By: Jon Collins, Service Director, Freeform Dynamics Published: 6th July 2007 Copyright Freeform Dynamics © 2007

I'm sorry. Simon Phipps writes about the ODF plug-in for MS-Office release, "...Now MS Office users can get the feature their supplier refuses to include—full ODF support intuitively implemented right in the application."

Now, maybe it is because I'm a provincial Brit but I've never met any of these users. Indeed, I've been told the opposite—"we've standardised on MS-Office as our strategic platform for the forseeable future," said one IT exec at an investment bank. Just one example, there are plenty of others. The collective sigh of relief in end-user land is strangely absent.

I'm sure there are plenty of perfectly valid reasons why ODF is a better format than the MS-Office XML, I'm just totally in the dark about which organisations care.

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6th July 2007: 'grahamt' said:

Jon, that's because business users are not the only MS Office users worthy of consideration. Even those who are (such as my wife) regularly tear their hair out because of the non-interoperability of documents between MS and other office productivity suites such as OpenOffice. The irony is that even MS itself maintains no interoperability between its own products! Have YOU tried to transfer a document between MS Office and MS Works? Even so called open standards such as RTF are implemented in different ways between MS products so that a document created in one can look completely different in another. This ODF development is a great step forward and shouldn't be so casually shrugged off.

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6th July 2007: 'Jon Collins' (Author) said:

Thanks - good answer, and good point. What gets my goat is the rhetoric of the ODF evangelists, who like to give the impression that there is a massive pool of corporate users whose lives will be transformed by ODF interoperability. There is, no doubt, a pool of some size, I just think we can do without the hype! However, and it's a big however, while I understand your concerns I don't think that the "blame" should be squared at any one company. I can remember distinctly the bloatware wars of the 90's, and I remember how Microsoft's toolsets offered better import/export facilities than those of WordPerfect (which was the incumbent at the time, where I was working). I have various good, and some not so good experiences of working with Interleaf, Framemaker, Word, WordPerfect, StarOffice and OpenOffice to name a few. With this background I can indeed see the benefit of offering a standardised document format, I'm not absolutely sure whether ODF is better or worse than the Microsoft-only format, for the simple reason that it has to boil down to meeting the productivity needs of the majority, and it is too early to tell which option "wins" - I'm not absolutely sure what was wrong with SGML for example! There are other factors - is it just me who finds it frustrating, with any office package, that if I change the printer, the formatting goes all over the place? I think it is too early for this, but at some point I would love to do some research to find out exactly whether and where the benefits of ODF are being realised. Apologies if you took my post as casual!

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6th July 2007: 'Simon Phipps' said:

Jon: There are plenty of users who care about this, especially in government procurement circles. Right now few are in the sort of companies with which analyst companies consult, but that will change. Just be aware that there would be no OOXML specification being offered for standardisation right now if ODF had not existed. Its continued vigour provides your customers with the vector that ultimately will drive down their costs and improve their freedom to choose vendors. Sneer all you want, but I believe that's a great contribution to our industry.

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6th July 2007: 'Jon Collins' (Author) said:

"Sneer" - ahem, I don't think I was, I was just asking the question. We don't have a large pool of consultancy clients, but we do have some strong relationships with appropriate people in end-user land. As it happens, just a couple of days ago I was talking to the MOD's "intelligent customer" to the Atlas consortium (more info here.) So, in other words, I am listening—and not just to the minority of people that might have analyst subscriptions. The research that we do crosses all sectors, so that shouldn't be a barrier either. As I said, I don't believe that the rhetoric accurately reflects what is happening in the field. I have no reason to sneer, but I do believe that we should all be careful to paint an accurate picture.

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12th July 2007: 'Jimbob' said:

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a single format for all documents? I thought IT was there to make our lives easier, not to make it more complicated!!

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12th July 2007: 'Gemma' said:

IT Utopia? One of the founding principles of the open source movement! But seriously ... get real. I doubt there will ever be a time when all systems talk to one another using a universal protocol and framework.

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