When it comes to documents, there are many organisations that need to keep them for a very long time now, especially governments. It’s not acceptable to be locked up in a format that has exactly one, proprietary implementation, especially when that implementation changes and drops support for old versions (Office 2007, hang your head in shame). Now, I don’t care really what standard it is, so long as there is one, and it’s implementable by anyone with a bit of talent in a reasonable amoune of time. The whole lobbying for ODF has a good side (despite no doubt nefarious intentions by IBM / Sun) in that ODF is relatively easy to support, as compared to OOXML, and as such it’s a better basis for a common standard. If people bolt on extensions, that’s for them to decide but the sensible ones should avoid doing it, or at least the business leaders should be smart enough to say that no extensions are allowed. Sure, people will bitch about their favourite extensions, but tough luck – if the goal is to keep business data open and maintanable for the next 50 years, then stick to the damn standards. There’s no ifs or buts here – if ‘coolness’ has to suffer for the benefit of long-term persistence, then so be it. It’s all a question of priorities.

What I got from that point of view was about the same as you, that the OOXML standard was a retroactive document… including documenting quirks and mistakes in previous products way back through the history of office.

It also sounded like it came about via a reaction to ODF lobbying for only allowing products that deal with ODF in government contracts because it’s an ISO standard, to the exclusion of MS Office.

I think the whole thing is more to do with politics and using it as a baton to hit the other around the head with. I think if ODF wasn’t used like that, this whole thing would have just gone quitely by.

As for implementation, it seems that so far they are letting 3rd parties and the open source community create add-ins to do odf things. So I guess it’s the whole “yeah it can, but not by default” thing. It will be interesting to see how this develops, and if saving as an odf would mean you loose things that you wouldn’t if you saved in the native format.

Course I hardly know the ins and outs of it all, and it’s all personal opinon. I’m sure ODF is lovely and clear in comparison, there again the purpose of a shiney new standard and one that covers warts and all of products for a decade or so are going to look very different.

@Paul: Oh jeez has that podcast got some of the most irritating content ever. Cheezy music: check. Irritating introduction: check. Seemingly endless ‘sponsored by’ fluff: check. Use of the word ‘rock’ in an entirely inappropriate context, bringing back memories of the unjustifiable confidence of Vanilla Ice: check. I should have been paid to listen to this

His issues seem to revolve around that people lobbied for ODF, so no-one should mind OOXML, but it’s really not about that. It’s about whether you end up with a genuinely open document standard that can be implemented by many people. ODF is already open and implementable – the spec is not that complex, it’s not anyone’s fault but MS that they haven’t implemented it yet. Conversely OOXML is a sprawling mess with a shedload of outstanding unanswered issues on it, that even Office doesn’t implement properly yet, that’s the core problem. Do you really want a sprawling, horrid ‘standard’ which can’t even get simple formatting commands consistent between Word/Powerpoint/Excel? I don’t, I want something the entire industry can actually use efficiently. Clearly they based it on what Office can spit out now which is why it’s so internally inconsistent.

You’re right about Cocoa, but you can level the same kind of argument at Gtk+ – there are wrapper libraries you can use to get around it, but if you want a ‘native’ feel you may have to invest in specific UIs for each platform with a common back-end, if you’re not web-based. It’s a resource sink, but it depends on how UI focussed your application is. App availability really hasn’t been an issue for me – NeoOffice gives me a Cocoa-native version of Open Office, I’ve gotten used to XCode now, many of my other apps are cross-platform anyway (like Eclipse, Thunderbird, Firefox) and there are a few apps on the Mac I’d love to be able to use on Windows but can’t, like Adium, Quicksilver and PixelMator.

When I worked for Symantec we actually had a Mac in the office where one of our client packages was developed on it which I thought was great because the software we were developing was mostly unheard of, yet implemented on a mass scale for primarily businesses, so to have a Mac port was quite a hurdle.

With the growth of Mac users (and there’s probably a steadily increasing curve for Windows users due to increasing awareness of computing for the newbies such as older generations, families unaware of computing potential etc.) I would say it’s becoming more and more important to support those users.

Ubuntu is a biggy now, especially with their vast increase in numbers and a huge development community working around the clock on the OS, as well as being implemented in schools around the world now (Swedish schools recently).

If you’re a developer working on a single platform, then there’s something very wrong