Open Document Format turns 20, but Microsoft Office still reigns supreme
“It's been 20 years since the Open Document Format (ODF) became a standard, marking a milestone in the push for open, vendor-neutral file formats — and the beginning of a long but largely unsuccessful attempt to loosen Microsoft Office's grip on the desktop.”
It's great that we have an international open standard for interoperability between different vendors, but very sad that Microsoft chose to promote its own rival standard instead (OOXML), and that MS has consistently been breaking its own standard to ensure rival vendors cannot fully support the Microsoft standard. As usual, MS played dirty instead of embracing open standards in the interests of all users everywhere, and ensuring future-proof reading/editing of documents.
The situation today I suppose it a lot better than it was in the early years when ODF came out. There is greater compatibility today. But if Microsoft had played ball properly, LibreOffice, FreeOffice, etc should all have been able to perfectly edit any documents produced by MS Office, and of course, the other way around too.
Open standards are essential to improving competition, interoperability, preventing vendor lock-in, and also ultimately reducing costs for consumers. None of this is really in Microsoft's interests, though.
Whilst many governments did in fact formally approve ODF as their standard, including South Africa, the sad reality is that they just about only exclusively send out documents in docx formats. This is despite MS Office being able to export to ODF format. The intention was to reduce costs for SMMEs and citizens who needed to interact with government.
I recall doing a post many years ago about a provincial level government social development department requiring charities to submit their business plans in docx format to them. As I said then, it was fine for the provincial government to spends millions per annum on paying for MS Office licenses using taxpayer money, but charities don't have that sort of donor money to waste. The charities actually had a right to submit their documents in ODF format to government.
See https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/03/20_years_open_document_form
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#technology #openstandards #ODF #interoperability
