Microsoft Office to support more default formats
Microsoft has announced that it will be supporting more file formats in its Office suite in the first half of 2009, and the response from the European Union was one of skepticism.
Microsoft intends to increase PDF support natively in Office, as well as add the Open Document Format (ODF), as a part of Service Pack 2 for Office 2007. The timing of this announcement comes after they have been successful in getting their own native document format, OpenXML, approved as an ISO standard, and is most likely being done to prevent attrition from a variety of Office competitors (free, and otherwise) that will be supporting the ODF.
Ostensibly, the EU is aiming at Microsoft because of the lack of interoperability, which is everyone's current bandwagon, but there are other areas that I wish they would focus on if interoperability was truly their foremost concern. I'm still trying to figure out why they should even have any jurisdiction over application document formats in the first place...
These grand interoperability quests are always supposed to be a benefit to the consumer, but they're not targeting any actual consumer needs. They really only benefit the other vendors in this space. And Microsoft's support of alternate formats will only help Microsoft and the free vendors. The other vendors with paid products are going to suffer attrition from the freeware options.
We have a year or so to see how this turns out...
About Logik!
Andrew S. Baker aka ASB aka Logik!
Andrew is an accomplished, hands-on IT Executive with a solid track record of providing timely and cost-effective business solutions using technology. With over 16 years experience in Information Technology, he has proven to be effective both as a Team Leader and as an individual contributor in designing, deploying, securing and maintaining enterprise networks.
His personal interests include Astronomy, Basketball, Bible Study, Chess, Comics, Computers,
Family Life Ministries, Reading and Strategy/Role Playing games...
Some of his contributions include several whitepapers on technology and Information Security, the UltraTech Knowledgebase, various postings to technology mailing lists and forums, active participation on LinkedIn Answers, along with a number of interviews for articles published in industry magazines.
A condensed version of
Andrew's current resume is available here.