On Tue, 2006-04-18 at 15:33 +0100, Thomas Adam wrote:
Bah. Typical. Oh well. Here's to hoping. The current filters in OO aren't too bad, for most things.
They will get better once MSO adopts an almost identical XML based format. There are opportunities here as well as threats. Several governments and most of the big players are backing ODF. IBM, Oracle, Sun, Corel and whole host of others are members of the Open Document Alliance which was only launched in March. MS is fighting but there is a real chance that the EU will mandate ODF when it achieves ISO status. So the way I see it is that worse case scenario is that MS bring out a new version of MSO with a new default file format next year that will confuse half their users some of who will migrate to OOo. The new format is easier to hack so OOo filters get better. MS do not provide OOo filters but really that is certainly no worse than now. Best case scenario. EU mandate that all people who deal with them have to use ISO documents ie ODF. Several US States follow this trend (2 already have shown clear signs of doing this) Google continue to develop Web based office suite also using ODF. IBM and other office software producers support ODF and so many more people start using OOo and alternatives and ODF applications other than office software start to spring up all over the net. OOo 3.0 is released and MS Office 11 sells like a dog because most people find they have no need to upgrade so there are far more ODF users than MSXML users in 5 years time. Game over, MS don't control the document format anymore and are forced to adopt ODF like everyone else. Even the worst case is better than now so we are making progress, question is just how much and how quickly. -- Ian Lynch www.theINGOTs.org www.opendocumentfellowship.org www.schoolforge.org.uk