Riding the open standards wave to lower costs

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Here's why.

Because everybody's using. And because you've got to work with them.

Because, though OO can open MSO docs, it can't open them very well.

And that matters.

In a former life, I did a lot of document format translation support. "Good enough" is tough to define in that field, but in most work environments it's critical that you be able to pass documents back and forth while tracking revision history and maintaining style- and macro-driven formatting, uncorrupted. That's hard enough to do across versions of Word; it's impossible when you're trying make one of those active participants an OO user.

The inevitable question is: "so who really does that?" The answer is: LOTS of people. We don't hear about it, because we're mostly coders or IT implementers. I'll wager that there are very few people contributing on these boards to participate in group document creation; there are probably very few marketing, sales, legal, design, or finance people here. We need to never forget that those are the people who actually drive and create new business -- at least, outside of the comapnies that sell technology solutions to marketing, sales, legal, design, or finance people.

Micorsoft has worked very hard to make Office work very well with itself. They've worked fairly hard to make sure it doesn't work well with anything else.

The obvious, unassailable ideal -- and anyone who does assail this idea is dishonest or a fool -- is to have a universal document interchange standard that could support critical features like revision tracking, universal metadata, stylesheets, and the like.

That kind of standard would be inarguably good for consumers. Any appeal to market dynamics in return argument is patently disingenuous and deserves to be ignored.

Posted by: escoles@...   Posted on: 10/17/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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