Music: Thanatopsis - Cross Section
I've been following the headlines these last few months concerning Microsoft's attempts to create an ISO standard document. They are trying to get OOXML to become a world wide standard for sharing documents with a government or organization. The problem they're having is this:
1. Its complicated. The document used to describe the standard was almost 9,000 pages, most of the features and functionality will only be available when using Word. (Surprised? I'm not.)
2. Its been done. PDF was created and standardized as a document exchange format. Some might say that PDF won't allow for editing documents, well for that Sun (the people behind Microsoft's cheif competitor, Openoffice.org) had ODF standardized several years ago and has been supported by many companies including IBM and Corel. This will allow you to share your document and edit it. Voila.
During the process, Microsoft hijacked votes in countries like Sweeden which before the vote had 6 active companies and at the time of the vote an additional 22 joined. That makes me angry. But thats not the point of this.
The point is this. Microsoft announced today that they are NOT going to be supporting their own OOXML format (because they can't figure it out) until the next version of Office which has no release date (I can guess 2012 by past performance).
The kicker... their main purpose of the press conference was to announce that they are supporting ODF documents. The same format that they were fighting when they devised a scheme to confuse the world.
Talk about not knowing what the right hand is doing....
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2008-05-21-022-26-NW-MS-SW
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