Re: GNOME Foundation Statement on ECMA TC45-M Participation

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Sun, Nov 25, 2007 at 12:56:09PM +0000, jamie wrote:
> 
> MOOX is most likely to become irrelevant IMO
Not agreed.
 
> Firstly the de facto standard is doc, xls ... And that will not change
> for a long time
somewhat agreed.  MS is not stupid.  They learned the leason of
Office97 and will not be repeating it.  This is why they released
MOOX support for older versions of office before 2007 came out.
The shiny new features in 2007 (more cols/rows, conditional regions)
are a means to draw people forward, but the old versions are not
locked out of the new files.

> Office 2007 has less than 10% of all office versions (50m out of 500m)
Which is already comperable to the OO.o installbase.  They are
playing with a much larger population.

> If companies will continue to use doc and xls formats for
> compatibilities sake then why is it so essential for us to implement
> support for it?
For the same reason that we release win32 builds.  The
windows/office population is large enough that even a small
percentage represents alot of bodies.

> Would it hurt so much to have a moratorium on MOOX dealings til after
> February next year when ISO standard is determined?
> 
> Personally I would not want Gnome to touch it with a bargepole but I
> dont have a problem with spec improvement *after* February next year.

That is precisely the situation we are in.  There is no opportunity
to raise new issues after the BRM in Feb.  Hence, there is no
involvement.

Work will continue on XLSX and ODF filters in Gnumeric but that is a
different issue IMO.