Microsoft: OpenDocument is too slow
C|Net | at | by Mike
The OpenDocument Format has come under attack from Microsoft, which claims its Office Open XML format has significantly better performance.
"The use of OpenDocument documents is slower to the point of not really being satisfactory," Alan Yates, the general manager of Microsoft's information worker strategy, told ZDNet UK on Wednesday. "The Open XML format is designed for performance. XML is fundamentally slower than binary formats, so we have made sure that customers won't notice a big difference in performance." Yates cited a study carried out by ZDNet.com that compared OpenOffice.org 2.0 with the XML formats in Microsoft Office 2003. But Marino Marcich, the managing director of the ODF Alliance, said this was not a fair comparison, as it did not test Open XML itself and examined only one implementation of the OpenDocument Format.