Microsoft has no plans to support OpenDocument Format in its own applications by default, despite the fact it has backed the ODF for ANSI (American National Standards Institute) accreditation.
Nick McGrath, director of platform strategy for Microsoft UK, told ZDNet UK last week: "In a nutshell, ODF doesn't meet the needs of Microsoft applications."
McGrath said that applications such as OpenOffice, which runs on ODF, would not fully support documents created in Microsoft applications such as Office 2007, which runs on the rival Open XML standard (OXML). This echoed a comment made earlier this month by Microsoft, where the software giant criticized IBM over its support for ODF.
"The functionality of Office and the functionality of OpenOffice--it's like chalk and cheese," said McGrath.
However, John McCreesh, OpenOffice.org marketing project lead, firmly rebuked McGrath's comments.
"That's patently untrue because millions of people create a document in Word and open it in Writer [the OpenOffice equivalent]," McCreesh told ZDNet UK. "To say the file format can't be used in both applications is nonsense. Microsoft doesn't support ODF because it doesn't control it. There's no technical reason why it couldn't. Having launched OXML, Microsoft would find it very difficult to support ODF. It has backed itself into a corner we hope market pressure will back it out of."
McCreesh said that Microsoft's act of backing ODF for the ANSI standard was a "novel turn up for the books" and that he hadn't "the faintest idea" why. "Maybe Microsoft has suddenly seen the light. And maybe world peace has broken out and there will never be famine again," said McCreesh.
In a press statement last week, Microsoft said it was backing the ODF ANSI bid in the interests of interoperability.
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"Nick McGrath, director of platform strategy for Microsoft UK, told ZDNet UK last week: "In a nutshell, ODF doesn't meet the needs of Microsoft applications.""
Here, in a nutshell, is how Microsoft thinks for its customers. Making us swallow things is the way to go, so it seems.
Basically supporting a format should not be decided based on what a company's application need or do not need but what the customer wants to. If the customer wants ODF (as seen by some government agencies already), jolly well take the initiative to change the application to support it.
Business is about betting horses like 3G vs Wi-MAX or MAC vs PC so if the company bets on the wrong horse, guess that revenue loss is the conclusion.
If Vista is a representation of what MS thinks about meeting customer needs, then the above quote just emphasized and confirmed our disdain for MS: That MS is not consumer friendly...if that's the case, then it just wants to line its pockets with profits from less than stellar software offerings.
Posted by Wilson Wong on Tuesday, May 22 2007 07:39 PM