Never one to often pat a competitor on the back, Microsoft
has found an axe to grind with the OpenDocument format (ODF). Citing a performance analysis carried out by
ZDNET in October of last year, Microsoft's Alan Yates pointed to longer load
times and increased CPU/memory usage compared to Microsoft's Open XML format,
"The use of OpenDocument documents is slower to the point of not really
being satisfactory."
A representative from the ODF Alliance was quick to point
out the inconsistencies in the performance evaluations that Yates pointed to. The
ZDNET blogger who did the initial tests only compared ODF to XML and not Open
XML and he also pointed to the fact that no Open XML products are actually on
the market yet. From ZDNET:
Marcich said Open XML
is harder for companies to implement as it has more than 4,000 pages of
documentation, compared with 700 for ODF. "A skeptic might say the
documentation is so long so only one application will support it well," he
said. "On my initial reading of the (Open XML) documentation, it looks
like Microsoft is trying to reinvent the wheel, while ODF freely refers to existing
standards like SVG," or Scalable Vector Graphics.
I have found OpenOffice.org to be generally slower with
higher memory usage than Office 2003
in my day to day activities, but I have been using it
for the past year due to it being a free, open source alternative. Now that
I've been using the Office 2007 Beta 2 which is freely available for
download, I can say that its general performance has been faster than both
in my experience.