14 DAY TRIAL // The United Kingdom government has recently announced that it wants to switch from Microsoft Office to open-source software, but Redmond’s reaction actually called for authorities to keep both formats alive and thus abandon plans to move away from its products.
While Microsoft’s request made sense at some level, the Document Foundation, the organization behind the famous LibreOffice tool, said in a statement for PCPro that Redmond is only trying to protect its own interest, so it’s criticizing UK’s intentions with nonsense.
Italo Vignoli, a spokesman for the Document Foundation, said that the British government should stick to just one format, especially to fight confusion and make it easier for staff to work with their documents.
“Microsoft’s business model is based on selling licenses - of course it’ll be heavily affected. I perfectly understand Microsoft's position – if I were a Microsoft employee, I’d support that position. But I think this isn’t in the interests of users, it’s in the interest of Microsoft,” Vignoli explained.
“You basically don’t solve the problem - there should only be one standard," he said. "It doesn’t make a lot of sense to have two standards for the same thing.”
Microsoft, on the other hand, believes that the United Kingdom government’s decision would also impact users, so sticking to Office would be one clever decision that would also keep things as they are for users across the country as well.
“These decisions WILL likely impact you; either as a citizen of the UK, a UK business or as a company doing or wanting to do business with government,” the company said.
Microsoft is seeing increased competition from open-source and freeware Office alternatives as the company continues to invest millions in making its productivity suite more powerful and available on more platforms.
According to people familiar with the matter, the software giant is also working to launching Office on some new platforms, including Android and iOS, the two leading mobile operating systems that are expected to receive the productivity suite as soon as this year.
Recent reports have hinted that Office for iPad is already in the works right now, so the launch could take place in the coming months as Microsoft is already giving the final touches to the project. The Android build is expected to follow soon, while a touch-optimized flavor that would be able to run in the Modern UI of Windows 8 would also be released in the near future.