ODF a Game Changer for Microsoft Office 2007
This is HUGE news. For the organizations who have not yet rolled out Office 2009 to their companies this is a HUGE deal. I think this is a game changer because it means you could have a dual strategy of rolling out free star office to the vast majority of the enterprise who are just consumers of content while the “power” users stick with Office 2007. For example, we saw a feature in the latest version of IBM’s Lotus Notes software last week which showed an embedded set of ODF viewers built into the client which in my mind eliminates even then need for Office on most end user’s workstations.
Microsoft was set to announce Thursday that it would make the interchangeable document format of a competitor available in its own market-leading Office 2007 software during the first half of 2009.
The company, under pressure from European regulators, national standards organizations and its own government clients, said it planned to give customers the ability to open, edit and save documents in Open Document Format — the main competitor to the Microsoft Word format — through a free update.
[From Open-Source File Format Is to Be a Part of Microsoft Office - New York Times]
