Missing the point

Posted Oct 22, 2008 14:29 UTC (Wed) by frankie (subscriber, #13593)
In reply to: Missing the point by dwheeler
Parent article: Why OpenOffice.org Failed - and What to Do About It (ComputerWorld UK)

That also motivates 3000 pages of standard description for OpenXML and many obfuscated details: a huge ramp for a truly OXML compatible third party product, resulting in an another lock-in format but blessed as a standard one.

Missing the point

Posted Oct 23, 2008 12:56 UTC (Thu) by hmh (subscriber, #3838) [Link]

And, when that fails EVEN after it did become an standard, take over the other one (ODF) which is not of stellar quality either. I shudder to think of what the already hideous ODF will become in five years.

The more I see of it, the more I am convinced that SGML or a human-usable restricted set of it (say, Docbook, and nowadays DocBook XML and XHTML strict) is the only thing we can really trust to endure for 20+ years.

That, and TeX (and LaTeX) documents without too many obscure extra modules. Go figure!