Gray Knowlton: On “motivation” and commitment to open file formats

 

There’s al lot of talk about OpenXML and PDF. Microsoft colleague Gray Knowlton has created an excellent blogpost about OpenXML. Gray is a Group Product Manager for the Microsoft Office system, so he’s close to the fire as we say.

He is highlighting the work, the solutions and most of all the progress that has been made in this field.

… Microsoft has been and continues to be fully committed to opening its document formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Interoperability is not new to Office, and Open XML is part of a much broader strategy around interoperability for Office. When we look at the past three years of document format related investments, you’ll see this shining through; we’ve done quite a lot. Different circumstances led to each of these activities, but as a collection of work, the intent is unmistakable, and despite claims to the contrary, we’re highly motivated to ensure that we can participate in an open environment. These are all steps toward openness, which is good for us, good for our customers and good for the industry.

Brian Jones has covered the history of the formats and XML support for Office in a prior post, there is a significant amount of ground covered in his post. 

Let’s take a look at what has happened: …

Read on at source : Gray Knowlton’s blog : Gray Matter