Microsoft twists and turns over ODF

In its latest manoeuvre, it has offered the claw of friendship saying that it would back ratification of its own Open XML format along with (ODF) as ISO standards. However, the policy document penned by Volish general managers Tom Robertson and Jean Paoli said Microsoft will only give its blessing if ODF promotes choice among the world's consumers.

Yep, Vole is claiming it is a poor struggling company being stomped on by these nasty open saucers who hold a monopoly and are trying to squeeze it out of the market. Microsoft knows a lot about playing monopoly and realises it is more than just getting a hotel on Park Lane that wins you the game. But you need to have some serious psychological projection problems to think that the ODF could kill off Vole's lucrative Office product.

By casting itself as 'open' and the 'opensource ODF format' turns the tables on its own image. The question is that it has about as much chance of pulling of a stunt like that as Boris “computer games rot your brains” Johnson has of getting through the London Mayoral elections without putting his foot in his mouth at least twice. Robertson and Paoli say that ODF's design is attractive to those users that are interested in a “particular level” of functionality.

However the Volish "Open XML may be more attractive to those who want richer functionality, the ability to integrate business data into their documents by defining their own document schema, or a format that was designed to be backwards compatible with existing documents.”

Although this sounds like our Voles are claiming that Open XML is better but you need a bid of trash out there to show how good it is, they deny this. They say it just that the two products meet different needs.

Just in case you were confused, they tell us it is how some people wanting to travel will drive and others will fly. It does not say which they think is the format which is crawling in traffic and which does the soaring, but we think we can guess. This month Microsoft has been trying to show how friendly it is to the ODF by instructing its new Linux chums Novell, Xandros, Linspire and Turbolinuxto come up with some conversion software between OpenXML and the ODF.

The problem is that if Robertson and Paoli's early claim is correct would be theoretically impossible to convert a plane into a car? If Open XML is so complex it would be a bugger to convert into something as simple as ODF. Unless they have got it all wrong of course.

More here. µ