Big news from Redmond - Microsoft changing Office default file formats to be open and XML based
- IT TOPICS:Applications, Management
This news has been bubbling from all over the blogosphere today.
Here's some links to blogs that have been talking about this:
http://rcd.typepad.com/rcd/2005/06/microsoft_offic.html
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/06/01.html#a10287
http://chrisgonyea.com/archives/2005/06/02/office-12-to-have-new-file-format/
http://joseph.randomnetworks.com/archives/2005/06/01/new-default-xml-formats-for-ms-office/
http://feeds.feedburner.com/EdBott-WindowsandOfficeExpertise?m=333
http://office.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000753045334/
http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2005/06/office_xml_ii.html
http://feeds.feedburner.com/EdBott-WindowsandOfficeExpertise?m=331
http://feeds.feedburner.com/HouseOfTheHangedManRSS2?m=174
This probably won't be much more than a cause of pain for consumer users of Office, but I'm thinking that this will be a good thing for corporate users.
A lot of the pain that we currently have with documents is using WordPerfect docs with Word and vice versa. If both applications switch to a more open file type like what Microsoft is supposed to be doing, it will be a very good thing indeed for users who either do not use Office at all or who use Office and another similar suite interchangeably.
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