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Re: It makes no sense
by T. J. Brumfield on Friday 02/Nov/2007, @17:08
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Office 2007 doesn't have the huge market share that Office 2003 does, because most businesses aren't making that jump yet. MS Office does have a huge market share lead, but a bigger priority should be on importing and exporting Office 2003 .doc and .xls formats first, before worrying about the huge mess that is OOXML.
Furthermore, now that there are .odf converters for Office 2007, you can convince Office 2007 users to send documents in .odf format to ensure compatibility with them. Office 2007 users who want to share documents likely have to "Save As..." in another format anyway, since not many people are using Office 2007 anyway.
OpenOffice is good, but not perfect. It is a little slow, has political issues with Sun going on, features bloat from an old code base, and has a poor UI.
Personally, I'd either like to see a combined effort from developers to make OOo the best it could be, or see a better product replace it. KOffice couldn't compete with OOo because it wasn't a multiplatform product, but it is about to be.
There has been some discussion in the OOo crowd to remove some older portions of its clunky codebase, and replace it with other existing libraries and products, such as page rendering and the like. Neither OOo nor KOffice is going away, so we're going to get developers split between the two products, and we have to accept this at some point.
However, I have to wonder if the OOo and KOffice devs couldn't work together on some joint libraries between the two products, such as MS import filters, ODF libraries, etc, and libraries for both products to best display natively on all three major platforms.
A codeveloped ODF library doesn't just benefit the KDE team, it benefits all developers, and the further adoption of the ODF format. |
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Re: It makes no sense
by Sebastian Sauer on Sunday 04/Nov/2007, @11:54
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See, very good support can't be done within a day, a week, a month or even a year. It takes just very long. Now the situation is, that it's guaranteed that ISO OpenDocument will be the default file-format for a bunch of applications for a pretty long time. That means, if we invest today time, it will pay out tomorrow and even the day after tomorrow we still support a widly used format. Now try to compare that to the MSOffice2003-Format. 2003 is _NOT_ compatible with 2007. Don't believe there the MS food, they are pretty much different file-formats what means, that already today the MS2003-format is already expired and out-of-date. If you look back a few years you will note, that this was very often the case and the old MSOffice-formats got replaced each few years with a new format. Now we have those blending MSOffice2007-Format. And guess what? Its guaranteed that the format will be replaced with a new one as soon as there is a new MSOffice-suite out. We are already able to see this with the large VML-related parts defined in the MSOOXML2007-specification and down the road we can expect that the next MSOffice-format will also introduce more dependencies to .NET && .Windows .
So, rather then starting to work on import+export _filters_ it just makes more sense to put all energy into a format that is guaranteed to stay real backward-compatible, even in 2008, 2009, and so on... A format that will improve in small steps rather then beeing replaced behind closed doors in one huge rush with a new MSOffice-version.
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Re: It makes no sense
by yxxcvsdfbnfgnds on Sunday 04/Nov/2007, @13:59
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"Office 2007 doesn't have the huge market share that Office 2003 does, because most businesses aren't making that jump yet. MS Office does have a huge market share lead, but a bigger priority should be on importing and exporting Office 2003 .doc and .xls formats first, before worrying about the huge mess that is OOXML."
Yes, you are right, but fully supporting old MS Office formats is hard. For OOXML files there already is a stand-alone converter that converts OOXML files to ODF files. Just executing this converter shouldn't be so hard.
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"Furthermore, now that there are .odf converters for Office 2007, you can convince Office 2007 users to send documents in .odf format to ensure compatibility with them."
Um, it's sadly a bit more complicated than that. As Windows users don't have a nice package management system, they have to resolve all dependencies by themselves, because they have to install the Office Compatibility Pack, install the .NET Framework, activate .NET Programmability Support, and then install the ODF converter. And that's only when they want to send their documents to someone else. What if those Windows users like to switch to KOffice 2? Why should they first need to convert all existing files they have on the hard drive? If KOffice supported them right away it would be a lot easier for them.
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"KOffice couldn't compete with OOo because it wasn't a multiplatform product, but it is about to be."
AbiWord has always been multi-platform. It boots faster and uses less resources while having all features common users want to have. Yet almost no Windows or Mac user uses AbiWord. Why? Because its MS Office file supports sucks as much as KOffice's.
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