Good Job, Massachusetts!

You may remember when I posted about Massachusetts dumping MS Office in favor of the Open Document Format? Well, now we have some more information.

InformationWeek has an article about both sides of the dispute, Microsoft and Massachusetts.

From the InformationWeek Article:

Kriss said, however, the state's IT administration carefully reviewed and considered both Microsoft's Office XML schemas and OpenDocument but voted for the latter as the standard that would best meet the needs of the citizens of Massachusetts. He said the state had concerns about the openness of the XML schemas and potential patent issues that could arise in the future.

I couldn't have said it better.

While any company can adopt the royalty free standard, Microsoft will not support OpenDocument in its next version of Office 12 because it is an inferior file format and is not compatible with older versions of Office, one Microsoft executive said this week after the report was released. Office 12 is due next year.

Inferior? Excuse me, Microsoft, but if it is in fact 'inferior', then why is it being used? Free Software isn't inferior, it is much, much better.

"No," said Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft's Information Worker Business Strategy, when asked by CRN about the potential for Office to support OpenDocument. "The Office "12" formats pay special attention to compatibility with older document versions, [and] other formats do not concern themselves with this important issue," Yates said.

Further, he added, "this proposal acknowledges that Open Document does not address pictures, audio, video, charts, maps, voice, voice-over-IP, and other kinds of data our customers are increasingly putting in documents and archiving."

Actually, I have a story about this, to prove that these things are not always good.

I have a friend, who sent me an IM one day. This friend isn't very computer smart, but isn't computer stupid either. She needed help uploading her picture to her blog. I told her to browse to where she saved the picture (in the webpage), and click on upload. She did this, but it didn't work. Suspecting that it was an issue of how big the picture was, I asked her to paste the text on the page where she got the error. It said that the format was not a picture. What kind of format was it? "application/msword". I asked her why she tried to upload a Word document to put her picture up, and she said that she pasted the picture into a Word document. I rest my case.

InformationWeek Article

Tech Tags: microsoft office microsoft office openoffice opendocument massachusetts