crop of new
computer science graduates in Ottawa who were willing to trade a few years
of low pay for  credible entries in the work history section of their
resumes. I can't say that WordPerfect has ever recovered from the loss of
the developers who actually rebuilt the app pretty much from scratch for
WordPerfect 6.0 and understood the code base.

The result? A small flood of user-developed macros for stripping the
Microsoft cruft from converted DOC files so they could be edited without
collapsing the document. And because the company has been so drastically
downsized since 1999, Corel never got around to developing a more useful
converter. I doubt that they have the resources to do it now. The company
today is a mere shadow of what it used to be and I'll probably maintain
until my dying day that there never was anyone in charge in Ottawa who
actually understood the office productivity software market and
WordPerfect's positioning in it.

I suspect that Corel will not have huge difficulties with implementing
something equivalent for DOCX support. So much of DOCX is dumped from DOC
that a lot of the existing work is probably fairly portable. But because
OOo's page layout engine is also heavily object-oriented and ODF accordingly
highly structured, I suspect they'll face a lot of similar issues with ODF.

Not to mention the fact that WordPerfect still doesn't (and most likely
never will) do Unicode except in the XML editor, which is so drastically
different from the main editor that I doubt Corel would attempt to adapt it
to handle ODF and OOXML. That would impose far too much learning curve on
existing users, which is about all that Corel has left for market share
prospects.

They also have the problem of ODF not supporting a fair number of features
needed to express the full range of functionality in WordPerfect. It's
really too bad that back when Corel was still participating on the ODF TC,
it sent one of their graphics apps developers as their rep. rather than a
WordPerfect Office developer. He got some SVG compatibility into ODF, but
from what I can tell never got as far as getting the full range of
functionality WordPerfect needed into the spec before Corel withdrew from
the TC. But then, the company is very heavily biased toward graphics editing
apps from head to toe, a fact that has seriously hurt WordPerfect over the
years.

I'd love to be pleasantly surprised, but I'm not hopeful. Like many others,
I'm still waiting for the first service pack for WordPerfect Office 2000 for
Linux, which is the buggiest version of WPO in the product's history. I'll
buy a copy of the new version to check out the ODF/OOXML support, but I'm
not holding my breath.

So yes, widespread use of OOXML by Corel is pure marketing hype,
particularly considering that Corel never achieved workable interop with MS
Office. It's the same old story; those who require high-fidelity interop
with MS Office use MS Office. It's only those who don't have that
requirement who can use something else.

Best regards,

Paul
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