If you read Scoble, you probably know that there was going to be a big announcement about Microsoft Office around midnight tonight (Eastern time).
Well, it looks like a few news outlets have already let the cat out of the bag. The big news was that Microsoft Office 12, due out as a beta in the fall and public release in 2006, is going to use XML as the default file format for Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.
Microsoft says that its new XML formats will be royalty-free, so the documents should be easily accessible in other applications that support XML. In addition, the XML files will compress everything via Zip compression technology, which will make typical files 50 percent to 75 percent smaller than they would be in today’s default Office formats (.doc for Word, .xls for Excel, and .ppt for PowerPoint).
To ease the transition to this new file format, Microsoft will also release a converter to allow users of Office 2000, 2003, and XP files to open up files created in older versions of office, and save them in the new XML formats.
This sounds retarded.
So they’re taking lesson from OpenOffice.org and company. OO.o’s file formats have been that way for years. Should certainly make it easier for Office replacments to get the file formats right. Although, they’re probably rebuilding the wheel again. Oh well.
I think that at this point they really need to reinvent word. It’s getting crazier by the release.
This sounds like brilliant news to me. Suddenly 3rd party apps might be able to easily support the new majority format.
Of course I’m still wondering if MS will find a way to make things difficult still. Maybe it will be XML but they will change the specs for it every few months :P or its a type of broken xml? any ideas?
is microsoft actually making a 100% good move for once?
Yeah, it really is a good move!
In other news, a Microsoft chairman announced that they will start selling state-of-the-art Ice-Cube makers to sell in Hell.
Sounds like Apple’s Pages format now….it also uses XML as its file format…