[odf-discuss] Microsoft will now support ODF

[Lars Noodén]

Christian Einfeldt wrote:

> But Sharepoint does not have the same broad reach as Microsoft Windows has
> possessed up until now. ...

I'm not sure how widespread the Sharepoint problem has become yet, but I
see indications that MSFTers inside organizations are rolling it out as
much under the radar as possible and as much as possible.  (BTW it
appears to be one of the key causes in a multi-organization,
international catastrophic failure of bank services.  In Finland, Sampo
is taking the heat, but there are others.)

Kind of related, at least as far as Internet and Open Standards go, is
that MSFTers inside organizations have been quietly migrating internal
services off of DNS.  That'll both lock out non-MS clients and (I
speculate wildly) make it possible to turn on the proprietary tcp/ip
replacement loaded into MS Vista[1] at a future date.

In all, the vaporware announcement (until a working, compliant service
pack ships), serves mostly to draw *our* discussions, the media, and
public attention off of ODF and ODF-compliant applications and back onto
non-standard cruftware.

While it's good, in principle, that MS is coming to the table at OASIS,
one should be sure to integrate them in such a way that they can only
contribute.  Otherwise the big risk is for them to 'pull an ISO' on
OASIS and the ODF TC aly l the while playing the 'Real Soon Now(tm)'
vaporware song and dance they are famous for.

To put on my OpenOffice.org (OOo) volunteer hat, with the removal of
support for old versions of MS Office documents, OOo seems to be in the
future.  That's for both institutions/businesses with lots of old
documents that must still be read as well as those with an eye to the
future who are moving to ODF.

-Lars

[1]	Like everything else in that version, the TCP/IP stack is an
egregious failure up front, as seen from an interoperability
perspective.  As seen from the potential of following through on the
'Halloween Documents', it's right on track.  You had your chance.