On 3/9/07, Lars D. Noodén <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
That's a very bad move which diminishes one of the long term benefits of OOo, which is ODF support. ODF has a huge backing already. Interoperability that you get from ODF is an advantage. Government and business leaders are promoting open standards, it would be a marketing advantage to ride on that and promote ODF as well.
Lars, We all appreciate your dedication to the fundamentals of the Free, but the "huge backing" that ODF has is mostly academic at this point. It has a "huge backing" as an alternative, not as the main stable of use. The defacto standard ... the most widely used formats of office suite type files is still hugely MS formats (.doc, .ppt, .xls, etc.). By enabling them by default, it will give the users what they want - the file formats they are used to. Preaching to Dell about the future of file format standards is like preaching to Dell about the wonders of Mac OS X. You may firmly believe in your stance - you may even be right - but you are wasting your breath. Remember, Dell is the one that bundles AOL crap with everything. They are not worried about making the Cloud a better place - they are worried about their bottom line, and bundling an office suite that defaults to some "weird" formats is not what they would want to do. However, bundling a Dell-branded office suite with industry-defacto-standard-file-format support and a wide range of other format support, (ODF, PDF, Flash, etc.), that would be something they would be interested in. Know your audience - that's all I'm saying. There's nothing wrong with focusing on the things that the audience would be interested in. In Dell's case - they get a proven, full featured, much-better-than-MSWorks, office suite with a wide range of compatibility for free that they can use to boost their brand. The rest doesn't matter to them. However, once the users get OpenOffice.org - they will have the choice to save in whatever format (including ODF) that they wish. We can even ask Dell to link to a special page on the OOo website describing what "OpenOffice.org (tm) supplied by Dell (tm)" is, and on that page we can talk about file formats all we want. I'd even put a link to that, or a copy of it, in the help section of OOo. (Which gives me another idea - how about a "Welcome to OpenOffice.org" tutorial to include with OOo?) When talking to Dell, don't even mention ODF. When talking to end users - feel free. My $1.25. -- - Chad Smith http://www.chadwsmith.com/
