Office 2007 adds Open Document support

..the embrace.

Next up: Extend

Quoting:Next up: Extend

Maybe not, that was OOXML and corrupting the ISO. MS does not own the ODF standard's organization, however, the ISO kindly offered to take over the latter standard. Nonetheless, that offer was rejected*.

* I have not heard if the rejection included prejudice, but one can hope.

I'm looking forward to hearing if this is proper, complete read/write support, or if there are problems with it.

They don't have a lot of choice really. Microsoft took over Lotus' market by providing full read write support for Lotus Notes, and also the various proprietary word processors, by doing the same. OpenOffice.org has the potential to do the same to Microsoft, by virtue of the fact that it provides full read write support for most of the Office applications, the better OpenOffice.org gets at being able to read nad write MS Office Documents, if MS Office can't do the same in reverse, the less relevent MS Office becomes, and the easier it becomes for people to choose something other than MS Office. Adding ODf support will only slow down the trend, as lock in is less easily engineered.

This is exactly what I was trying to tell Sander in another thread.

The network effects of "standards" is far stronger than for particular applications. I'd assert that the reason Microsoft Office had such benefit from "network effects" is specifically because of the associated file formats, not the actual application.

Emacs or vi? Who cares, if I can read the text in which ever I choose to use.

So Microsoft gives in to ODF, as it gave in to TCP/IP. Good for them.

They chose this path, by failing to publish Office for *NIX, which would have had it's own benefits from network effects back in 1997 or so. More's the pity, ne?

> Adding ODf support will only slow down the trend, as lock in is less easily engineered.

Exactly. Couldn't agree more.

I guess the real question will be, as techiem suggests, just how well they implement ODF. I will not be surprised at all if a file written by MS Office somehow "renders better" in MS Office than it does in OpenOffice or other ODF application. It's not like they haven't been doing exactly that with other "standards".