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Civility in critiquing the ideas of others is no vice. Rudeness in defending your own ideas is no virtue.


Mon 13 Aug 2007, 01:42 PM
I have been playing a lot with spreadsheets, and I was thinking it might be fun to show a Pivot Table sample in our Report It! demo using the Midas Rich Text LSX and rich text tables.  Would that be appealing?

Copyright © 2007 Genii Software Ltd.

Mon 13 Aug 2007, 12:01 AM
It is now three months since I first posted the table of OOXML file types found by Google.  I was curious how the numbers have changed, so here is the updated file:


Format
Count (May 10, 2007)
Count (August 12, 2007)
ODT
85,200
90,400
ODS
20,700
21,600
ODP
43,400
50,700
Total ODF
149,300
162,700



DOCX
516 (12% on Microsoft.com)
1010 (16% on Microsoft.com)
XLSX
68 (6% on Microsoft.com)
216 (2% on Microsoft.com)
PPTX
80 (13% on Microsoft.com)
767 (47% on Microsoft.com)
Total OOXML
664 (11% on Microsoft.com)
1993 (26% on Microsoft.com)

I guess a dedicated Microsoftie could spin this in a positive way (rah! rah! 100% growth in DOCX format in three months), but it is getting harder.  In eight months since Office 2007 was released to th general public (10 months since release to enterprise customers), there are under 2000 of these office documents posted on the web.  In three months, 13,400 more ODF documents have been added to the web, with only 1,329 OOXML documents added.  It is hard to spin ten times as many ODF documents added as OOXML documents,  especially as 451 (34%) of those new documents were added on Microsoft.com.  That isn't what I would call good traction for the overwhelmingly dominant office suite.

And all of this before IBM rolls out Notes 8 with the ODF productivity editors included as part of tha package.  Since Notes/Domino is enterprise software, and enterprises move slowly, I don't predict an immediate surge, but I would expect a steady increase after six months or so.  By that time, if OOXML keeps up its torrid growth rate of 200% every three months, they should have an amazing 7,972 OOXML documents on the web, while ODF with its measly 9% growth rate should have about 193,215 ODF documents.  Eventually, of course, OOXML would likely catch up, except that the IT industry tends to reward winners, and the preponderance of ODF documents and ODF compatible office products is likely to start being noticed.  Also, that awkward percentage of the OOXML documents on Microsoft.com (especially going from 11% to 26%) is not going to fool anyone long.  When ODF documents are all over the place, and when Microsoft Office documents are still all really in the older binary format... I think people will get the message.

Copyright © 2007 Genii Software Ltd.

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