Posts Tagged ‘OpenOffice’
Guest lecture from MS Denmark
Today I attended a guest lecture by Jasper Hedegaard Bojsen, CTO at Microsoft Denmark. The lecture focussed about the network effect, lock-in types, switching cost and the whole issue of choice of open document standards in the public authorities in Denmark.
I always try to attend these kinds of lectures and meetings because they are almost always quit interesting. And todays lecture was indeed interesting as it gave an insight in what Microsoft (especially in Denmark) thinks about the open office standards issue and what they are about to launch of new products and features.
Regarding the war of the standards (note the reference to “The war of the worlds”) Jasper was in the defense talking a bit about what their competitors does to influence the decision makers. He emphazised on the fact that there is not just two Office products in the world today. The choice of office product is not realy just black and white (OpenOffice and MS Office), but there is a lot of alternatives out there. He also said that the price for an MS Office pack was not that expensive as many believe it to be. Regarding ODF as a standard, Jasper told that OOXML was a more rich standard than ODF and that there is a lot of loss of information when converting a OOXML document to a ODF one as the ODF standard is much smaller. He also stressed the fact that MS had made it possible in their Office package to save to ODF but the people behind OpenOffice haven’t made it possible in their package to save to a OOXML document and he thought that this was quit strange because it had been possible to save to .doc for instance which he thought was much more difficult to develop.
Google Docs was mentioned and he talked about the problems about Google Docs not using a office standard for their service at all and their ability to change the appearence as they liked. He also talked about the update ratio of Google Docs (20 to 30 times updated last year) and why that is a problem for the users. To me it sounds like Microsoft sees Google as one of their biggest competitors right now.
The last part of the lecture, Jasper talked about the new products that Microsoft was launching earlier this year and with that the new webbased Office service. This looks and sounds quite interesting but few of my fellow students stressed the fact that this new webbased office service wasn’t that innovative and that Google in this field was the innovative one. In the light of how big an competitor Google is for MS, Jasper told that service would not work in Google Chrome as MS would not like to “help Google to a greater browser market share”. This is something that has been seen with the lack of support for Silverlight in Google Chrome.
A very interesting guest lecture from the CTO and I thaught that he had a lot of good points about the war on standards. I know that it’s just one side of the story but he was very honest in his views. I look forward to follow the war of the standards and what the outcome in Denmark and in the rest of the world will be. I don’t think that any office products just yet can compete with especially the usability in MS Office and I have both used Google Docs on work and OpenOffice for a period and they really lack alot from what MS has right now.
