Great post

Story: Brian Jones can't tell why MS customers have to waste billions of dollars on OOXMLTotal Replies: 2
Author Content
Sander_Marechal

Feb 12, 2008
11:55 AM EDT
Great reply Hans, though I doubt you'll get a reply from him.
hkwint

Feb 12, 2008
1:29 PM EDT
Thanks, nice to hear. I see I made some stupid spelling errors in that post now, but the intention of my post is clear. Also, if you want to have a laugh, look for the 'funny' spelling errors which Brian Jones made himself (worse: They could have easily been avoided by using spell check, and he made them on his own blog), which is why several people recommend he uses Firefox. Off course, he doesn't. He's probably afraid it might be better than what he uses.

Usually, Microsoft tries to divide the world in ODF proponents which in their opinion are OOXML opponents and vice versa. However, they forget their clients are a party too, and they don't give about ODF or OOXML, they just want to save money, time and efforts. What I saw happening a lot is an argument of ODF vs. OOXML, but not focusing on the ones who are supposed to benefit from a standard: The clients of IT-companies and the 'everyday office document users'. It's sad to see the latter are (almost) not represented at all in standard bodies, so the 'customer' or 'end user' ends up not being represented at all. Most of them don't know what's going on anyway. They'll find out when it's too late.
vainrveenr

Feb 12, 2008
2:30 PM EDT
Great post indeed!

On the one hand,
Quoting:If the ODF guys decide to change their design goals, then they are welcome to reference the Ecma standard and change ODF to also be compatible with the existing base of Office binary documents. It would require a good re-working of their existing format though, and I doubt they will want to do that.


An alleged olive branch Brian Jones not-so-humbly deigns to bestow upon "the [mere mortal] ODF guys" one thinks?

OTOH, (from LXer Bob_Robertson at http://lxer.com/module/forums/t/26791/)
Quoting: OfficeXML ends up being 6000 pages which don't define anything. Implementing the OfficeXML "spec" is impossible without prior full documentation of the _closed, proprietary file formats_ of the previous Microsoft Office editions. That documentation does not exist outside of Microsoft.
That is to say here, "the ODF guys" are effectively prevented from changing the design goals that Brian Jones may indeed be suggesting above .

Brian Jones knows that ODF would be the victim of his clearly-intended Catch-22 efforts (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22_(logic) ). Thus, he'd be the epitomal Open XML-fanboi , and readers of this post have already realized the diligence of his efforts to specifically promote MS's OfficeXML at all costs.

No wonder Brian Jones will refuse to clearly respond at all to hkwint's comment on the OOXML blog!!

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