Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

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I'm confident the person who most wants to sabotage LibreOffice's success is Italo Vignoli. He's involved in this issue as well, but the other core problem is his marketing strategy: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/author/italovignoli...

Most of his blogs are about how awful OOXML (Microsoft Office's open standard) formats are, and that everyone needs to switch to ODF (his preferred open standard).

What people don't want to use is products which don't work with everyone else's. LibreOffice works with Microsoft Office files really well, but for some reason Italo doesn't want you to know that. He wants the entire world to switch formats to LibreOffice's formats, but really that's just telling potential business users LibreOffice can't meet their needs... interacting with the existing monopoly of Microsoft Office users.

This is a self-sabotaging marketing approach. LibreOffice needs to be promoting itself as an excellent drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office which will easily interoperate with every other organization's office applications, regardless of format.

He's using this approach because the EU requires documents to be in an open format, and by him advocating that OOXML is only open by name, he can advance a legal argument that OpenDocument is the only acceptable format.

Office supports OpenDocument.l, it just doesn't use it by default.

I understand his approach but it's a dumb approach. OOXML is plenty open, proven by the fact LibreOffice works with it fine. The push to force Europe switch to ODF only serves to suggest LibreOffice isn't capable of replacing Microsoft Office (in a world where most other organizations use Office). This is a conversation I have at work, where people laugh when LibreOffice is mentioned and suggest it's incompatible and we can't consider it.

A far better marketing strategy would be to loudly announce, continually, that LibreOffice is the best software for handling Office files and ODF alike! And as people switch to LibreOffice and it defaults to ODF, that naturally grows.

Meanwhile, LibreOffice's current marketing strategy may succeed in getting governments to offer ODF files and simultaneously sabotage anyone from ever switching to LibreOffice because LibreOffice's own marketing claims it won't work well with Word and Excel files.

> The push to force Europe switch to ODF only serves to suggest

No, it doesn't only do that. It also suggests the open xml MS Office format is a mess.*

> This is a conversation I have at work, where people laugh when LibreOffice is mentioned and suggest it's incompatible and we can't consider it.

This is evidence your coworkers are misinformed and you can't correct them. It is not proof that the only thing this blog post does is communicate LibreOffice can't handle Microsoft Office docs.

* this is a tale as old as time, I'm 37, remembering reading about this over and over again on /. when I was a young teen. It was part and parcel with Microsoft's antitrust era. The idea was the open format would help avoid antitrust claims, the complaint was the open format was so byzantine as to be effectively closed.

OOXML is a terrible format, significantly overcomplicated and implemented by MS Office in such a way as to make alternative implementations fully compatible with it impossible. It's "open" in the name only, burying it would be the only logical step if wide interoperability and using truly open formats is your real goal.

And Italo's bad marketing strategy will only ensure OOXML wins. That's what you're missing, it's just a bad way to make the case or foster change.

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