> Everything always seems to render differently
> between MS Office and LibreOffice.
And Microsoft will make sure that it will always be so, *if* I understand
Microsoft's general marketing policies correctly.
> Microsoft Office supports ODF now, so that's good.
I am not sure that it will amount to much, because it is a "lip service" by
Microsoft, never meant to work properly in large/professional scale. Had
Microsoft supported ODF before OOXML was standardized (which they never
would, as it would have undermined OOXML's standardization) then *that* would
have been good.
Now that Microsoft have managed to usher the game into their own backyard
(OOXML), they can now support ODF as a symbolic gesture and this will never
amount to anything serious. They will deliberately make ODF support subtly
buggy and semi-compatible in order to sustain subtle incompatibility between
MS-Office and LibreOffice. They must stay incompatible.
I also suspect they will introduce "improvements" in their version of OOXML
to effectively lock customers into MS Office.
The ultimate idea is, to my understanding, MS Office and Libre Office should
not blend together well, so Microsoft can get to offer "either all MS or no
MS" proposition to their corporate customer base. This is kind of
wrist-wrestling: While on top, Microsoft will try everything they can in
order to sustain subtle incompatibility - subtle enough to block mixed usage
in large deployments. But when/if ODF becomes more popular, then Microsoft
will be championing the compatibility issue more than anyone else.
Cheap cheap corporate tricks.
