The technical newswires are red hot: Microsoft bends on OpenDocument. Microsoft has announced it is supporting an open-source project which is developing plug-ins to allow MS-Office users to access ISO 26300 OpenDocument Format (ODF) files. OpenOffice.org has released a cheeky PR welcoming them to the party.

Of course, every Microsoft watcher (and their name is legion) has their own opinion what the arch-monopolists are up to. I don’t believe that Microsoft have an evil masterplan for world domination which they take out of the safe every morning to tell them what to do today. They are big enough and rich enough to play a number of lines in the water simultaneously to see what bites.

1. Ideal position: all this open XML nonsense proves to be a passing fad and life carries on much as now with .doc, .xls, etc.
2. Fall-back position: get Microsoft’s Open XML ‘standard’ approved by as many standards bodies as Microsoft can buy persuade (that’s probably all of them)
3. Diversionary tactic: announce support for one third-party convertor which will be given away free. This immediately prevents any other commercial vendors entering the market. Give the chosen convertor project just enough support so that it passes “tests to European Commission customer standards” (conducted by Dialogika, funded by Microsoft).  but runs like a dog and loses lots of formatting, and tell people we told you so:

“The use of OpenDocument documents is slower to the point of not really being satisfactory” here
“No translation is perfect. There are a lot of trade-offs between Open XML, which is actually full-featured and backward-compatible, and ODF, which is more limited.” here

4. Worst case scenario: ODF takes off in a big way. Having demonstrated the limitations of ISO 26300 ODF using the dodgy convertor, release an upgraded MS-ODF which amazingly fully supports all the features of MS-Office 2007. Yes, it’s the old Embrace, extend, and extinguish ploy:

• announce support of a genuine standard
• bastardise it so it only works with your software
• wipe out the opposition

For an alternative vision, see my earlier posting.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 6th, 2006 at 8:02 pm and is filed under OpenDocument. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.