Office applications Toolkit

Story: Google: OOXML 'insufficient and unnecessary'

Posted by: Albert (Wednesday 27 February 2008, 10:16 AM)

Google motivation

I was stating the motivation for Google to be against the format. They are using a competing format that is less feature rich. That is why Google is against OOXML becoming an ISO standard, because then Google will have to compete more against office software that has features Google apps cannot provide (at least for a while).

You suggest that google cannot use OOXML but the specs are publicly availiable for more than a year now and google. Also google is able to interprete the old binary office formats of which the specification are a lot less good than OOXML spec.

The ODF format Google is using cannot supply the needs for a faithfull representation of most current document so when converting to ODF you will loose information. The OOXML format does allow faithfull represnetaion of the data in current MS Office files after conversion. This is very important for many of the current Office users which have billions of existing Office documents. Also the OOXML format is a lot more feature rich than ODF and can support the features currently used in MS Office. To support the features in MS Office in a simpler format like ODF it would require extensive MS extensions to ODF which would cripple ODF for any other users. Even now it is difficult for the different ODF implementation to interprete OpenOffice propriety features in ODF. This would become a lot more difficult if ODF documents were to consist more of propriety extensions than official standard complient code.

Btw, referring to the consortium info is like referring to the Linux foundation as Andy writing that blog is a director of the Linux foudation and a laywer working with IBM in an anti-ooxml crusade. He is also aprticipating in the anti-ooxml meeting in Geneva at the moment sitting in a panel with IBM VP Bob Sutor.

So the consortiuminfo blog, I read as an IBM blog (of course it very visibly often directly referring to the blogs of IBM employees like Bob Sutor)

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