Microsoft Blasts IBM Over XML Standards 323
carlmenezes writes "Ars Technica has up an article discussing Microsoft's latest salvo against IBM. Microsoft's open letter to IBM adds fresh ammunition to the battle of words between those who support Microsoft's Open XML and OpenOffice.org's OpenDocument file formats. Microsoft has strong words for IBM, which it accuses of deliberately trying to sabotage Microsoft's attempt to get Open XML certified as a standard by the ECMA. In the letter, general managers Tom Robertson and Jean Paol write: 'When ODF was under consideration, Microsoft made no effort to slow down the process because we recognized customers' interest in the standardization of document formats.' In contrast, the authors charge that IBM 'led a global campaign' urging that governments and other organizations demand that International Standards Organization (ISO) reject Open XML outright."
I don't know about you guys (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not an IBM's format (Score:5, Insightful)
This "Open Letter" is nothing than another piece of FUD and whining.
Re:IBM or Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Could the IBM product function without the MS one ? Yes, you could download an alternative OS for free.
Could the MS product function without the IBM one ? No.
Go with IBM, brother.
Of course they did (Score:5, Insightful)
When you're a convict.... (Score:4, Insightful)
crybabies (Score:2, Insightful)
Boring Boring Boring. More posturing as per usual
Be alert the world need more lerts
Wait... what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah... are we supposed to believe that? If anything creating there "open" format looks to me like a blatant attempt to prevent the one thing that open format people are trying to accomplish, namely having one open format that can be used by everyone and can't be arbitrarily obsoleted by any one company. Or maybe I missed something.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
I feel sorry for Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM is being a big bully and not allowing Microsoft to screw the public and private companies of the world as Microsoft wants to.
Naughty Naughty Big Blue.
OH GOD MAKE IT STOP! (Score:1, Insightful)
In XML-based file formats, which can easily interoperate through translators and be implemented side by side in productivity software, this exclusivity makes no sense except to those who lack confidence in their ability to compete in the marketplace on the technical merits of their alternative standard. This campaign to limit choice and force their single standard on consumers should be resisted.
Yeah, right. I hope you die.
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's format in and of itself is an attempt to sabatoge OpenDocument. Their refusal to support it, despite having the most popular Office Suit is another clear sign of their contempt for it, and the customers they claim to care about now.
God forbid IBM promotes their own standard. Jeez, that's almost like having competition! We'de hate to have to make MS actually compete with anyone. On top of all that, why in the world would IBM trust MS not to tweak the standand and make it MS only? Why would anyone who actually cares about an open format trust MS to touch it?
They both suck. (Score:3, Insightful)
The major problem is the use of XML. At least with HTML, the tag names were kept short. But both standards use rather long element names, often in excess of eight characters, plus eight or more namespace characters beyond that. For some of the XML element names of each format, we're looking at over 16 characters overhead! When such tags are used repeatedly, especially in a large or heavily-formatted document, a lot of space ends up being wasted.
Another major problem is that they don't really solve any problems that LaTeX or GROFF haven't already dealt with. Both LaTeX and GROFF allow for far more compact document files, and they easily allow for output in a wide array of formats, from DVI to PostScript to PDFs to HTML. The HTML that is generated, for instance, is actually human-readable. OpenOffice.org and MS Office's HTML output is garbled and insane.
One True Format (Score:5, Insightful)
Call me crazy but having two different standards doesn't really capture the idea of having Standards at all. I thought the point of standards was to make it so we (the developers) only have to implement one thing. I can fully understand IBM's reasoning here. The only thing it seems MS wants to do is create more vendor lock.
Re:IBM or Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
I have to assume GP was referring to the fact that GGP bought the laptop with Windows installed. That being the case, he more than likely bought an OEM license which, I am sure you are aware, is non-transferable. That being the case, the laptop *will* work fine without Windows, however, since Windows cannot be (legally) transferred to another machine, it *will not* work on other hardware (legally).
"...wait, don't answer that."
Ooops... too late
Re:When you're a convict.... (Score:5, Insightful)
When a "standard" [ecma-international.org] says
This element specifies that applications shall emulate the behavior of a previously existing word processing application (Microsoft Word 95) when determining the spacing between full-width East Asian characters in a document's content.
[Guidance: To faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of that application, which involves many possible behaviors and cannot be faithfully placed into narrative for this Office Open XML Standard. If applications wish to match this behavior, they must utilize and duplicate the output of those applications. It is recommended that applications not intentionally replicate this behavior as it was deprecated due to issues with its output, and is maintained only for compatibility with existing documents from that application. end guidance]
It's shorter, more accurate, and only a little less helpful...
Typically Microsoft ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nevermind that customers are rejecting Microsoft Office because they are trying to get out of the lock-in of Microsoft's proprietary document format. Nevermind that Microsoft is into "Open" only to fudge the line between "Open standards that are documented and that anyone can implement and use" and "Proprietary with an open wrapper". Heh ... if I embed an MS-Word file into an XML document and compress the result using the Open Source program Gzip, does that make the resulting file "Open"? No? According to Microsoft's own logic, this would be the case.
And all this just to disguise the fact that their proposed "Open" standard allows them to put their their (totally proprietary) Office format into a document that follows the standard and then call it "Open". It's squarely aimed at fooling manager types into ticking a box labelled "Open Standards compliant" on their checklist.
Of course it's a fine example of complete intellectual dishonesty on Microsoft's part ... but whenever did Microsoft ever care about honesty? Intellectual or otherwise? Microsoft didn't become big by using such stupid tactics ...
Take that video demonstration for example. You know ... the one that showed Windows "crashing" when Explorer was removed. Any ordinary person would have gone to jail for perjury on that "testimony" ... but large companies are exempt it seems. "A regrettable communication error sir." Yeah, right.
As many people know ... Microsoft's OOXML is a blatant attempt to perpetuate Microsoft's proprietary standards through a selection of backdoors in a 6,000 page standard proposal that Microsoft is trying to rush through. Just see the "criticism" section in this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML [wikipedia.org]
my solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They both suck. (Score:5, Insightful)
The "space" is not that big of a concern, really. When LaTeX and GROFF were formulated, 640K was significant amounts of memory, and a 10MB hard disk was luxury. Space was important. Not so much anymore: 256-512MB RAM is standard, with 1-1.5GB not being unreasonable on a desktop, with 100's of GB of disk space. I know, "bandwidth" is still a somewhat limiting factor - but that's starting to die as a limitation, too. That all said, for the on-disk/transferable format, remember that at least the OO format is gzipped. Those repeating 16-character tags compress really nicely when gzipped.
However, I think this thread is really missing IBM's point. It's not that Microsoft's "standard" is horrible (which it is), it's that having competing "standards" will detract from the whole idea of having the standard: interoperability. Microsoft is attempting to subvert the standards process to be able to claim that MS Word complies with open standards while still making it nearly impossible for others to do so, which maintains Microsoft's lock on the word processor market. IBM is opposed to that as it will impede the ability for anyone relying on these open standards to reduce lock-in to actually meet their requirements. (Of course, it also impedes Lotus' ability to penetrate those markets, as well as OOo, AbiWord, KWord, and lots of others.)
Re:When you're a convict.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think that is so strange; it's a deprecated element, for backwards compatibility, not meant to be used anymore.
What's bizarre is that a new standard, that Word95 cannot read at all, is encumbered by deprecated backwards compatibility elements at all! They should just be left out.
Re:IBM or Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
Additional keys are all well and good, but what I think really irks people about this particular key is that it has the Windows logo on it.
It would be exactly as useful and 0% as annoying if they kept the key but printed something else on it, like a star, or a light bulb or something.
Re:When you're a convict.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They both suck. (Score:3, Insightful)
The XML is compressed before it is saved. Yes, there is redundancy in the source XML, but that doesn't mean you store the redundancy.
The discussion (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know the people involved, and I don't know where they're coming from. But I suspect something. That suspicion colors everything I read in it.
I cannot read a discussion of my peers and believe what I read today. Every peer is possibly specifically paid to market and lie. Therefore, I have no peers.
We need a law against astro-turfing.
Re:Is there a point somewhere? (Score:1, Insightful)
I've sat on a couple standards meetings. I have no idea how ECMA produces "standards" but a 2000 to 6000 page spec won't become a standard any time soon, not a standard that is implemented by more than one party. It's a standard in name alone. They "fast tracked" it? You can't read 6000 pages in a month, let alone make valuable architectural decisions or discuss the impact of it on your products. This is nothing but a PR campaign, the one thing I will say though in IBM's defense, they've been working on an open doc standard for years and MS is a late comer to the party, despite being invited. A 6000 page spec? haha, I wouldn't expect a "standard" for 20 years...
There is a reason why MS goes for ECMA standards rather than ISO or ANSI. Look at javascript, it's an ECMA standard, you still code to the browser with firefox and IE, you still have to deal with both browsers. C++ is an ECMA standard, point to one example of any legitimate interop between C++ compilers... Point to one example of an MS ECMA standard that took any input at all from a competitor or independent implementor, just once, point this out.
MS to Release full Open XML Specs (Score:1, Insightful)
MS intends to release the complete implementation details as soon as optical disc technology catches up and 8 Terabyte quad layer discs become commonplace and the drives are available on all Compaq and Dell computers; MS will open source its BlakDeth-Ray(tm) technology to speed the development process, however, the BlakDeth-Ray(tm) SDK requires an NDA, a per-seat license and a DRM dongle compatible with Windows Vienna. It must also "function as per Microsoft Bob".
MS also needs to locate a programmer named Karl to produce his code comments for the Word 95 spec, but they have been saved in Multi-Tool Word format and are currently unreadable in Office 2007.
Re:They both suck. (Score:2, Insightful)
ODF is format (Score:3, Insightful)
Having looked into both formats, I realized that they're both trash.
... OpenOffice.org and MS Office's HTML output is garbled and insane.
So (assuming any legitimacy to the complaint) then use a different tool to convert OpenDocument to HTML. Geez. It's XML and there are quite a few ways to make the transition, many of which are quite good.
You do realize that the article is about the format and not the applications which use them, don't you ? Yeah. I thought so. There are something close to three dozen applications which support OpenDocument, of which OpenOffice is only one.
MS shills seem to be working over time to try to confuse the issues regarding OOXML vs ISO/23600 aka OpenDocument. Two of the main themes are here.
Crissakes, even the government of China is trying to harmonize with OpenDocument. You also have the 5000 or so participants in OASIS representing 600 or so organizations, companies, agencies and universities participating in OASIS, which is responsible for OpenDocument. You also have about 2 billion MS Office users tired of being forced into a new office suite and/or operating system purchase every the vendor decides to change its undocumented, binary formats.
The whole thing seems to be MS doing the only thing they're good at, waging a PR war, to try to 1) bring focus away from the technical issues being discussed at ISO, and 2) try to hide the groundswell of support for a universal file format.
Re:Clouding the issue - backwards (Score:5, Insightful)
Choice is standards is a negative thing for consumers, which is also something you example with your reference to GSM vs. CDMA. While there are enough differences in the goals of GSM vs CDMA that might technically make a valid case for both standards existing, their wide adoption in different geographical areas represents something of a failure in the standards process to ensure interoperability for the consumer.
So, thank-you for making my point on why we do not want competing standards, only competing implementations.
Re:10 Billion In Revenue - You'd Be Pissed Too (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:They both suck. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're missing the point. You don't replace Word with Lyx, you replace ODF with TeX. Then you would use Word to write TeX files.
It's not a bad idea on the surface; at the very least you would get a typographically powerful document format, instead of the nasty, ass-sucking typographic atrocities that the major office word processors currently produce.
I suspect it would be a nightmare to implement. TeX formats want you to define your document elements logically, ie. this line is a foo, this paragraph is a bar; the styles and rules for foos and bars are defined elsewhere. Although this is similar to HTML+CSS and is appropriate for anything being used systematically by designers, it really is not how people use wysiwyg, and is the opposite to how they've learned to use Word. With Word, very few people follow a methodical approach of predefining styles and using them consistently; instead they just randomly set fonts, sizes, colors, and line spacing until it looks right. Accidentally turned that list element into a giant heading? No problem. Just resize it back to 10pt, fix the line spacing, and turn off the bold. Now it looks just like the rest of the list elements. Nevermind that logically it's still a heading, which will screw up anything that is expecting the document's structure to be meaningful.
A second problem is that TeX and especially LaTeX depend heavily on style files to provide most of the document formatting definitions they use. The portability of a LaTeX document depends on having the prerequisite style files, and since different vendors and versions will have different style files in their distros, and will be tweaking and refining those like crazy to keep ahead of each other, it would lead to the LaTeX equivalent of DLL hell, and perhaps even to attemnpts to lock each other out by putting restrictive copyrights/licensing on the style files. You might get around that with a modified file format that incorporates the style files into the original document, but then you've just lost the proposed advantage of a lean and simple format.
It would be possible to come up with a powerful and easy to use wysiwyg interface for LaTeX (I think Pages could make a good example, since it emphasizes logical document structures) but the real problem we face is that the whole world has learned to create documents in the wrong way with Word, and there's no going back to a rational system.
Re:They both suck. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wake up and smell the 21st century. You burn more CPU cycles per byte encoding and decoding SSH traffic or passing data over a WEP-protected wireless network than you do packing and unpacking a zipfile. And let's not even talk about the processor intensity of JPEGs, PNGs (gotta love that alpha-channel compositing), or -- God forbid -- MP3s.
Besides, gzipping is only one way to compress ODF. The people who deal in high-volume data processing have done plenty of work on binary XML. The fact that ODF is an open standard makes it more or less trivial to write a program that translates tags to 16-bit tokens, which reduces markup overhead to a whopping two Unicode characters per tag, assuming you can devise a set of working conditions where the data overhead of human-readable tags and the processing overhead of gzip translation are both unacceptable.
Face it: storage costs less than a dollar per gigabyte these days, gigabit-per-second data transfer exists at consumer prices, and most people have more processing power on their desktop than existed in the first four generations of supercomputers. The value of bit-squinting has decreased exponentially since the 1950s, and these days it's vanishingly small except under very-high-load conditions.
And ODF's openness makes it friendly to people who find themselves working in very-high-load conditions.
Re:They both suck. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd rather have human readable markup in documents than save a few kilobytes.
Rather than giving stupid analogies, why don't you give a decent reason why this is bad?
You don't get it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Here is how the flag is used today:
1) Open Word95 document containing full-width East Asian characters in Word 2007+
2) On open (import) Word 2007+ sets the "autoSpaceLikeWord95" document property in the new document
3) On display, Word 2007+ displays the document using the special case formatting rules.
4) On Save as OOXML, the document gets saved with the "autoSpaceLikeWord95" flag set
So the problem for non-MS OOXML implementers is: WTF does "autoSpaceLikeWord95" mean? The only way to determine this is to reverse engineer the behavior by studying Microsoft Word 95 in detail. That is completely inappropriate for an open standard.
If MS was sufficiently motivated to produce a true "open" standard they should have translated the "autoSpaceLikeWord95" into a set of document presentation attributes whose meaning does not reference the behavior of any particular implementation. (Something like: autoSpaceLikeWord95 in a Word document translates to "allow 2px of space on either side of the character, except in years evenly divisible by 3, in which case allow 3px.)
Re:IBM or MS who to trust (Score:3, Insightful)
Bullshit. First: ODF is format and M$O2007 is (unreleased) product. Feel the difference.
Second. Guess why StarOffice file format (SXW, tried and proven in real product) spent that much time in OASIS/ISO until finally reaching stamp of approval. You seems to have missed that completely. The main difference between SXW and ODF is support for extensions: SXW is vendor specific XML schema, while ODF does support all kind of extensions on all levels - to be truly vendor neutral and allow proprietary extensions.
M$ intentionally kept silence during ODF development to claim now that ODF can't support all what they need from it. The whole argument that they were silent during ODF since they didn't wanted to intervene with its progress is totally BOGUS. Standardization process isn't place for political games "take and give" - it is place for finding common ground. M$ didn't wanted finding common with rest of industry - and now they try to turn tables around and paint IBM (who raised valid technical point) as bad guys.
Re:They both suck. (Score:3, Insightful)