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The other day we mentioned South Africa because of its decision to embrace OpenDocument format. Shortly afterwards we spotted Microsoft’s plan to pay a little visit to this country. Coincidence? Maybe.
When in mid-October 2007, the OpenDocument Foundation announced that the World Wide Web Consoritum-backed Common Document Format (CDF) was the heir-apparent to what it believed was a dead-on-arrival OpenDocument Format, many confused the ODf to be one in the same with the ODF and the latter to have one foot in the grave.
I’ve been so busy with other stuff that I’ve only peripherally been paying attention to an ongoing meme on the Internet about how the World Wide Web Consortium’s Common Document Format (CDF) had been identified by the OpenDocument Foundation as a superior document format to the OpenDocument Format that it had been backing for so long.
Six months ago I got a request to check what Microsoft had said in a report about Italian public administrations rejecting OpenDocument as mandatory format, so I tried to contact MS Italy to know more. Since I'm still waiting for them, and in general Microsoft asking for "file format neutrality" is a bit ridiculous, I've decided to ask again, in public
Bill Gates has reportedly been making phone calls to the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Commerce to push the American National Standards Institute to ignore the votes of its advisory committees and vote "yes" on ISO standardizing Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) format, the one in competition with the OpenDocument Format (ODF) pushed by IBM and Sun.
In shocking news, Microsoft's support of ODF in Microsoft Office is basically unusable in many respects, according to the OpenDocument Format Alliance.
