blog/data/2012-05-26-odf-cost.txt

   1 Title: The cost of ODF and OOXML
   2 Tags: english, standard, nuug
   3 Date: 2012-05-26 18:00
   4
   5 <p>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
   6 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
   7 government.  I just sent him an email to let him know that his
   8 assumption are most likely wrong.  Sharing it here in case some of my
   9 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.</p>
  10
  11 <p><blockquote> <p>Hi.  I just noted your
  12 <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>
  13 comment:</p>
  14
  15 <p><blockquote>"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
  16 with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the
  17 savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the
  18 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take
  19 it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."
  20 </blockquote></p>
  21
  22 <p>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated.  I believe it is
  23 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
  24 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
  25 at the content.  In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
  26 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
  27 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
  28 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
  29 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
  30 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver.  In
  31 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
  32 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
  33 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
  34 of wasted effort.</p>
  35
  36 <p>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
  37 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
  38 minutes converting to ODF. :)</p>
  39
  40 <p>See
  41 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php</a>
  42 and
  43 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php</a>
  44 for background information.  Norwegian only, sorry. :)</p>
  45 </blockquote></p>