ODF Vs. OOXML File Counts On the Web 154
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."
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
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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.
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In my experience (Workers Compensation claims), the documents are opened for analysis and printed immediately, a copy will be made in a modern format for redaction and/or inclusion in other documents.
The rules in this case come fro Australia's Records in Evidence legislation, but they're likely to be similar worldwide.
While the 'original document rule' has been abolished, it is still necessary for parties to authenticate evidence of the contents of documents tendered in one of these ways. For example, in relation to a document in writing that is signed, it remains necessary to lead evidence (if the point is contested) that the signature appearing on the document is the signature of the person who has purported to sign it. In the case of computer records, it is necessary to give evidence that the computer output is what it purports to be.
The procedures, which can be set in motion before the hearing of a proceeding, may result in the making of court orders against the party leading evidence of the contents of the document, including an order that:
in the case of a computer or similar document, that a party be permitted to examine and test the way in which the document was produced or has been kept.
In other words, a printout will most likely be acceptable, but if the evidence is
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Just curious, but are these 10-year-old archived documents edited or used as the basis for new documents?
Not anymore. It's now a version based on the older documents (based on an older version...), but you can show the linage of a given document.
My impression has always been that documents in such half-dead formats are more or less dead themselves with respect to editing, and the best idea would be to (somehow) convert them to PDF and be done with it. Since you are the first person I've caught with real experience, I'm curious to see if I'm right in your case....
Funny enough, that is my recommendation each year.....
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Switching an office suite is a long term commitment. One should start with computing the yearly costs that have been spent in the past X years on them to see what the long term results will be. Then you can compute what can be saved by switching over to a free office suite.
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Actually there is an incentive to move to Word 2007, it is the first edition of Word with a citation feature that
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.
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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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The operative word here is "yet".
Email me in twenty years - if we still have email - and let me know how it went.
Just because Microsoft has been around - and dominant - for the last twenty years doesn't mean they will continue to do so for the next 20. Technology is changing too fast to make decades long pronouncements about who's going to be on top. I read somewhere that of most of the top IT companies in the early '80's, most of them went out of business or were bought out by s
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Just because Microsoft has been around - and dominant - for the last twenty years doesn't mean they will continue to do so for the next 20.
I'd rather not have to wait through another 20 years of Microsoft, the 2000lb. gorilla, sitting on top of OEMs and killing off competitors through their shady business practices, stifling the innovation we should be seeing so that they can maintain their monopoly on the desktop OS and application suite. The government took two shots at them. Won both times, and yet they imposed no significant remedy for the problems MS had created. So the only real competition has been from open source channels, and onl
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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
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While certainly possible, I think that there are limits to how great you can make a word processor. There comes a point where it's good enough for just about everybody, and I think we've already reached that point. Yeah, there are some problems, but I think those problems are probably inherent to using a general purpose WSIWYG editor than they are problems that can be fixed by a better interface or more features.
The goal here is
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The problem might be that word processors, Open Office and Word alike, are made using a specific conce
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Some people will want it to act one way, while other will want the complete opposite. That might be true for the same person working on two different documents.
I think that something like LyX, or even LaTeX, offers a much saner solution to the problems that exist in Word. The "specific concept" you mentioned might just
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I just think that for the things you mentioned, there is probably just no good way for an easy to use, WSIWYG editor to handle things correctly without some sort of artificial intelligence.
Some people will want it to act one way, while other will want the complete opposite. That might be true for the same person working on two different documents.
I think that something like LyX, or even LaTeX, offers a much saner solution to the problems that exist in Word. The "specific concept" you mentioned might just be that WYSIWYG isn't such a great idea after all.
While I agree with you that WYSIWYG is not such a great idea (I waited for WYSIWYG editing for years, and when I had WordPerfect 6.0, I was very happy with it, but of course I used the code window a lot, because that was what I thought of as part of the experience, because not only I need to see how it looks like, but also I didn't want to lose the knowledge and the control of what was being written. That is what we lost, now you have the WYSIWIG view, but the view that shows the codes is not logical or ea
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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
MS Google jamming (Score:1)
Wait a short while for MS to figure out how to game these numbers too.
All MS has to due is illegally leverage that desktop monopoly again. MS Outlook currently infests a large number of MS Windows desktops. All MS has to do is add a "security" patch that co-incidentally also sets MS Outlook to spew MOOOXML for all formatted messages. Overnight overpopulation of the new formats. Courts are so #$&* slow that by the time the anti-trust papers are served, it'll have been long since over. Of course, c
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The problem with that one will be everyone who is using some other OS than Windows XP or Vista, or at first, some other mail client than Outlook (including web-based ones such as Gmail), will complain about unreadable e-mails. Of course, this will also be a possible way to stem the tide of spam, at least temporarily, but I feel the effect is that e-mail will become even less reliable than it already is.
Office Compatiblity Addon for Old Versions (Score:3, Informative)
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Is a web count really the best metric? (Score:5, Insightful)
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You should be kicked for posting EITHER format (Score:2)
We just paid a lot of money for a bloated shiteware CMS that can sort of do this with DOC files. Even it will convert the DOC file to PDF on the fly for those of us too l33t to read DOC files.
Yeah, but (Score:5, Insightful)
No Demand? (Score:2)
How does it benefit most people? Not at all. Everybody can already read the MS docs they create since everybody already has MS Office.
Seems logical (Score:2)
Legacy formats, so what? (Score:2)
Old word formats are still a poor way to share documents and are probably outnumbered by pdf.
The new formats are supposed to address these problems and deliver a fundamental promise of electronic editing: seemless collaboration. The M$ 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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it is different, that's the problem. joe user will have to spend time to relearn how to do the same stuff with the new program. I installed firefox on machines at work exactly one day after they were "upgraded" to IE7, guess why.
> Microsoft have in fairness spent a fair few billion on this new interface. That's more effort and investment than OO will ever get, ever, so the chances are it is going to be easier for users.
Two problems
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And sorry, but personally the whole "M$ Windoze security suck0rz!" thing is frankly so out of date. There
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The focus of Microsoft's collaboration effort with Office 2007 isn't just formats, it focusses on moving people from the plain-old-web to Sharepoint servers for collaboration, which wouldn't show up in Google indexes.
So, if Microsoft were successful, there would be zero OOXML documents found via Google on the web that were there for the purpose of "seamless collaboration".
I
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Difference (Score:2)
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Yeah, using the logic of this article, ODF is a dismal failure... lol
public consumption (Score:2, Insightful)
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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.
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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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Hahaha beautiful.
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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
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I dare to ask: So what?
OOXML does not have to actually be used to serve its purpose for MS. It just has to be accepted as an (pseudo)open, possible alternative to the existing old formats. This will probably be enough to stop critical questions from buyers who want support for open standards.
Bad metric (Score:4, Insightful)
Its a worthless metric, how many OOXML have been stored in various internal Sharepoint servers around the world ?
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Nobody wants to switch to Office 2007 because 1) it's expensive, 2) it's more difficult to use, 3) it needs major retraining.
I am going on as a Mac Sysadmin now (quit the other job) and I don't think a lot of people are going to upgrade to Office 2008 for Mac either, I think they stay with the current implementation and switch to O
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That's funny. In my own anectdotal experience, on the 15 flights i've taken in the last 3 months, every single time i've seen someone open up a (non-mac) laptop, they've had Office 2007 running. Probably 25 different people, randomly encountered. The ribbon bar is very noticable, even if you're just glancing in someones direction.
Now, maybe it's just that people that regularly fly on business trips have extra money lying around to upgrade, but it kind of bl
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.
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ODF doesn't even have necessary connection to FOSS. It's just another open standard, like HTML.
As for why this story is interesting? Well, it might be a stretch, but it is possible that there is some correlation between the document counts and the popularity of the formats. That seems almost as likely as our anecdotal evidence on the obscurity of ODF. It wouldn't be news to hear that ODF went largely unused, we would alread assume as much. The fact that there is evidence to the contrary is at least interes
Clue Phone its for you (Score:2)
news flash! (Score:2)
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Ha ha. Apology collision detected. (Score:1, Troll)
Office 2007 users don't like posting documents on the interweb.
But Office 2003 do? I know that M$ hates the internet and all, but another M$ apologist in the room has pointed to the existence of many ordinary .doc [slashdot.org] as proof of I don't know what.
You will have to try harder to mask OOXML's poor adoption rates.
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).
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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
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Yeah, that's why no one uses Wikis. Oh wait... [wikipedia.org]
Not as easily, I think. And you're right, the availability of the software is pretty slim.
If I was passing around a document I wanted people to be able to edit, I wouldn't use PDF. I'd use PDF for things I really don't want anyone to be able to edit at all.
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.
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It drove me nuts, when moving a document from a computer hooked up to a laser printer to one hooked up to a dot matrix printer. Invariably, page breaks would move. Sometimes line breaks moved as well.
Well (Score:2)
What they need to do (Score:1)
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http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?fa milyid=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&displa ylang=en [microsoft.com]
BTW, it works with Office 2003, Office XP and Office 2000
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
What this really means (Score:1)
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.
So desperate... (Score:2)
Man, relative comparison really makes this sound tough for Microsoft. 10x more ODF! 34% on Microsoft!
If only we could skip the part with the absolute numbers, where it turns out this is about mere several thousands of documents found on the web (of either format).
Congratulations on the self-referring sarcasm about the spin though.
Ap
Its the public, who will be deciding (Score:2)
Different Audiences (Score:2)
Um, maybe because the corporate world with corporate secrets (whether they should be or not) use Office and don't put their works up on the web; and those who do tend to publish are typically in the open source camp?
Let me Make this Simple (Score:2)
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If they were HTML we could read them (Score:2)
no reason to buy office anymore (Score:2)
Whoa, now wait a minute! (Score:2)
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Maybe, maybe not... (Score:2)
That would be why
However, there are times when it makes sense. For example, manuals which were always meant to be printed and physically included with a piece of hardware often go on the Web as PDF, because that's the format in which they're sent to the printer, so put
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Editing is an issue for archival... (Score:2)
That's easy in documents designed to be edited. It's easy to, for example, convert odf to html, or pdf, or plain text. It's much harder to convert pdf to one of these other formats -- I've tried a PDF to text conversion, and a PDF to html conversion, and neither worked the way I wanted.