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Big Interoperability Announcement

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I'm traveling right now and don't have a lot of time to go really deep on this, but today's interoperability announcement is great for Microsoft for a lot of reasons. Gray Knowlton posted on this today, it's a great read if you want to understand how Office and file formats are affected.

Here's an excerpt from Gray's post that is pretty important:

"The change should also underscore the idea that support for Open XML is not the same as opposition to other standards, despite many claims to this effect. Different formats are a means to achieving specific types of work, and interested communities exist to offer support for them. Today's commitment creates new opportunities to use many document formats in Office, and will allow people a greater ability to choose the formats that best suit their specific needs. This is good for our customers, but it's good for our business, too; adding these interfaces makes a lot of sense."

This is a good step forward for us. I hope this gives us more of a chance to work with various technology and user groups, being more open should help folks who want to work with Office.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2008
    PingBack from http://www.biosensorab.org/2008/02/21/big-interoperability-announcement/

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2008
    Today Microsoft made a substantive announcement about interoperability and I’d like to discuss the elements

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2008
    So Martin, do you really feel like that's the big missing piece here? If Microsoft supports ODF then everything is solved? I'm not sure that ODF has proved to be highly interoperable even across forks of the same implementation (OpenOffice and Lotus Symphony). If you look at this announcement though, you'll see that this isn't just about ODF, Open XML, UOF, or HTML, it's much bigger than that. Interoperability is a complex issue, and simply "supporting ODF" does not solve it. -Brian

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2008
    Hi Brian, I've casually looked through the document on Microsoft's site and it stuck out to me (and the BBC news folks) that Microsoft's covenant only covers non-commercial open source. As I explained on my blog, given that the open source definition prohibits restrictions on fields of endeavor, there can be no such thing as non-commercial open source, so the covenant appear to be worthless, as it covers something that doesn't exist. Could you please take care that the non-commercial bit disappears, and the set of covered developers is no longer empty?

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2008
    Speaking of interoperability, when will you consider documenting (or at least mentioning) the following file formats :

  • Office theme (.thmx)
  • Chart template (.crtx) I have seen those files over the last few months, and I am quite surprised that those files and the underlying file formats (OPC based) are not mentioned anywhere. How is that? What is the full list of Office 2007 file formats?

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2008
    Hi Brian, I think that the European Commission's response to the announcement is pretty spot-on. We've heard it all before, and we'll believe it when we see it. Microsoft has been an anti-competitive, abusive monopoly for too long for an announcement and a fundamentally flawed ISO standard application to change people's minds. In a couple of years, if Microsoft has really changed its behaviour, it will be accepted and the IT landscape will be much better. Until then, I'm afraid that you are going to have to accept big doses of skepticism in response to announcements like this.

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 22, 2008
    skc, I wish I shared your optimism! I'm afraid that developers are sharing the "battleground" with not just politicians, but also far too many lawyers and market strategists at this point. Only time will tell whether this announcement is a big deal or not.

  • Anonymous
    February 22, 2008
    Microsoft anunció la estratégia de Interoperabilidad mas importante de su historia, aunque Microsoft

  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2008
    A commitment to be allow implmentations of the protocols under a license that is only for non-commercial use and is incompatible with the most used open source licenses. Typical Microsoft, and typical Brian Jones.

  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2008
    I have been reading on the Interop annoucement and its awesome. One of the things that really interested

  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2008
    I have been reading on the Interop annoucement and its awesome. One of the things that really interested

  • Anonymous
    February 25, 2008
    And you guys think it is cool calling it Office Open and not confusing. Change it already if you respect other peoples property and rights. Dont u have any dignity. Yet every day you sending out hundreds of C&D when folks use a logo of MS, or any little thing which might infringe and ussally not to protect your rights. http://lifehacker.com/360503/open-office-2007-documents-in-openoffice-with-openxml-translator

  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2008
    Google to ISO: Say no to OOXML http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080226-google-to-iso-say-no-to-ooxml.html

  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2008
    A renewed wish for open document standards http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/renewed-wish-for-open-document.html

  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2008
    Robertlilly, please do not use or imply "Open Office" as equivalent to "OpenOffice.org". "Open Office" is a registered trademark of a party that has nothing to do with either of "OpenOffice.org" or "Office Open XML". For that matter, "OpenOffice.org" and "Office Open XML" sound sufficiently distinct to my ear.

  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2008
    im, and what experience with file formats and standartization does Google have on its resume? >:)

  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2008
    @BluesClues - Funny. I could tell the difference between MikeRoweSoft and Microsoft, but the Microsoft management who piled on the lawyers could not. What happened to your other ear?

  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2008
    Mistakes happen? At least this one was settled out of court: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Rowe_(student)

  • Anonymous
    April 01, 2008
    I'm sure many folks have seen the news by now that Open XML has been approved as an ISO/IEC standard