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In what many will see as a long-overdue move, OpenOffice.org announced today that IBM will become an active supporter of, and contributor to, OpenOffice, the leading ODF-compliant competitor to Microsoft Office. The question that many will be asking is this: What took so long?
That's a query upon which many have speculated, but which no one has ever definitively answered, on which more below.
The news is significant principally because the ability of ODF compliant software to meet end-user, and especially enterprise end-user, needs has arguably lagged the success of the ODF standard itself to achieve credibility in the marketplace.
In order to capitalize on this success, vendors need to be able to offer customers products that can compete toe to toe with Microsoft Office. OpenOffice derives from a code base whose development stretches back to the dawn of desktop computing. With OpenOffice available for free, and StarOffice at a very significant discount from Office, OpenOffice clearly offers the most credible and formidable ODF-compliant competitor to Office.
That leaves the question of why this announcement comes now, and why "now" has been so long delayed.
Quoting:Novell and Corel have versions of OpenOffice.org that support OOXML. Why don't you have similar support?
Their versions have converters, which, at this point, don't yet do a flawless job translating between ODF and OOXML. In addition, IBM's customers haven't asked for this capability yet. ODF use dwarfs the use of OOXML.
Quoting:Novell and Corel have versions of OpenOffice.org that support OOXML. Why don't you have similar support?
You could ask similar but opposite question, Why should they? May be IBM doesn't think it is necessary or worth the effort for them. May be they are asking a similar question, why doesn't MS support ODF, which is already an ISO standard, without having to spend the extra efforts and resources to develop a converter.
Quoting:...which, at this point, don't yet do a flawless job translating between ODF and OOXML
I guess when you have this translator perfected and to a 100% conversion, then you can ask all these questions. Until then, don't bother because you have no point in asking them at this time.
Quoting:Maybe that's exactly what you would have discovered if you had read the entire quote!
A little of elaboration doesn't hurt and might be helpful! :)
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