So when I saw the title of this article (slashdot link), the first thing I did is check the calendar; nope, it’s not April 1st. Then I checked to see if it’s an article from The Onion; wrong again. So now I’m left wondering what’s going on. Apparently Microsoft will add support for ODF 1.1 in Office 2007, and not their new OOXML format.
What the hell Microsoft.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, the part about ODF being supported natively is great news for people who understand why truly open formats are needed. Good job Microsoft for finally implementing it. But the whole OOXML part is very strange. Microsoft has spent a lot of time and money conducted some questionable practices to get OOXML committed as an ISO standard. But you can’t actually USE this standard in Office until the new release?
There’s been a lot of articles online about this whole OOXML controversy, ranging from the various technical issues [pdf] with the standard to committee stacking and other irregularities in the actual voting process. I’m sure a bunch of this is just Microsoft hating, but with all the events and issues surrounding it, it makes you wonder. And the fact that you cannot use it in Office until Office 14 (release date TBA, of course) doesn’t help their case.
In reality, this doesn’t really affect me that much since I only use LaTeX for typesetting and PDFs for reading anyways. And really, it’s not that bad of a thing, since ODF is finally getting included as a supported format in Office. But this is not going to help OOXML at all, and so it begs the question as to why they’re not including it as a standard in Office 2007.
