by acknak » Fri Sep 04, 2009 6:10 pm
I suspect it's more along the lines that it gives them a lot of flexibility when pitching their case.
To a customer who is required to buy a product that "supports ODF", they now meet the requirement. It usually doesn't matter that the ODF support doesn't work, as everyone just goes on working as they had been up to this point, using the MS-proprietary formats.
To a customer who actually wants interoperable documents, they can say: "Yes, we support ODF, but look: this format specification is not adequate. See what bad results you get when you use products other than ours." Of course that's only due to their flawed implementation, but only the outsiders know or care about that.
I just can't see any way that MS will ever support bona fide interoperability. It would be commercial suicide if their Office customers could easily move to a different, far less expensive, product. Maybe they will slowly abandon lock-in by the file formats and move to lock their customers in through other technologies, e.g. Sharepoint.
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