Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

Back to the lost cause of document interoperability (I just love lost causes): as you may or may not remember¹, back in 2008 – almost exactly 1 year ago, after the OOXML fiasco – I wrote a tirade about how Microsoft can attack the (really) open OpenDocument Format by botching their implementation of it in MS-Office 2007 SP2.

Well, guess what – they did botch that and while Rob Weir takes a Hanlon’s razor view on this, I can only say: “Told you“.

But if anyone thought that this is the extent of Microsoft’s effort on this issue, they are sorely mistaken.

Here is how Microsoft addresses complaints about interoperability problems between their product and other vendors products’:

• Launch a smear campaign against ODF,involving a Wikipedia edit war to perpetrate misinformation produced in blogs.
• Personally attack the critics and claim that a chairman of the ODF technical committee should be removed from his position because he criticizes an implementation of the standard. (see Rob Weir’s response).

Well, nothing new here, move along now, move along.

For some anti-FUD data, check out Groklaw. In the mean time, if you want to get your MS-Office (2003 or 2007) to work with ODF documents properly, try the Sun (now Oracle) ODF plugin for Microsoft Office.

1. probably not as no one commented on the original article [↩]

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 21st, 2009 at 01:07 and is filed under Stuff. 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.