From: Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>
Date: Sat, 26 May 2012 15:53:59 +0000 (+0000)
Subject: New post on ODF.
X-Git-Url: http://pere.pagekite.me/gitweb/homepage.git/commitdiff_plain/ad1f1dfae6afa137b0b625960d0d4f1cf27f5d7e

New post on ODF.
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+Title: The cost of ODF and OOXML
+Tags: english, standard, nuug
+Date: 2012-05-26 18:00
+
+<p>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
+claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
+government.  I just sent him an email to let him know that his
+assumption are most likely wrong.  Sharing it here in case some of my
+blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.</p>
+
+<p><blockquote> <p>Hi.  I just noted your
+<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/does-microsoft-office-lock-in-cost-the-uk-government-500-million/index.htm">http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/does-microsoft-office-lock-in-cost-the-uk-government-500-million/index.htm</a>
+comment:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote>"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
+with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the
+savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the
+Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take
+it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."
+</blockquote></p>
+
+<p>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated.  I believe it is
+the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
+and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
+at the content.  In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
+will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
+existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
+formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
+ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
+10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver.  In
+reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
+receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
+would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
+of wasted effort.</p>
+
+<p>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
+transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
+minutes converting to ODF. :)</p>
+
+<p>See
+<a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php</a>
+and
+<a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php</a
+for background information.  Norwegian only, sorry. :)</p>
+</blockquote></p>