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Continuing the discussion of Massachusetts' open document intitiative, George Ou asks "Does the open document religion make sense?" and points out a glitch:: the OASIS format does not seem to work as well as Microsoft's alternative.
In my opinion, the whole file format controversy is an artificial one and it's a non-issue. The main argument for an OpenDocument format is based on the premise that Microsoft somehow leverages their proprietary Office file format to bully the competition by denying them fair access to the file format to maintain their dominance in Office suites. But this is argument is fundamentally flawed because the existing Microsoft Office binary formats are effectively the de facto standard and are effectively open to anyone. The Microsoft Office formats are open in the sense that every Microsoft Office competitor from StarOffice to OpenOffice.org to Word Perfect to ThinkFree Office has reverse engineered the Microsoft Office format and uses it freely yet they've never been sued by Microsoft for doing so. OpenOffice.org Calc is already substantially faster with Microsoft's binary format than its own native ODF format and it leads one to wonder why anyone would want to use something that's less efficient when something better already exists. He concludes:
But given how bloated and inefficient the OASIS OpenDocument format is, do you really want the same committee that created ODF to have a say in Microsoft's format? If Sun or any other company is serious about creating a Microsoft Office competitor, they should spend less time debating this OpenDocument nonsense and compete on merit by improving CPU and memory handling among other things. Why even mess with OpenDocument when it's such a huge liability in performance and offers no advantage in competing with Microsoft? Stick with Microsoft's lean binary format but if you must have XML, use Microsoft's open XML format since it's still much faster than ODF.
posted by James DeLong @ 9:59 AM | Software
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