Or OS X. Macs run office quite well, thank you.

In the end, competition is about meeting customer needs at the best price, not about achieving an arbitrary feature level defined by Microsoft.

In 1980’s and early 1990’s this was about adding features. But today I’m not so sure. We now see people moving to tools like wikis for collaborative editing, tools with fewer editing features (a big step backwards in fact) but increased ability for multi-user collaboration.

I’d rather see some fresh thinking around what users really need. An Office suite that was designed in the pre-internet days, for a market filled mainly with computer novices might not be the right model for a connected, mobile world of users who have been using computers since age five. So people are willingly taking a step backwards in terms of control over the visual appearance of their documents. Part of this is increased collaboration. But part of it is also increased consistency of appearence. If the user has less control over the text attributes, and styling is deferred to post-procesing, then wonderful things can happen, like easily reusing the same content for different devices, different modes of delivery (voice, screen readers, etc.)

WYSIWYG ties us to the printed page metaphor on screen devices with far less resolution. This choice was made very early in the development of the word processor, in a time before connected computers, where document collaboration required the exchange of printed output. But is WYSIWYG still as critical today?

Power for the user is not what you allow the user to do. Power is in what you allow the user to ignore. The user doesn’t worry about font kerning and instead leaves that to the font manager and rasterizer. This is good. Similarly, the typical user should not worry about layout and text attributes. The powerful tool lets the user concentrate on what they are saying, free from distractions.

I disagree with you on the “control of the format” comment. If you check the meeting attendence of the ODF TC, and look at the members who have voting rights, you will see that neither Sun nor IBM controls the TC. The current voting mmebership consists of: IBM(2), Sun(2), Intel(1), ISO(1), KDE(1), Open Document Foundation(3), Individual(1).

You say, “I do not think that any of the current ODF implementations holds it’s own to the MS Office suite which is just a lot lot better”. I’ll accept that as your personal view. But I think you will agree that not everyone evaluates an office suite with the same criteria. For some, price is the main issue, for others the use of standards is the issue, for others the feature set is the issue, for others ease of use is the issue, for others disk and memory footprint is the issue, for others support for non-Windows OS’s is the issue, for others the freedom and ability to hack the source code is the issue. With 61 million downloads, there is clearly a sizable minority who have evaluated the alternatives and chosen OpenOffice. In other words, “a lot lot better” can only be said for a particular value set. From another, equally valid set of requirements, weighing and comparing the factors OpenOffice is clearly a lot lot better.

There are clear economic alternatives here. Would you give up your copy of MS Office in exchange for OpenOffice if I gave you $1? Maybe not. What if I gave you $1,000,000? Most likely yes. No one is a purist here. Everyone is just haggling over the price.

Assuming OpenOffice is sufficient to do the task (and for many/most tasks I’ll claim that it is), when the cost to switch an organization to OpenOffice (TCO, including training, deployment, etc.) is less than the cost to upgrade to the next version of Microsoft Office, then the landslide begins. I’d look at the Office 2007 upgrade numbers one year from now as a proxy for what the market considers the relative values of the two suites to be.

Thanks for the comments, though I do disagree. It is perfectly legitimate to examine the history of this industry and ask what the singificance of various past decisions and circumstances were, and what alternatives would have brought. To believe that the present situation is the best of all possible worlds, or to believe that past choices had no consequences — these are both dismal views of our ability and responsibility to influence events, a view which I utterly reject.

In any case, my post was clearly future-focused. I’m not going to dwell on what happened before or why it happened. I just want to make it clear that the status quo today is far from a consensus, that we have choices today that we did not have previously, and these choices can lead us to a future that is far better than today’s present.

-Rob

Creativity and invention rely on freedom of choice. Hey ! Look at me I’m institutionalized, I love it, the porridge is great, besides who needs real food, and drinking water it is healthy. Let’s scratch a doodle on our cell wall and communicate our creative freedom.

If you have ever tried to do something meaningful with the information in a Microsoft document, particularly with none Microsoft tools .. well get your tin plate and cup out friend, there is not much on the the menu. The amazing fact is Microsoft demand you to pay for these privileges, not for too much longer, the writing is on the walls.

History is a progression – we would not be where we are now if things had moved in a different direction 10 years ago. Some things would be better, others a lot worse.

10 years ago the ubiquitous Internet (in the developed world) did not exist. 10 years ago most applications were proprietary black holes that your data disappeared into and you did not care.

It is only since the infrastructure has been put in place to enable the wide exchange of data that it has become necessary to unlock this data for sharing and to enable all the scenarios you envision.

Personally, I can’t wait to see this vision of yours happening.

However, your single-minded determination to blame one company for holding back this utopia diminishes everything else you say.

Please open your mind to the fact that your one true way might not be the only way to achieve your vision.

In any case, it was an analogy, and any analogy can be stretched too far, as you have amply demonstrated.

In the end, we all benefit from competition in goods rather the confusion over multiple standards.

Have you ever had to deal with DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM? Who benefited from proliferation of standards? Who lost?

For example, in the United States we have a thriving market with plenty of competition for automobiles, both foreign and domestic. These vehicles are available at a variety of price points, in many sizes, styles, colors, etc. This is a free market, not a dictatorship. But we also all drive on the same side of the street, and have standards for airbags, safety belts, fuel emissions, and other things.

Similarly, we have healthy competition in telephone service, and telephone hardware, though we all agree on the underlying protocols for telephony.

As we have all seen, agreement on standards encourages competition, leads to a healthy free market with innovation, increased customer choice, value and freedom. These are things we do not have today with the Office monopoly.

I believe that it is far better to have a single standard with a market of several competing implementations than to have several incompatible standards. To do otherwise is to continue down the road to fragmentation and vendor lock-in. I’m not saying that there are not those who would prefer that outcome, but they should be honest about who they are, and what interests they represent.

Microsoft has offered upgrades to Office over the years but maintained the same binary formats. Although they have added features in Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003, etc, that has not prevented document exchange between, say Office 2003 and Office 97. By your logic, the Microsoft formats which add new features, including Office 12, are all unusable because they can encode things that older versions of Office cannot understand. That isn’t what you really mean, is it?

Certainly, questions of forwards and backwards compatibility are issues that require some thought. But this issue already exists whenever one thinks of upgrading MS Office or collaborating with others who use a different version of Office.

Certainly having everyone in the world run Office 12 on Vista would solve all compatibility problems and remove the inconvenince of thinking about the problem further. This would work in the same way that a dicatatorship removes the inconvenience of opposition parties, free speech and elections.

This freedom and prison analogies remind me of the fact that I’m prisoner to our electric system and should be freed from this by going back to living in the woods. I mean Microsoft Office is everywhere and the fileformat is ubiquous and accepted as a fact. And the new XML-version serves not only Microsofts customers best, but all of the common users who want their documents to “just work”: No broken nested tables, mixed up fonts and all the other stuff.

And it’s not like the existing binary fileformats are totally opaque: Google indexes them, OpenOffice and most other word processing software (et cetera) can deal with that format.

These formats simply work and there is simply no reason for us (all normal users, most windows users, most people for whom the import/export of OpenOffice is just as good as it is possible) to care about your point of view and dreams about everybody using this pseudo-open OpenOffice file format.

And remember: The problem is not the openess of the file format or the usage of XML. The problem is that for a perfect compatibility between OpenOffice, Ms Office, Kword, etc. these programms would need to have almost the same set of features! If any one of them implements something new like shadows or bibliography, then all others need to follow or there would be no round-tripping.

It’s a shame to just take the OpenOffice-fileformat which is specific to OpenOffice and declare it as standard. This is unusable by programmers