Implementations v. Implementations (and why the difference matters)

Posted by Andy_Updegrove on Sep 23, 2007 1:40 AM EDT
ConsortiumInfo.org Standards Blog; By Andy Updegrove
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Military tacticians often bewail the havoc that the "fog of war" (i.e., the inability to communicate effectively amid the chaos of the battlefield) wreaks on their carefully laid plans. About 10 days ago I tried to do a bit of fog cutting when I posed a few questions at Microsoft's Jason Matusow's blog .

What I wanted to get to the bottom of in this case was what exactly these implementations were trying to accomplish. ODF advocates like to focus on not only the potential for ODF to be used as the basis for office productivity suite implementations, but on the reality that such suites have actually been produced. They also like to point out that there are no such suites implementing OOXML, other than Office itself, although there are products (such as Novell's OpenOffice implementation) that can save to the OOXML format. And to be fair, Microsoft has consistently said that OOXML and ODF were created for two entirely different purposes. So I was curious to what purpose these implementations were intended.  

Does the answer to that question really matter? Yes, I think that it does. 

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