Up to their old tricks? ||= MS Office 12 To Utilize ODF?

MS Office 12 To Utilize ODF?: "Up to their old tricks?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by mrogers (85392) Alter Relationship on Friday October 28, @08:22AM (#13895983)
(http://elgoog.rb-hosting.de/)
The problem with an extremely liberal license is that it can be embraced and extended. The best way for Microsoft to kill OpenDocument would be to implement it perfectly, wait a year, then add lots of cryptic, undocumented extensions that are only supported by MS Word. When you receive an OpenDocument email attachment you'll be in the same position you're currently in with .doc attachments - it might work, it might not, and you'll never be sure the document's supposed to look the way it looks on your computer, unless you're running Word.

OASIS (the consortium behind OpenDocument) is doing its best to avoid licensing issues and legal arguments [wikipedia.org], which unfortunately seems to mean you can write whatever you want and call it OpenDocument, or at least 'OpenDocument-based' or some other form of weasel words."
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Matter of time
(Score:5, Interesting)
by smallguy78 (775828) Alter Relationship on Friday October 28, @08:39AM (#13896087)
(http://www.microsoft.com/)
Reading http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200510261 95537674 [groklaw.net] describes how the body responsible for advising UK schools on IT policies (BECTA) is planning to force schools to

"...use software that saves files in open formats (see pages 25 and 26).".

Following from this, it probably won't be long until government bodies follow suit in the UK, and the trend spreads from country to country.

Microsoft will then definitely be forced to support the OpenDocument standard, or someone will get very rich writing plugin to do so.

Office vs competition will then be down to features and useability rather than format tie-ins (Microsoft purposely tieing people to their products surely stems from a satanic Sales/Marketing department rather than evil developers).

If the competition comes down to UI/useability I think Star Office and OpenOffice are a long way behind MS Office, both tending to looki like cheap shareware applications at the moment. Which then leaves the doorway open for a company to take OpenOffice, pretty-fy it and sell it for a vastly reduced amount compared to Office (unless the license restricts this?)
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'Nothing costs nothing'