Enterprise applications Toolkit

Story: Microsoft makes last-gasp OOXML push

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Not really...

ODF is a document format, by no stretch of the imagination does it "provide backward compatibility" as implied by the Microsoft representative. Think PDF, another published standard, does it provide backward compatibility for reading old Microsoft doc files? No, of course not, it's a format and as such can opened up in Adobe Reader, OpenOffice and numerous other applications.

Organizations, particularly governmental ones, should standardize on published document formats for several reasons. Number one being that multiple applications can correctly read and write these documents allowing for wide range of pricing/support structures and competitive bidding in the market place.

If they were to use a proprietary format, not only would they lock themselves in but also force third parties dealing with them to get themselves locked in too. Because of this, the vendor can charge ridiculous amounts for retail copies while potentially giving the government and super-large companies big discounts to discourage them from migrating.

All this is why it's such a big deal for Microsoft and why everything they put out is be a moving target when it comes to being compatible or interoperable, including their MS-OOXML pseudo-standard.

Read the ODF alliance's response to this Burton Group's report:
http://www.odfalliance.org/resources/BurtonGroupResponseFinal.pdf

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