OpenOffice 2.3 and 3.0 and IBM Symphony Improve Interop With Office

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Sure, they'll adopt Open Source. Just not all at once.

Customers won?t adopt any open source desktop ? whether it is backed by Sun, Novell, Red Hat or IBM ? if it doesn?t offer seamless compatibility with Microsoft Office.

Sure they will. Otherwise you might as well add Office 2007 to the list of apps that customers won't adopt. Let's be clear that it does not provide seamless compatibility with the 97/2000/XP .doc formats currently used by the vast majority of MS Office users.

Microsoft doesn't really believe their customers need 100% compatibility, as they haven't provided it. This set of slides re: Compatibility Mode Confusion details one administrator's set of problems. http://tinyurl.com/2npxcx

The Microsofties deride OSS proponents when we use terms like "good enough", but they absolutely depend on it (and consumer ignorance of the compatibility issues that remain) for sales of Microsoft Office 2007. And if you allow that the concept of "good enough" is valid for switching versions of Office, then it has to be valid for adoption of Open Source as well. That is, if you're fond of actually using logic in your thinking.

Yes, companies have huge libraries of .DOC files. Microsoft would like you to abandon that format for OOXML on the basis of the "good enough" fidelity provided by Office 2007. OSS proponents would like you to abandon those old formats for ODF, also based on "good enough" fidelity. However, ODF is already a widely adopted (by vendors) standard. OOXML is not widely adopted by vendors; nor is it widely adopted in practice by users.

Microsoft's market dominance isn't anymore permanent than the blockage of the NorthWest Passage. Remember WordPerfect? It was dominant, too. A blind man can see that the entire industry is changing. So if you've got to switch anyway, be smart about it and go the standards route.

Posted by: dave.leigh@...   Posted on: 09/18/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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