Comments on: Day 2 of the OFE Conference http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2008/02/27/day-2-of-the-ofe-conference/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=day-2-of-the-ofe-conference The Magic of Open Source Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:18:44 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Alan Bell http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2008/02/27/day-2-of-the-ofe-conference/comment-page-1/#comment-1143 Alan Bell Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:29:26 +0000 http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2008/02/27/day-2-of-the-ofe-conference/#comment-1143 basically no, duplicate standards don't benefit the consumer. Things like imperfect GSM standards lead to quad band phones, i.e. the phone deals with 4 times the number of bands it needs to do. Bluetooth vs WiFi was an interesting example where at the beginning it was not well understood that the different roles of the two wireless technologies were quite different and not overlapping much. Turns out both standards are useful. Nobody thinks OOXML should be an international standard, but this answer was somewhat of a foregone conclusion. Andy Updegrove thought that OOXML was possibly a bit different to ODF in it's aims, I didn't quite follow all of his logic on this, but it will be in the video and transcript next week sometime. OOXML is different in it's aims. It is aim is to represent and preserve the idiosyncrasies of Microsoft's legacy formats, Microsoft wants it to be an international standard so that Microsoft gets to bid for government contracts and persuade governments to mandate that their citizens send and receive documents in Microsoft formats using Microsoft software. basically no, duplicate standards don’t benefit the consumer. Things like imperfect GSM standards lead to quad band phones, i.e. the phone deals with 4 times the number of bands it needs to do. Bluetooth vs WiFi was an interesting example where at the beginning it was not well understood that the different roles of the two wireless technologies were quite different and not overlapping much. Turns out both standards are useful.

Nobody thinks OOXML should be an international standard, but this answer was somewhat of a foregone conclusion. Andy Updegrove thought that OOXML was possibly a bit different to ODF in it’s aims, I didn’t quite follow all of his logic on this, but it will be in the video and transcript next week sometime. OOXML is different in it’s aims. It is aim is to represent and preserve the idiosyncrasies of Microsoft’s legacy formats, Microsoft wants it to be an international standard so that Microsoft gets to bid for government contracts and persuade governments to mandate that their citizens send and receive documents in Microsoft formats using Microsoft software.

]]> By: Kyttkat http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2008/02/27/day-2-of-the-ofe-conference/comment-page-1/#comment-1124 Kyttkat Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:37:12 +0000 http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2008/02/27/day-2-of-the-ofe-conference/#comment-1124 So what was the answer to your question? So what was the answer to your question?

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