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ODF Vs. OOXML File Counts On the Web
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Aug 17, 2007 01:54 PM
from the numbers-not-lying dept.
from the numbers-not-lying dept.
mrcgran writes "In eight months since Office 2007 was released to the general public (10 months since release to enterprise customers), there are fewer than 2,000 of these office documents posted on the Web. In the last three months, 13,400 more ODF documents have been added to the Web, with only 1,329 OOXML documents added. It would be hard for the Microsoft camp to spin ten times as many ODF documents added as OOXML documents, especially since 34% of those new documents were added on Microsoft.com. That isn't what I would call good traction for Microsoft's overwhelmingly dominant office suite."
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Microsoft is competing with itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft is competing with itself (Score:4, Informative)
Especially if you have any legacy Word 1.0 or 2.0 documents that can't be upgraded to the latest format for contractual reasons - Office 2007 will not open those files correctly, and those files are officially unsupported by Microsoft.
I'm surprised that more people don't just use
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Offtopic, but I'm just too curious... Would it be possible to explain why these can't be migrated to a newer format? I'd think that'd be dangerously unwise.
I'm surprised that more people don't just use
Cause we all know how much a success th
Re:Microsoft is competing with itself (Score:4, Informative)
Offtopic, but I'm just too curious... Would it be possible to explain why these can't be migrated to a newer format? I'd think that'd be dangerously unwise.
My recommendation was to handle those archives very differently. This client has a decision maker who knows what he wants, and dictates that it is either done that way, or he'll find someone else to do it. So we do it that way, and every year, I make a case for becoming more current, and every year, the answer is no. I don't mind, though, he's paying for the service, and other than this little bit of fear, he's really easy to work with, I've certainly had far more progressive clients that were far more of a PITA.
Parent
Re:Microsoft is competing with itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Their whole business is dependent on being the popular standard. But by definition, a standard can't be a moving target, so it has to change very slowly or people will stick with "the old version that everyone has."
This puts Microsoft between a rock and a hard place, since they'll lose the market if they make too drastic a change, and they'll also lose the market if they don't change at all, and allow other implementations to catch up.
It's a high-wire balancing act, and while they're very good at it, they're going to slip eventually.
All of you people worried about Microsoft as a monopoly are freaking out over nothing. In the long term, what they're doing with Windows and Office is not sustainable.
Parent
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All of you people worried about Microsoft as a monopoly are freaking out over nothing. In the long term, what they're doing with Windows and Office is not sustainable.
People have been saying things like that for years. It hasn't come to pass yet. What may not be sustainable for other companies, Microsoft can pull off due to their political and financial clout. They damn near succeeded in getting OOXML fasttracked due to their financial clout with their partners. They will come up with many many ways to fight off what you seem to think is inevitable.
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They don't necessarily have to slip. They just have to make a better, more intuitive, easy to use word processor. I can name quite a few things that are wrong with Word 2003 and OpenOffice. But I guess you can too
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
MOOXML isn't about competing with other office suites. It's about preventing competition from thousands of specialised document creation tools.
If ODF becomes ubiquitous, it will be easy for specialised tools to create documents which can then be opened/parsed by the office suite or by other tools (ie databases, document managers, aggregators etc) in the chain. Instead of having a few easy targets to embrace, extend..., Microsoft
Office Compatiblity Addon for Old Versions (Score:3, Informative)
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Is a web count really the best metric? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, but (Score:5, Insightful)
No Demand? (Score:2)
How does it benefit most people? Not at all. Everybody can already read the MS docs they create since everybody already has MS Office.
Seems logical (Score:2)
Legacy formats, so what? (Score:2)
Old word formats are still a poor way to share documents and are probably outnumbered by pdf.
The new formats are supposed to address these problems and deliver a fundamental promise of electronic editing: seemless collaboration. The M$ format is really more of the same old M$ only, version dependent stuff M$ has always served. Because it offers no real improvement, it's adoption will have to be forced. ODF, on the other hand, offers a choice of editors and OS, and is being used by people. Free and ope
I would point out (Score:2)
Yes, you would. So? Re:I would point out (Score:2)
This would be wonderful if it were true.
MS Office supports ODF just fine.
What I've read does not support the assertion. In the last year, M$ has made a few converters that imperfectly use the text document branch of ODF. These converters are poorly integrated into Office and not at all into the OS, so using ODF on a M$ platform without Open Office is painful.
If a user wants ODF, you would think that they would just get Open Office. It's interface is more familiar than Office 2007 and the user gets
Que? (Score:2)
Have another article on it if you want - http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,126331-page,1/ar ticle.html?tk=nl_dnxnws [pcworld.com] - no mention of partial implementations there, or otherwise there's always the good old community to help out - http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter [sourceforge.net]
Also, as it turns out the UI for Office 2007 isn't so bad after all - http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j html?articleID=201800612&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News [informationweek.com]
Think logically for
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Difference (Score:2)
public consumption (Score:2, Insightful)
When standards were determined not by..... (Score:3, Funny)
ODF is apparently 10 times more a standard than OOXML.
And I bet its all because its easier to spell.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I tried open office once and it was buggy and crashed a lot. So why should I use the Open Office XML format, when I can use the trusted Office Document Format?
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http://www.noooxml.org/ [noooxml.org]
the website you won't find on wikipedia thank to their astroturf editors.
Open XML is broken XML. And the patent licensing conditions look like a minefield.
Microsoft should adopt OpenDocument.
And...so? (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably because most people creating documents with Office 2007 for the web are either:
1) Converting them to PDF or XPS if they aren't meant to be edited, or
2) Converting them to Office 97-2003 format if they are meant to be edited, since the majority of the Microsoft Office-using audience will be using older versions of the office suite.
I don't think counting documents on the web is particularly a useful way to try to measure the dominance of office suites or their associated file formats. Its, perhaps, an easy measure, but not a meaningful one.
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Agreed, but only if you're a rational sort.
I'm reminded of my head exploding some years ago when I read about Bill Gates' disappointment at learning that of all the rich and varied content available on the web, so little of it was offered in
My head has exploded many times since the
That isn't what it's measuring (Score:2)
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No, its not. It's measure the usage of a particular standard for interchange on the portion of the web indexed by Google. It doesn't measure what's used for interchange by different paths than the web, by log-in based sites on the web, or what is used for non-interchange (i.e., archive) use.
Since one of the main motives for choosing a standardized format for office documents is future-proof archiving of internal documents, and since it doesn't measure that u
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In any case, your first point, that people save in PDF, is of no real issue. First, the study, as flawed as it may be, is meant to indicate formats that are universal enough to be predictably exchanged. Second, the same argument applies to ODF, only more so. I, for instance, seldom post in
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No, what I'm saying is that people using Office 2007 to post documents on the Web (hardly its primary use) are usually targetting an audience where Office 97-2003 is a more useful interchange format (since lots of people have older versions of Office), while people posting ODF documents on the
Bad metric (Score:4, Insightful)
Its a worthless metric, how many OOXML have been stored in various internal Sharepoint servers around the world ?
How many Copies of 2007 are truly out there? (Score:2, Interesting)
The question is not how many now, but it's how many will there be 5 years from now.
Buffoons... (Score:2, Funny)
***captcha is buffoons***
Bollocks (Score:5, Insightful)
"That isn't what I would call good traction for Microsoft's overwhelmingly dominant office suite."
The fact that it is an "overwhelmingly dominant office suite" is traction enough. Compare how many users are using any other suite, to the amount running Office. And filecount means something now? By this logic, should be now abandon Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and other audio formats because the number of
And this whole "t would be hard for the Microsoft camp to spin ten times as many ODF documents added as OOXML documents" continually searching for, and boasting any little flaw or inconsistency or what-have-you, no matter how insignificant is really both absurd and childish.
There's no "ODF" category. (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems to me, "Linux" is as good as anything to describe this.
news flash! (Score:2)
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Meanwhile... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do I really care what format people pass around documents they intend to edit, as long as they publish them in what's become the standard format for end-users, i.e. pdf?
The problem, as I see it is people are using ODF/.doc/Microsoft-whatever to often for documents that are really supposed to be just electronically published documents. I.e, not intended to be editied (though obviously you can with the right software).
Re: (Score:2)
The real problem is that there is still a difference. You should be able to edit documents with ease.
Honestly, why? I don't care about editing documents, and honestly it's not really something with a great need. If you _want_ to edit a PDF, you obviously can. The difference is really only in the availability of the software (not many people create PDF editors).
Word Perfect did not have this problem and was the defacto standard before MicroSquish got them
That was a different world where there was less cri
Re:The root problem is that there's a difference. (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem is that there is still a difference.
The more I think about this idea, the more I disagree with it. I think it's a great thing that there's a separation between "presentation" formats, and formats intended to be edited. Why? Because presentation formats should always be the same, always be readable by an older version of software, etc. Editing formats have different needs, like adding new features like layers, links to other documents, etc.
Look at the photoshop format (psd I think) vs jpg for instance. jpg is a format intended to be published, where psd is a flexible format for a designer to do whatever they please with the photo (seperate layers, all that jazz).
In short, editing formats need to evolve and be extremely flexible (and thus incompatible), presentation formats need to stay the same (to a large degree). That doesn't mean you can't edit a publishing format of course.. people edit jpgs all the time. It's just not the design goal of the format.
Parent
Well (Score:2)
Is it significant? (Score:2)
What would be significant is, if public in some county or school district sues the Govt agency claiming, they have a fundamental right to get Govt documents in a format that is not saddled with proprietary burdens, they should have the right to process these docs and for
who puts documents on the web? (Score:2)
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Apple and Oranges (Score:3, Insightful)
All of these things will lower the number of OOXML documents on the web even if the use of Office 2007 is growing. Any opinions of Microsoft, Linux, Office aside, the comparison in TFA means absolutely nothing.