Red Hat Summit panel: Who ‘won’ OOXML battle?
by Colin Dodd
ODF (Open Document Format) has benefited from the two-year battle over the ratification of Microsoft’s rival OOXML (Open Office XML) standard, which is native to its Office 2007 suite, Microsoft’s national technology officer said Thursday during a panel discussion at the Red Hat Summit in Boston.
“ODF has clearly won,” said Stuart McKee, referring to Microsoft’s recent announcement that it would begin natively supporting ODF in Office next year and join the technical committee overseeing the next version of the format.
“We sell software for a living. The ability to implement ODF in the middle of our ship cycle was just not possible,” he said. “We couldn’t do that during the release of Office 2007. We’re looking forward and committed to doing more than [ODF-to-OOXML] translators.”
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) ratified OOXML in April. ODF backers, including major vendors like IBM and Sun, long decried it as too proprietary to be declared a standard.
June 24th, 2008 at 3:25 am
Oh come on. This is the oldest trick in the book:
Pretend to give up to catch your enemy unaware.
August 6th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Ya. Can anyone say “vapourware”?
August 8th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
It’s part of the old strategy: embrace ODF, extend ODF, and finally extinguish ODF, by making it oddly similar to OOXML.