Microsoft is supporting a chief rival to its Office suite for approval to a national standards board.
The company announced yesterday that it voted to add the Open Document Format (ODF) 1.0 to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) list. ANSI is a private, nonprofit organization that coordinates and develops U.S. standards for products and processes.
ODF is used by open source Office competitors in the Linux space, including the OpenOffice.org suite and the KOffice suite. It is supported by IBM, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Corel, Novell, Opera Software and Red Hat.
"We have listened to our customers, and they have told us they want choice, they want interoperability, they want innovation," said Tom Robertson, general manager for Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft, in a press release. "The American National Standards list does not include a number of document format standards in wide use today, such as PDF, .DOC, RTF and HTML. The inclusion of ODF is just the beginning; we expect the list will grow in the future to reflect the choices customers already have in today's marketplace."
View: Application Development Trends
The company announced yesterday that it voted to add the Open Document Format (ODF) 1.0 to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) list. ANSI is a private, nonprofit organization that coordinates and develops U.S. standards for products and processes.
ODF is used by open source Office competitors in the Linux space, including the OpenOffice.org suite and the KOffice suite. It is supported by IBM, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Corel, Novell, Opera Software and Red Hat.
"We have listened to our customers, and they have told us they want choice, they want interoperability, they want innovation," said Tom Robertson, general manager for Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft, in a press release. "The American National Standards list does not include a number of document format standards in wide use today, such as PDF, .DOC, RTF and HTML. The inclusion of ODF is just the beginning; we expect the list will grow in the future to reflect the choices customers already have in today's marketplace."
View: Application Development Trends
After all the talk over the last few days about MS going after open source projects for possibly using their technology, this is odd event to happen so soon after.
I think it is great that Microsoft has done a reversal of their previous stance. They can support and promote their own standard, yet still support odf. Good on them! (Y)
Maybe to get antiMicrosoft fanboys off their back on saying "MS doesn't care about it's costumers"
But again these are the same antiMicrosoft fanboys that say Microsoft = M$ so....
Serious though, this will help MS compete against OO.o in environments (gov'ts and corps) where IT decision makers are requiring the use of ODF. IMHO this additional competition can only be a good thing as long as MS keeps its grubby little fingers out of the cookie jar.
This is nothing more than a strategic move, it has nothing to do with interoperability. It doesn't matter if ODF is a "standard" or not. It is up to the OpenOffice developers to ensure the format is readable by Microsoft Office. The only thing Microsoft has to do to maintain interoperability is allow competing developers to make their file formats readable by Office which they have obviously done.
good joke. MS was criticised by every sing standards organization in the world and EU is openly boycotting 2007 for not supporting ODF.
In actual I dont think they listned, they are forced to do so and MS is buckling under pressure.
good joke. MS was criticised by every sing standards organization in the world and EU is openly boycotting 2007 for not supporting ODF.
In actual I dont think they listned, they are forced to do so and MS is buckling under pressure.
So if MS does something bad that's what they want, otherwise they're forced to.
How 'bout Apple? Did Steve Jobs invented iPod because he just loved to bring (DRM'ed) music to the world, or he's forced by their dwindling share of the personal computing market?
Its enough
Okay
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