Microsoft Embraces ODF, PDF and XPS

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Microsoft announced that it will introduce support for Open Document Format, Portable Document Format and XML Paper Specification in Office 2007 SP2, due for release in 2009. This is another step by Microsoft to support Open Source while at the same time hopefully keeping their critics quiet. As I've said before I now expect other Office vendors such as IBM and Sun will now embrace OOXML. While I don't care about ODF support it is a great addition for education where students can use Office 2007 in school and know that they can work on their coursework at home on their Open Source Office suite without formating difficulties. The ability to open and save PDF's is much more useful to me and lets remember that Microsoft had intended to support PDF in Office 2007 until Adobe forced them to pull support in 2006, not really thinking about users there Adobe were ya? I assume Office for Mac will also get support for these formats at some point in the near future also.

The 2007 Microsoft Office system already provides support for
20 different document formats within Microsoft Office Word, Office Excel and Office PowerPoint. With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) scheduled for the first half of 2009, the list will grow to include support for XML Paper Specification (XPS), Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1.

When using SP2, customers will be able to open, edit and
save documents using ODF and save documents into the XPS and PDF fixed formats from directly within the application without having to install any other code. It will also allow customers to set ODF as the default file format for Office 2007. To also provide ODF support for users of earlier versions of Microsoft Office (Office XP and Office 2003), Microsoft will continue to collaborate with the open source community in the ongoing development of the Open XML-ODF translator project on SourceForge.net.

Microsoft No. 1 Tech Company

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Fortune has published a list of the 20 most profitable tech companies and Microsoft is at no. 1 again with $14.1 billion in earnings last year. The top 5 in the list are:

1. Microsoft


2. IBM - $10.4 billion


3. Cisco - $7.3 billion


4. HP - $7.3 billion


5. Intel - $7 billion





Google and Apple came in 7th and 8th with $4.2 billion and $3.5 billion respectively. For a company that certain people are claiming is collapsing and who are supposed to have released an OS that is alledgedly massive failure, personally I have no problems with it but that's another post, they've still made some pretty good money this year. They really would be unstoppable in a few years if the Yahoo merger goes through and turns out to be a success, however, expect Microsoft to slip down the list next year if the Yahoo takeover goes through because $44billion to purchase Yahoo, let alone the cost of actually bringing the companies together, is a lot of money even for the Seattle Giant.

IBM Applications on Apple Devices

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Lotus Notes on the iPhone will allow the iPhone to compete directly with the Blackberry in the business market. Bringing these two major Microsoft competitors together could mean that we're looking at a full on assault on the business community. New XServer, Lotus Notes connectivity and Lotus Symphony does make a good foundation to build on.

IBM to add software for Apple devices

By BRIAN BERGSTEIN - AP Technology Writer

E-mail software from IBM Corp. will be available on Apple Inc. iPhones and iPod Touch devices under a new partnership that brings together two big rivals of Microsoft Corp.

IBM plans a formal announcement of the Lotus Notes e-mail package for Apple's portable devices at its Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Fla., next week. The software, which requires use of IBM's Domino e-mail server program, will be free for users who already have a Lotus Web-access license and start at $39 per year for new users.

IBM also plans to release Lotus Notes and the free Lotus Symphony "productivity" package - which includes documents, spreadsheets and other Microsoft Office-like software - for Apple's Macintosh computers.

http://www.thestate.com/technology-wire/story/285949.html