Leader News

Help Microsoft stay true to its word

Leader ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 04 Oct 2005 14:15 BST

It is a positive pleasure to report when Microsoft lives up to its publicity. Yesterday, we received a press release that began "Microsoft is continuing its commitment to supporting open technologies for sharing and archiving content," and went on to prove it. The company is adding comprehensive support for saving documents in PDF format in Office 12 even though it has its own XPS document presentation format.

People want PDF, it's been offered as an ISO standard and it fulfils many needs for platform-independent data handling. Being an open standard, PDF is free for Microsoft to implement without limitation — a modest investment that rewards us all.

All of the same arguments apply to OpenDocument, with one difference — OpenDocument is very new and not yet in widespread use. It is far more capable than PDF and has been designed from the beginning to share and archive content in many more ways; still Microsoft can plausibly claim that it's just not seeing demand.

The company has in the past made somewhat waggish use of this style of explanation. When asked about the similarities between Vista and OS X, Steve Ballmer said "I don't hear that from enterprise customers. They don't look at the Mac."

Yet even assuming that the reason for Microsoft's coolness over OpenDocument adoption is a genuine belief that it's just not popular, we know what the trigger point is for new feature adoption. With 120,000 queries a month about "PDF" through its Office Online Web service and perhaps a hundred or so mentions in the support forums, Microsoft has been stirred to action.

It now falls to the OpenDocument supporters to show that there is a demand for Office support. To some extent that is a matter of education and demonstration, showing real life uses where the standard is the best answer, and of encouraging widespread take up from other software makers.

Most importantly, though, Microsoft must be told directly. Ask your vendor, your consultants, your MVPs. Ask in the Office Online forums — there's a 'suggest a feature' option — and during sales pitches, demonstrations and trade shows. With Microsoft 'committed to open technologies', user demand will be the only reason it needs to take action — and that's openly documented.