Microsoft Spokesman Says ODF "Clearly Won" Standard War 289
Elektroschock writes "At a Red Hat retrospective panel on the ODF vs. OOXML struggle panel, a Microsoft representative, Stuart McKee, admitted that ODF had 'clearly won.' The Redmond company is going to add native support of ODF 1.1 with its Office 2007 service pack 2. Its yet unpublished format ISO OOXML will not be supported before the release of the next Office generation. Whether or not OOXML ever gets published is an open question after four national bodies appealed the ISO decision."
The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, no, this is not the end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft. I guarantee that ODF will not be the default format and that Microsoft's implementation of ODF will clearly be some variation of 'embrace, extend, extinguish,' just like everything else they do.
Still, it feels good to hear a Microsoft employee admit that OOXML lost.
That's It???! (Score:4, Insightful)
So after all of the time and money and arm twisting MS engaged in because they had to have THE open standard, they're just going to say 'Oh well, ODF was better anyway'?
Wait and See (Score:5, Insightful)
Now we shall all have to wait and see if MS plays nice with ODF because they are scared of the EU, or if they try to extend and break the standard to prevent true interoperability, as they have done with HTML, CSS, etc. since being late to the Web standards game.
Ok, this is the "embrace"-part... (Score:5, Insightful)
... wait for the next phase!
Consumer vs Professional (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is whether Microsoft is going to really support ODF or just give lip-service token support. For example, how fast are bugs in the ODF support going to be fixed? Remember how Micorsoft "supported" Java with their non-compliant, buggy implementation?
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it doesn't mean that Microsoft will make ODF the default format. It does mean, however, that I could send an Office 2007 user an ODF document that I made with OpenOffice.org and they would be able to open it. They, in turn, could save their file as ODF and send it over to me if I ask for all documents to be sent in ODF format. This represents a serious hole in the "must send everything DOC to ensure compatibility"* lock-in.
* Yes, I know that DOC had troubles across Office versions, but still sending DOC was your best bet if you wanted the party at the other end to be able to open and edit the document you were sending.
Re:That's It???! (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the lengths they went to, first to fight the very notion of an open standard format, and then to push OOXML, it seems hard to believe that this is over.
I'm as happy as anyone else if it is, but it's very unlike MS. To my knowledge, this has happened only once before, with HTML, and we're still paying for the fallout of that one.
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
And render correctly, just like if you created a W3C-compliant HTML 4 document with a W3C-compliant CSS style sheet that displays correctly in every other browser other than IE, right?
It's A Trap People (Score:2, Insightful)
Hello, it's a trap people, not a sudden outbreak of commonsense. M$ is doing this to embrace, then to extend by adding all sorts of proprietary shit, and finally extinguishing it by eliminating that and going to their proprietary office closed XML format. Once done, ODF will be anchient history and M$ will reign once again.
--
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, sure but this isn't just any software developer. Word format documents probably hold 80% of the world's knowledge. Including tons of publicly funded stuff - eg laws, research, etc.
So its important that this stuff be readable in the future and able to be shared.
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I know that DOC had troubles across Office versions, but still sending DOC was your best bet if you wanted the party at the other end to be able to open and edit the document you were sending.
Your statement, taken as a whole is correct. I just don't believe the last part "and edit the document you were sending" comes up very often. I can't think of one time I've been sent a document that someone wanted me to edit during the whole 18 years I've had internet access. 99.99% of the time I get documents someone wants me to review, but not edit in any way. In those cases I'd much rather get a PDF.
If it's a collaborative editing situation, I'd rather use something like Google docs (and have).
The bigger deal for a single document format is really just archival purposes. I want to be able to save a document today, and open the same document in 10 years with totally different software, on a completely different OS and computer. You're not really even guaranteed of doing that TODAY with .doc.
Perhaps Microsoft is disorganized (Score:4, Insightful)
It certainly is a mystery why Microsoft would spend all the money and accept all the bad publicity with their effort to bribe everyone in the world to mark MSWordXML as a standard, and then just drop it right after they "won". With one press release they have killed their format dead, and thus they have cancelled every bit of the bribes, FUD, and the expense of a chunk of their remaining karma, so that they have lost everything.
Why the hell do all that work to end up in exactly same position they would be if they had just accepted ODF?
I don't think it's possible this is some nefarious complex scheme by Microsoft. It seems to indicate that this giant organization is losing control of itself. Somehow the FUD & bribery machine was started up, and probably immediately some engineers there started saying "whoa! whoa! It's not necessary!" and they were unable to stop the machine, which has it's own enormous momentum, until millions are spent and the company loses a good chunk of it's remaining karma.
Re:Did I read that right? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wouldn't you think they'd want all their products supporting that standard before embarking on such an ambitious process?
Yes, that would have been smart, but Microsoft is a company with thousands of people who don't always agree.
It really reinforces an idea I've had for a while not that there's currently a large culture war going on at Microsoft. The battle is between the old thinking "lock em in and control it!" vs "we need to adapt to standards or become extinct".
Re:That's It???! (Score:4, Insightful)
There's nothing graceful about this. We know the history here; embrace... extend... extinguish.
I guarantee you that within five years, Microsoft will have its own variant version of ODF with unpublished extensions which will force guys like OO.org and KOffice to once again reverse engineer to maintain compatibility.
standard business tactics (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, they will support ODF. It's too big a thing to ignore.
Also of course, their implementation will have a few... quirks. You know, implementation bugs that happen symmetrical on both import and export, so they never show up to you, as long as you stay within the MS world. Meanwhile, everything someone with a different ODF implementation sends you will show up buggy, and everything you send them will not quite properly work.
Details, of course. Like footnotes misaligned, or small formation differences. Just enough that nobody calls it bugs, just "quirks", but enough to make sure nobody within a corporation, for example, uses something different.
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, in the session McKee said it will have an option to make ODF the default format. You just have to tell it to.
Re:ODF Compatibility test utility (Score:5, Insightful)
a). A Reference implementation conforming 100% to ODF 1.1 . Open source, freely reusable.
b). Requirement for any conforming implementation which wishes to be known as ISO ODF to be certified to pass a standard test suite.
c). Any "extensions" introduced after MS does the "embrace" to be by some standard mechanism which enables other implementations to quickly adapt to it.
Since (c) is practically a given where MS is concerned I'm most worried about that one.
Andy
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
your getting ahead of yourself. First it is Embrace.
What is MSFT doing right now? Embracing ODF, next comes a slow extension of ODF to make it MSFT only.
1) Embrace --- MSFT is doing this part now
2) Extend -- wait about a year for this to start happening
3) Extinguish --- OOXML rulez. in about 2010 or when the next version of Office Ships.
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, I know that DOC had troubles across Office versions, but still sending DOC was your best bet if you wanted the party at the other end to be able to open and edit the document you were sending.
Well, depends. In my experience .rtf worked better in most cases (actually one of the few decent formats that creeped out of Redmond) and if you have a more complex document at hand .tex is still your friend.
(And exchanging .doc-files between different Office version from a Mac to a MSWindows machine can make you cry.)
Re:Ok, this is the "embrace"-part... (Score:3, Insightful)
One year later, OpenOffice has both an option to save ODF, and an option to save "ODF -with hacks to make it look right in Office"
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:4, Insightful)
An alternative step #3 may yet be possible (bear with my mild optimism - it is Friday, after all):
#3: Quietly give up on OOXML but claim to have invented ODF, just like they created DHCP.
Re:Consumer vs Professional (Score:3, Insightful)
It's my understanding that Sun has patents that cover a lot of the OpenDocument Format. They have signed a covenant promising not to sue for use of those patents so long as they implement the specification as sun helped to outline. If Microsoft tries to extend the specification, they may find themselves subject to patent lawsuits.
I think a bigger concern might be a poor implementation of the same specification. They could easily argue that they're within the patent covenant, while giving the consumer a poor impression of ODF.
Re:Consumer vs Professional (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Ok, this is the "embrace"-part... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well the question is, when Microsoft embraces you, are you facing forward or backward?
dave
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:3, Insightful)
What war?!? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
Word format documents probably hold 80% of the world's knowledge.
You have got to be kidding. I don't pretend to know what percentage of the world's knowledge is in .doc format, but I'd be amazed if you weren't at least an order of magnitude out.
Just think of all the knowledge that is in text fields in databases, on web sites in HTML, in PDFs (extremely popular especially online, even MS offer documents in PDF), and of course *printed out on paper*.
80% of the world's knowledge in .doc? Rubbish.
Possibly the real deal. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm as jaded about MS as the next person, and always watch carefully where their interests lie before trying to second guess them.
This time, I think they may be serious about full ODF support. Without the 'extend' section.
The reason I think this is that they're no longer pitching to a set of businesses that can do what the hell they feel like, and ignore the rest of the world.
They're now having to play ball with governments. And many governments have been bitten by the 'changing of the format' game in word, where they can't read older documents anymore, thus the rising insistence on being able to reliably and moreover accurately save in a known, documented open way that anyone in 50 years time will be able to build a reader for from the well documented specification if there isn't one available.
If they're to sell to government (a lot of money is at stake here; they need to at least be in the market. If a government can't buy word, quite a few businesses would invest in alternate word processor software to maintain compliance with government and ensure they can pass documents around reliably), they have to abide by the full letter of the spec, and not break it. Governments can be quite uppity when you take liberties with their internal workings.
That doesn't mean that ODF will supplant OOXML in all places though, as I daresay there are things that can be saved in that format that ODF doesn't support. They're just few and far between. But you can guarantee the suits in the businesses will just hear the "Our format does more", and "You can easily make prettier presentations with our software", and the MS suite will still be sold.
They'll still have lock in to a level with business (who are far more prone to using the 'shiny' parts of software that are just toys, but require the 'extended format' of OOXML), plus the momentum they have there isn't going to go away anytime soon (IT departments not wanting to support more than one vendor of software for cost reasons).
For purely monetary reasons, I can see the benefit in them toeing the line on a standard. Which is why I think they'll do it and leave it alone (and then use the standard smoke and mirrors to try and get everyone, apart from Governments who insist on it, to completely ignore it).
I use both OOO and Office 2007, and honestly, getting full ODF compliance in Word would only make me more likely to use it more often (I currently only use it when I want to make some pretty things very quickly; all the real work is done in OOO).
Re:I was in this session... (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, in abstract, I don't think this is all bad. If you ask me, companies like Microsoft and Apple (and anyone else making office suites) should be involved in making ODF v2. If it's really going to be the common, standard interchange format for office suites, everyone should have input.
Because I could see someone writing an office suite and saying, "Standards are good and all, but ODF doesn't do what we need it to do. It's too bulky, but doesn't allow us to support [feature X], doesn't support [feature Y] in a way that allows us to get good performance, and [feature Z] makes it too difficult for us to develop a good converter." (or whatever. I don't know what valid complaints someone might have about ODF) And ideally, all those people would have a place at the table to talk about making ODF better, so that no one has any reason not to support ODF.
Of course, the only real problem here is that we don't trust Microsoft to work well within the system in order to develop improvements that will remain free. I still hold out some hope that one of these days, Microsoft will get the idea that they shouldn't be sabotaging technological progress by keeping a strangle-hold on computing, but I share your distrust.
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:3, Insightful)
Reference rendering...
What we need is a w3c site, like validator (validator.w3.org), but one which processes a given page and renders it according to standards, and produces an image of it.
Re:That's It???! (Score:4, Insightful)
ODF documents should be checkable, and compliant applications should have the opportunity to flag errors on the format.
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a way around this.
IE6 was horrible, slow, insecure, and rendered HTML poorly.
Once Firefox got good enough for general consumption, many web developers stopped putting up with IE, and coded their sites to be mostly-standards compliant.
Users switched to Firefox to gain access to the cutting edge features, and found that it was easy to use, offered a few simple innovative features (tabs), and to be an overall improvement over IE.
In response, IE7 was vastly improved, and is seen as being reasonably on-par with Firefox in terms of supporting the "important" standards properly. There's still a ton of room for improvement, but the days of designing sites specifically around IE are over. The EEE cycle was broken.
Office, on the other hand, has the distinction of actually being better than anything else out there. Its decently fast, offers the features that people care about, and has an interface that most find familiar and easy to use (once they got used to it, people also quite liked the 2007 interface).
OOo, on the other hand stinks. Its slow, ugly, not terribly easy to use, and offers virtually nothing in the way of improvements or new & useful features. It's not quite as bad as early versions of The GIMP, but isn't much better. Apart from the price, there's very little reason for users to switch.
Apple's iWork does do many of these things, but isn't a fantastic candidate due to its platform dependence. Cost is also an issue, though at a fraction of the cost of Office, it remains fairly competitive.
Make an office suite that can legitimately compete with Microsoft, and the EEE cycle will have break in order for Microsoft to maintain their market share. It doesn't have to be Oo.o, and I honestly doubt that they will ever turn out a product that can compete with Microsoft. That doesn't mean that others can't, however!
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:2, Insightful)
Does ODF support commenting and tracked changed?
I read somewhere it doesn't, and don't feel like checking.
If features such as those are not supported, then it makes sense for the default to be the feature rich format, with the opportunity to archive the final copy in ODF.
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:3, Insightful)
Too bad they didn't mention giving a patch to Office 2003, since 2007 is utterly unusable, distracting and the Ribbon interface needs a seriously large monitor not to completely destroy screen real estate.
I wish MSFT would give a "Ribbon off/Classic Mode" switch. Its horrible. Its so bad there is software to douche out Ribbon:
http://www.addintools.com/english/menuoffice/ [addintools.com]
We really, really shouldn't need crap like this, MSFT.
Re:ODF Compatibility test utility (Score:3, Insightful)
i.e. what we need is an Acid Test for ODF.
Re:Perhaps Microsoft is disorganized (Score:3, Insightful)
They thought they could win and they did.
They couldn't see in advance that the market would route around that victory.
Now they go to the next step, infiltrating the open committees with apparently neutral people that they own to poison the open source movement directly.
And they don't see that the market will route around that too. Word processing is not... well, it's not rocket science. These days it is a very well defined set of business rules and any group of 100 motivated people can probably turn a decent word processor out.
The days of their selling word processors for $578 are probably done and in 10 years, they probably go for $100 ($50 in today's dollars).
And, if it resists being corrupted, openoffice will just continue to get better through the next 10 years until anyone with any brains will ask "Why are we spending $100 a copy when we can download OO for free?"
Just like $150 oil, the solution comes from the problem. (The longer we are at $150-- the longer we will be at $60 oil when that price collapses). If Word had been $75, no one would have bothered to write a replacement for it.
Wish i could see what you see.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Consumer vs Professional (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft does not need an excuse to write a buggy ODF implementation, they already have a reason why it would be in their interest to do so.
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if you only want to cite personal anecdotal evidence, I'll counter your argument by stating that I quite like it.
Commonly used functions have been moved to the toolbar, rather than buried in menus. The toolbars are also based around more of a task-oriented approach, which better suits the habits and mindset of most users. (The contents of the Format -> Cell window in Excel being the most egregious example).
Most people have never even heard of the functions you described, let alone learned their keystrokes. Those features aren't terribly high up on Microsoft's list of priorities. If you took the time to learn the keyboard shortcut to the obscure document properties dialog, odds are that you're perfectly capable of learning the new ones, or to assign a custom keystroke with the old combination (virtually everything in office can be assigned a custom keystroke).
I hate to say it, but users like yourself make up an infinitesimally small fraction of total users. A company needs to market/design their products for the masses, not the outliers.
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with most of your post.
After repeatedly trying OOO, saying "this sucks" and going back to word, I can't agree with you that it stinks.
As of the recent release, I not only finally successfully transfered to it, but within a month, I was suffering in Word because it was illogical and missing features I'd gotten used to (that quickly) in open office.
I think the most recent word (which will be forced down my throat at work shortly) gave up some backwards compatability of interface and addressed some of those illogical areas (Why do I go to the File menu to FORMAT my page/margins???).
The OOo method for formatting pictures ("real-time preview of what your formatting is doing) is superior to the "try a blind stab until you get it right.. not really integrated formatting) in word.
Plus, Office has no equivalent for Draw which as an old Coreldraw hound, I love (it's still primative and can't paste objects on a curve but I'm sure that will be addressed).
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you actually tried any of those shortcuts you say don't work anymore? ES still brings up paste special. EF still brings up find. They specifically left in most of the existing combinations so any you had memorized will still work. Yes, there are new ones too which match the organization in the ribbon more closely, but if you want to use ES... go ahead. It works.
The new interface was geared toward the beginner which represents a large portion of the market. At the same time they did stuff so as not to slow down the power users (like leaving in existing key combinations). I agree it's not perfect and I personally liked the old UI better. They're trying to walk that line between supporting a huge user base and not slowing down the people who know what they're doing. That's not always an easy task.
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:4, Insightful)
OO.o has done everything that I've needed it to do, which is all that I can ask from any office suite. I concur that OO.o doesn't have as many features as MSOffice, but what OO.o does it seems to do fairly well, IMO. You never mentioned what is so bad about the OO.o interface/feature set (and what is so good about the MSOffice one)
You seem to forget that if not for OO.o, most people would be forced to buy Msoffice if they wanted to get anything done at all. OO.o bridges the gap between truly crappy software like MS Wordpad (i.e. nothing) and a full-fledged office suite like MSoffice. It gives people another alternative, which is never a bad thing.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)