Office Formats Fail to Communicate

So if I understood it right, the basic summary of the article came down to:

We can't do a perfect translation of OOXML to ODF without MS MS won't open it formats to let us perfect the translation The government isn't likely to make them behave Therefore we should add nice proprietary extensions to ODF to support OOXML

erm....

It misses the point. Microsoft doesn't want non-MS programs to "interoperate" (I'm beginning to hate that word) with its document formats, and MS will do everything they can to make sure the "experience" is less than perfect. Even if someone managed to reverse-engineer the OOXML perfectly, MS would then make a minute shift in the format spec, in order to keep the canard going that "MS products are just superior to all the competition."

If you tell your dog to "sit," then punish him for doing anything but lie down, simply because "what 'sit' meant yesterday isn't what it means today," your dog will become confused at least, psychotic at worst. Guess what? When you standardize on Microsoft, you're the dog.

techiem: Don't forget, apart from blaming MS, Sun isn't willing to help either. They only help if it favours StarOffice, sadly.

> They only help if it favours StarOffice, sadly.

Could be it's endemic to "proprietary software" of all kinds.