IBM To Support OpenDocument Next Year

An anonymous reader writes "IBM announced this weekend that early next year it will begin supporting the OpenDocument standard in its WorkPlace line of products. They're planning on pushing this widely accessible format and their products in developing nations." From the article: "Rather than create an analog to Microsoft Office, IBM is offering editors for creating documents, spreadsheets or presentations within a Web browser. Documents are delivered via a Web portal and stored in shared directories. Access control and document management tools allow people to share and edit documents with others. Until now, Workplace supported the formats from open-source product OpenOffice, from which the OpenDocument was derived. Workplace Managed Client software also can read, write and edit documents created with Microsoft Office."

The legacy of saving everything in MS Office

[digitaldc]

"The governments of India, China and other emerging markets are very interested in this," Fontaine said. "They don't have the legacy of having everything saved in Microsoft Office to transition from...This is an opportunity to start out right."

What does this statement mean? Did China and India use pen and paper when doing their spreadsheets up until this year?
Article on MS in China: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5197528/site/newsweek [msn.com]

Government is the key to Open Document Success

[xoip]

Governments around the world have built on the M$ Word platform without an serious look at this defacto standard impacts the competitive environment and the choices of consumers. While there are formats available, the percieved lack of technical support and business model behind Open Office has slowed the adoption of alternatives. Support by IBM is crucial for the wide spread success of the Open Document movement and will go a long way to increasing market share.

Re:I'm afraid...

[miscz]

ODF is being adopted in many public institutions in Poland. I don't know what's the fuss about Massachussets, there are hundreds of places that already switched and you don't read about them on Slashdot everyday.

Strategy

[pubjames]

OSS fans are always bitching about Microsoft, but they don't seem to have a good strategy for competing them. Microsoft did a lot of fairly simple but very strategic things to get their dominance, OSS developers need to do the same. Here are my ideas for increasing the use of open formats:

1) Make Firefox display OpenDocument formats by default. I know that everyone complains about keeping bloat down, but if the OpenDocument format is going to get widespread use them people are going to have to be able to read it. Besides which, Firefox must already have 95% of the code required to do this.

2) Make a standalone MS Office to OpenDocument translator from the OpenOffice code. I want a tool so that I can drag a Word Document onto an icon on my desktop and it automatically translates it to OpenDocument format. And it should be able to do batch converting too, and to output a log of what it's done and any problems.

3) Take out the MS Office compatibility from OpenOffice. Concentrate on making OpenOffice a great tool for creating OpenDocument format files.

I think many people approach this the wrong way, they say things like - "OpenOffice must be able to write MS Office files so that I can send them to people that only have MS Office." However, what we really should be aiming for is to get in a position so that anyone can happily say "Please send us the document in OpenOffice format" and so that if someone says "Can you send it in Word" you can say "Download Firefox - it reads all OpenOffice files."

People are going to criticise this as unrealistic, but these are exactly the type of strategies that Microsoft used to get their desktop dominance.

Great

[ClosedSource]

Another IBM product you never heard of is going to use open document. Anyone who uses these obscure IBM products has been drinking so deep from IBM's koolaid well, that they will never use a non-IBM product anyway. Thus the adoption of open standards will have zero impact on those customers.

The usual question...

[Mjlner]

...for almost any post labled "Linux" on Slashdot is, of course, why is this labled "Linux"?

Granted, this is good news for the linux community, as much as it is good news for people who use lots of other operating systems which do not run certain proprietary programs. Most of all, it is good news for anybody interested in using an open format instead of a proprietary format, regardless of the platform which may or may not be proprietary.

Re:Strategy

[Kjella]

However, what we really should be aiming for is to get in a position so that anyone can happily say "Please send us the document in OpenOffice format" and so that if someone says "Can you send it in Word" you can say "Download Firefox - it reads all OpenOffice files."

"Sorry, Firefox is not in our default installation and I'm not authorized to install software (and IT will not support it)." Send them a document they can't open once, they get slightly annoyed. If they reply asking for a document in Word, and you still can't provide, they are considerably annoyed. If it was your jobb application, you're probably dropped at this point. If not, you're probably already marked as a "difficult" customer.

If you want to get to that position, you shouldn't be so quick to shoot yourself in the foot. What you are describing is a good strategy to close a market - to get you from largest player (maybe 30-50%?) to monopoly. It's probably one of the worst ideas for gaining initial market share, since you'll see more abandonment (OO can't interoperate with anything, I'm getting MS Office) than converts.

ODF in Poland

[Skinny Rav]

ODF is being adopted in many public institutions in Poland

Exactly! I've just googled for "Open Document Format" with results in Polish only and one of the first hits is a document from the Polish goverment describing "minimal requirements for IT systems in public institutions" in Poland (text in Polish). If you scroll down to the section called "File formats" and a paragraph about text documents you will find 5 different formats: txt, rtf, pdf, doc and odf. Further details are even more interesting: requirement is that IT systems in institutions must be able to read doc documents - default format for read and write exchange of documents is either txt, rtf or odf.

Wow. I am mighty impressed: there is so much fuss about different countries/cities/states which are about to introduce some kind of such regulations while in my native Poland it is already done and it is not even news.

Cheers

Raf

P.S. And PNG and SVG are listed among graphics formats!

Re:Great

[duffbeer703]

Popular? Even IBMers hate Notes. And the Eclipse-based replacement (ie Workplace) has been "in the works" for like 3 years now.

Re:Strategy

[caudron]

these are exactly the type of strategies that Microsoft used to get their desktop dominance.

Those are the things MS did to /maintain/ dominance. To /get/ dominance, they did things like allow us to tweak the system (anyone else remember the joy of eeking another 3k on bootup in MSDOS?), being freindly to programmers (OSS will get no mainstream developers as long as they continue to beleive that Glade is the end-all-be-all GUI designer...Visual Studio has THE BEST in the biz. Deal with it), and all around nicer to their customers and programmers. After they got on top, they bent us over and screwed us square in the ass. Totally uncool.

But for the records, I really dif your idea of getting Firefox to read OpenOffice docs out of the box. A plugin for IE wouldn't be a bad thing either! I also think a stand alone converter is a great idea. If you are a developer, you should consider writing such a thing.

Re:Strategy

[jc87]

I for example , usually open my father work docs in ubuntu (he is a policeman , and around here , government unfortunally still uses M$ in almost every public place) , if OOO didnt suport it , i would be forced to have M$ wintendo plus M$ office to open them , and for me , wintendo is only for playing Counter strike source , not for anything else. Besides ,removing the M$ office compatibility , would be playing the same kind of dirty game that MS plays with theirs closed formats.

Another crack in the dike...

[HexaByte]

This is just another crack in the MSOffice dike.

Several national governments are now mandating Open formats for thier documents, spreadsheets, etc. The more they are adopted, the more Bill and Company will have to compete on quality, features and price, not "Only we are 100% compatible with our proprietary format".

Now, if we can only convince the the Feds, or at least several more states, to make OD format the standard, we can make real progress. After all, most of Bill's bucks come from the US, and if we don't get the changes made here, we have so much less impact.

My 2 cents.

IBM Office Suite.

[saintlupus]

What ever happened to SmartSuite, anyway? I used to have a roommate that swore up and down that it was the best office suite in the industry. Do they still make that?

--saint