It’s hip2b2

Finally, after a number of governments and organizations tooks turns pressuring Microsoft, it has finally yielded to their request to have the MS Office Suite have support for the OpenDocument Formats. NetworkWorld has this article.

The company said that the next edition of Office - Office 2007, now expected early next year - will include menu options for XML, ODF, and Adobe’s PDF formats. The ODF support would include Office’s three main formats, namely Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Microsoft has already released an ODF plugin for Microsoft Word 2007 Beta. The plug-in is now hosted in Sourceforge and is covered by a BSD license. It seems nice seeing Microsoft release more and more open source software in the market. This is not Microsoft’s first Sourceforge hosted project. It has currently also maintains a project called WiX that builds Windows installation packages from XML files.

Of course, this plug-in initially will only support Microsoft’s up and coming suite of office productivity software which is Microsoft Office 2007. Microsoft has also promised to release support for older versions of the Microsoft Office suite. This is definitely a good start.

This is a good move for Microsoft as it is a huge incentive for certain groups to upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007 (from whatever older version of MS Office they are clinging to). It will also keep some other groups from leaving the Microsoft Office suite. I believe the Microsoft formats will still maintain their market position and will not be displaced by ODF. At least, not yet. I believe the majority of users will insist on using older MS Office formats for quite a bit more time. Also, I am sure that support for ODF formats will not be full featured. However, I also believe these wins are short term. Once, compatibility between document formats is established this will allow groups to standardize on this format (ODF) and choose between multiple office productivity suites. Suites such as OpenOffice.org (which uses ODF native since its 2.0 release) can now gain significant ground against Microsoft Office. Later, they can get rid of MS Office all together.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 7th, 2006 at 12:37 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.