“ODF has clearly won”, Microsoft says
After over a couple years of passionate fight between the Open Document Fomat (ODF) and Open Office XML (OOXML) supporters, it sounds like Microsoft will fully embrace ODF.
Microsoft’s national technology officer, Stuart McKee, speaking at a panel at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, said:
“ODF has clearly won. We sell software for a living. The ability to implement ODF in the middle of our ship cycle was just not possible. We couldn’t do that during the release of Office 2007. We’re looking forward and committed to doing more than [ODF-to-OOXML] translators.”
Full support for ODF will appear in Office 2007 SP2, slated for first half of 2009.
Great news for the Future of Documents and all of us end users! One single XML-based Format will be used as standard for most, if not all, of our Document Processing files, thus allowing easy interchange . Furthermore, one can hope the standardization work will now be shift focus from making one standard prevail over each other towards a joint enrichment of the format to support more “semantic” like representations of documents, thus enabling easier content and information extraction from these extractions.
…Unless China’s UOF actually becomes a significant player ?
