Office’s support to ODF a warm welcome
I don’t know which of my lines got them. Was it this:
Obviously, software companies are going to be protective about their apps and their source. Fine. Most users don’t care about your black boxes. But, they will be mighty pissed if software is going to lock them down to use a particular version that has no portability to (any) other application.
Or this:
Nobody has a thing against paid software, but paid need not mean data locked-down. I mean come-on, look at the irony. You are paying for the software and yet, it does not give your data the freedom to port to another open format, if you wish to. That is like robbing and cheating. It may have worked until now, but will not in future, or atleast, should not.
No, I’m kidding of-course. I don’t care if it is the Ray Ozzie effect or something else. And they’d be slapping themselves if they go on the lines of there’s no strong demand for ODF support from corporate or consumer customers. I am not buying that downplaying user one-bit. I mean, are you kidding me? We have had enough calls in recent times highlighting the pain of seeing our data end-up a crap by lossy exports or no exports at all.
The prick process has already started, as noted and widely acknowledged in the blogosphere and in the mainstream media. The voice of this pain felt by users would only grow stronger in time.
Kudos to Office team in deciding about going with ODF. Can we now see pdf next on the guillotine?
Update: And now I read this. Ouch.