Comments on: Lock-ins need lockpickers

By: Marcus

Marcus — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 12:05:50 +0000

It’s also important to see governments trying to avoid the lock-in. India, Poland, Brazil, Italy, France and Belgium have all recognised and recommended ODF, and various states in the US have it under investigation.

Microsoft’s OOXML’s delayed ISO standardisation and the number of countries with reservations against it in its current form could delay it even further and allow ODF to gain more of a foothold.

By: Jackie Danicki » Weaning companies off Microsoft Office

Jackie Danicki » Weaning companies off Microsoft Office — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 11:20:00 +0000

[...] nails it, saying “Lock-ins need lock-pickers“: Somewhere inside my head, there is no difference between my buying a song via the iTunes [...]

By: Ric

Ric — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 07:17:49 +0000

It’s often easier to use OO.o to open earlier versions of Word documents than a later version of Word itself – and I’m the only person who can open some very old WordPerfect documents still kicking around …

By: Ric

Ric — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 07:15:30 +0000

Now – do I use MS Office? Yes – at work mainly because we are a MS shop on the desktop. At home? OO.o all the way …

By: Ric

Ric — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 07:14:12 +0000

Ooooh don’t worry, JP – I certainly consider MS Office formats to be a very invidious form of DRM … we have allowed MS to control our own data, and ONE possible outcome is that we are held to ransom at some future point to access it. The Australian National Archives explicitly switched to ODF to ensure that future generations would always be able to access government archives, and potentially have a wide choice of software to do so.

By: Gaurav

Gaurav — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 06:10:33 +0000

Well ..clever people are working on so that there are no more lock ins in future. e.g major companies like IBM, SUN, Google are promoting ODF (Open document format). As far as migrating from MS Office is concerned it requires people, companies demand for it. What you have mentioned is desirable but companies do not feel the need to shell out money and effort to move towards open standards. So there wont be any migration bridges available soon.

More over I think MS provides bridge to migrate from old Word/Excel format to their new open OOXML standard, though I am not sure about this.

Regards
Gaurav

By: David Gumbrell

David Gumbrell — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 23:56:47 +0000

I have a suspicion that it’s because people buy iTunes with their own money and MS Office with their employer’s. Bolstering that monopoly is why Student & teacher edition exists.

You are absolutely right though, and it has been brought into sharp relief by the ODF shenanigans documented on Groklaw.