On Sat, 2005-10-22 at 00:00 +0200, Johan Vromans wrote: > > * OOo has a larger market share than MS Office 2003. > > I don't believe this.
Then look at the market research rather than personal impressions. Most of the reputable research seems to indicate that MSO 2003 is a small proportion of the overall office installed base. Broadly similar to the estimates for OOo users. We have MS Office 2000 at work and it gets used alongside OOo. I can't see any liklihood that we will ever upgrade MSO to later versions. We didn't bother with XP or 2003 so why bother with MSO12 - and as a business we are not unusual. But since we have MSO 2000 we might as well use it where we specifically need it. One example is our CRM application. Chances are this will be upgraded to something better and at that point we will be free from dependency on MSO. I also have some particularly complex documents I need to edit in .doc format sent out by the government. The Government have a policy not to do this any more so its very unlikely that if MSO12 comes out that anyone will use its MS-XML format for general distribution of files. Most people will not be able to open them without buying MSO12 (Or perhaps 2003 dependingon how its implemented) and government are now a lot more sensitive to this forced upgrade issue than they were in the days of Office97. So .doc will persist for quite some time even if ODF didn't exist. Gartner reckon there will be no significant take up in terms of market share for MSO12 until 2008 at the earliest. By then we will be on OOo30 at least and KOffice and other apps will have moved to ODF too. Maybe MS maybe not. If ODF is adopted and government want to send out something in that format they are not forcing anyone to buy anything. Just install OOo for free and you can read and edit the document. If you choose to pay for MSO and it supports ODF that is your choice but government is not forcing you into it. If MS don't support ODF there is a real chance they will get sidelined since even by 2010 .doc will still be by far the biggest MS format in use. By 2010 we will be on OOo40 with proliferation to PDAs, web based office, embeddedin games consoles etc. So if you want to contribute maintaining the momentum for these changes, sign the petition. -- Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ZMSL --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
