OpenXML vs ODF: Users may suffer, but probably won’t

A rather disappointing article by Martin Banks over on The Register: On the Office format wars:

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/04/20/openxml-odf/

It’s all about users, we’re told; they (we) use Ms Word widely and aren’t going to want to use something different or incompatible. That’s no trouble, however, as Novell (as well as a number of companies in the future, so the prediction goes) has just released a tool to convert one open standard to the other. All of this neatly explains away the need for the article in the first place.

Neil Lewis, in the first of the comments:

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/04/20/openxml-odf/comments/

Reminds us that open standards aren’t about vendor dominance and software lock-ins, but about creating material that can be widely disseminated now and still accessible in the future.

The point of this post? A reminder that some people (Banks) see issues of openness simply as a matter of a vendor’s software sales and are happy to treat the user as some sort of keyboard-drone, the office cubicle equivalent of the mechanically milked cow. Open formats shouldn’t be viewed simply as a sales vector or marketing push, quite the opposite in fact, they should be seen as a means of getting beyond these stifling considerations.