What planet do you live on? Only MS didn’t want to play nice.

So Sun and IBM’s ploy with ODF wasn’t primarily an attempt to undermine Microsoft’s dominant position in the office tools market?

Wake up, for God’s sake. You must be very naïve.

I’ve read a lot of the OOXML spec and I don’t believe this characterization is justified. For sure there are flaws, but it is not bad.

Tim

A planet where Microsoft Office is the de facto standard. Introducing a new standard without Microsoft’s cooperation is unpleasant for the user.

Tim

What planet do you live on? Only MS didn’t want to play nice. Everybody else on your list has already adopted ODF and has been begging MS to make office read and write ODF files.

Seriously, are you on drugs or something?

any standard would have never been acceptable to microsoft. they wish to prolong their stranglehold on the office market (through non-interoperable file formats) as long as possible. OOXML is nowhere near a standard, it’s a horribly incomplete specification trying to masquerade as a standard in order to meet the requirements (in name only) of the push for actual open standards.

it occurs to me that the new proper action for openoffice users is to just send ODF files, and tell the people using microsoft office to go install the plugin.

Sure, but defaults are all-important. The simple step of going off and downloading a plug-in is a huge obstacle to many users, who may have locked-down desktops or just be nervous of installing anything. I come across this frequently.

Tim