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 Its yet unpublished format ISO OOXML will not be supported before the release of the next Office generation.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.
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:5, Interesting)
Im not against Microsoft (or any software developer) having their own format, even if its the default format, however, I think that 1) ODF should be left alone (no EEE) if added to a Microsoft product, and 2) that they supply a converter (as lossless as possible) that can convert both ways, from ODF, and to ODF.
Likewise, im glad to hear them admit it, but not as glad as I would be to hear that they are dropping OOXML.
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)
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.
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
Captcha - accuracy. How fitting.
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Even disregarding the fact that most of the world's knowledge is still probably printed out on pieces of paper (in books or otherwise), I'd hardly say that Word documents comprise 80% of our online knowledge.
What about HTML? Does the vast majority of the world-wide-web count for nothing? What about databases? Those certainly aren't in .doc format. PDF files aren't Word formatted either.
And those are just text formats. Lets not even start with things like images, audio and video.
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:5, Funny)
Word format documents probably hold 80% of the world's knowledge.
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: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.
How to Stop Extend Embrace Extingish ? (Score:5, Informative)
- Create open standard that is copyrighted and trademarked
- Create free test suite for open standard
- Predicate free-gratis license to distribute on passing test suite
- Profit! and compatibility all around
For what it's worth, I think this should be used with html, ecmascript, and css. You should only be ALLOWED to implement those standards if you can agree to follow those standards. The Open Group does with UNIX and the Single Unix Specification, but ofcourse, they charge exorbitant fees.Re:How to Stop Extend Embrace Extingish ? (Score:4, Interesting)
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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!
Wish i could see what you see.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:5, Informative)
The keystrokes for common actions used to be short, and for infrequent actions used to be longer -- a standard UI design principle. But in Word 2007?
"Edit | Paste Special" used to be "<alt>ES"; now it's "<alt>HVS" ("V"??? Where did that come from?). "Edit | Find" used to be "<alt>EF", now it's <alt>FDF. "File | Properties" used to be "<alt>FI", now (for all but a couple that I don't use) it's "<alt>FEP"[click "document properties"][click "advanced properties..."]. I can't find any way to get there without the mouse, and I can't find any way to get rid of the properties ribbon without using the mouse, and I don't see the point of needing the two mouse clicks because "advanced properties..." is the only entry under "document properties".
On the other hand, changing the number of columns (which I would always do in a new document template, maybe once every couple of years) is just "<alt>PJ" -- really convenient.
The whole interface is geared to the beginner, who is mousing all over the place. Power users, who usually like to keep their hands on the keyboard, have been abandoned.
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.
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Well, if you only want to cite personal anecdotal evidence, I'll counter your argument by stating that I quite like it.
I didn't intend to offer evidence, I questioned the evidence for the original claim.
Commonly used functions have been moved to the toolbar, rather than buried in menus.
Commonly used functions I used keystrokes for, without having to take my hands off the keyboard, so it didn't matter where they were in the noise at the top of the screen. Stuff that I was likely to have to mouse around for I put onto the toolbar, so the toolbar contained what I needed on it, and nothing else. The ribbon doesn't allow that; I have to work in the way Microsoft dictates.
The toolbars are also based around more of a task-oriented approach, which better suits the habits and mindset of most users.
But with the loss of flexibility for anybody who has to do anything else (for instance, writing technical reports I need to do a lot of cross-references, but they're not on the home page which is supposed to be where the stuff for normal document writing should be).
Most people have never even heard of the functions you described, let alone learned their keystrokes.
I would have thought more people would have done "edit | find" than changed the number of columns in the document or changed the hyphenation settings ("<alt>PH"), but I could be wrong.
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.
So what you mean is that it's only really for writing simple documents now, such as letters and memos, and for writing complex documents we need a different tool. Well, actually I agree with you, but I think my chances of getting my company to standardise on laTeX are slim, so I'm stuck with a tool that is no longer fit for the purpose, MS having abandoned that purpose.
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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 s
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: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.
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No. That's the problem. ODF wont mean squat if it doesn't become the default format. Because no one will bother "Saving As..." to ODF before publishing documents.
Heck, I still receive Word documents as emails. I wont even mention the PowerPoint-as-postcard crap emails I get on a regular basis.
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Partially true, but thats a problem with humans in general, not the format, or its implimentation into a application.
I have no trouble using 'Save As...' and 'Export', but alas I am also not the type to save documents as "New Document (1035).poo", but then again I always have "show extensions" and almost always manually type the *.xxx" on the file name.
If the original is saved accordingly, then modifications should save as that format by default, just new documents would save as *.ext
Plus, if its really tha
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:4, Interesting)
That ODF mirrors OpenOffice.org so closely is no wonder. Before it became the world's "standard" file format, it was simply the storage format of OpenOffice.org. So, it has the same limitations and idiosyncrasies as OpenOffice.org.
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:5, Funny)
however, I think that 1) ODF should be left alone (no EEE)
Hey, I'm using OpenOffice on my Eee PC right now, you insensitive clod!
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: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?
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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: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.
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:4, Interesting)
For some of us, it comes up quite often. As tools get better and more people are online with easy networking, I think collaboration on documents will also become more common and choice of tools to use with a real, open standard becomes more important as well.
Usually I agree (although .doc is better if I'm mining it for data the user didn't know they sent). For the average person, however, this may be a different story for a number of reasons. First, the most popular PDF reader (Adobe's) is horribly slow and bloated in tis default configuration and most users don't know of better option or how to use it. Most users are not even capable of copying and pasting text from it into something else. Combine this with PDFs on the Web using IE+WinXP+Adobe's plugin and you have a terrible experience for the average person reading PDFs from the Web. This leads a lot of people to avoid the format altogether and .doc is the next closest thing the average person has seen for communications of that sort.
Google docs is fairly new and is still a bit lacking in features for many people. It is also not really an option for a lot of internal communications in a work environment. I do think collaborative editing will move to ODF unless MS manages to upset things.
Change tracking ? (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess you mean change tracking... it's fun when some government types fall for it, but for the sender it's a disadvantage or even a security risk.
Also, I think it is not very user-friendly if you want to track multiple revisions. The display gets really cluttered tying to display three or four different versions. Overall, I think it is a poor substitute for a version control system.
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Not if this guy [slashdot.org] is telling the truth. I have no reason to think he'd be lying, either.
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:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:5, Funny)
So, it can be the default, it's just not the default for it to be the default?
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That's correct.
er... I mean...
default.
Re:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:5, Funny)
And we know Office will render/produce ODF just as well as IE 6 renders standards compliant HTML.
The ODF version of this comment is best opened with Microsoft Office 2007 or higher.
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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:The end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.betanews.com/article/Next_Office_2007_service_pack_will_include_ODF_PDF_support_options/1211343807 [betanews.com]
There will be an option in both the installer and options menu to choose ODF as the default format, if you want.
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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.
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Ice-capades grand opening in hell marred by dive-bombing pigs.
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'?
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Does it need to be anything more? Do you want a cake?
How about we just accept it for the victory it is and move on to the next battle.
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:That's It???! (Score:5, Funny)
"The cake is a lie."
"Beware of Greeks bearing gifts."
Re:That's It???! (Score:5, Funny)
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Let me correct that for you: "Beware of Geeks bearing gifts."
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"Very well! Give him cake!"
"Oh, thanks very much. It's very nice!"
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What are you trying to say?
Is the next version of Office going to flood a user's room with a deadly neurotoxin for using ODFs? That'll certainly be one way to dampen uptake of the format. Shit MS is clever aren't they! I'm making a note here, huge success.
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Well if they are professional about it. They will not let get their emotions in the way, and realize that they loss. They are not admiting that ODF is better OOXML just that they won the standards war. When you loose you can either cry fowel fight to the bitter end and possibly hurt yourself more then you gain (think SCO) or just go Damn they won. Well I guess we better comply, and at lest show some grace. (And perhaps easing some pressure from the Anti-Trust people by saying "see we loose too, and we are g
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.
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:That's It???! (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, yes. But that's just what they say in public. In private they're probably saying, "oh shit, we were way too obvious and public about our criminal behavior and the EU looks ready to stomp on us hard for this one. Maybe if we pretend to roll over and pretend to support ODF for a while, the EU will not make this a priority and use the courts to force us to play nice, with real consequences and oversight. At least if we look like we're willing to be open, we can subtly break compatibility with others and try to extend it with proprietary DRM or something. Really anything that stops us from being declared to have monopoly influence in the office suite market and doesn't make us compete purely on our software's merits is workable."
Re:That's It???! (Score:4, Interesting)
The EU did not go far enough. The media player software market is still pretty destroyed. Can you really argue that if WMA was not bundled into Windows it would even be used by anyone? You're right that the particular remedy they tried was stupid, but wrong about the direction. OEMs should be choosing which media player to include, be it WMP, iTunes, Realplayer, or Mplayer. MS should not be able to force everyone to have WMP, just because they have a monopoly on desktop OS's. The market would be much better for al of us, if OEMs were able to pick the one they think would be best for their users, without having to deal with MS's illegal incentives.
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For many other areas, Microsoft can effectively buy market share by throwing money at it. But this is an explicit standards war: you either win or lose, you can't hang on to ten percent and hope to claw your way back. The ISO standardisation process can be corrupted, as we've seen, but I think even Microsoft can't halt or reverse the standardisation process.
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This reminds me of Internet Explorer.
Microsoft worked hard to create the best browser at the time, and then when it was clear they had won, they took most of the developers off the project and let IE rot for several years. Internet Explorer went from being a top priority to being mostly ignored.
Why did Microsoft fight to completely own the browser market if they weren't planning to do anything with it? They could have made things much more difficult for their competitors if they had put the slightest bit of
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.
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, this is the "embrace"-part... (Score:5, Insightful)
... wait for the next phase!
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Are you guys a bit too paranoid?
Fight Microsoft, We Win!, We won it must be part of Microsofts plan lets rechange everything we fought for.
I am not sure if you have noticed it or not but Microsoft is no longer the powerhouse it use to be. It is still a big company that is not to be taken for granted. However the general population is tech savy enough to not deal with that behavior. Lets take the browser war of the 90s microsoft won. However they spent all this money and didn't get what they wanted. Active
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There is an old saying: "Once lied, never be trusted again".
Microsoft now gets bitten by that.
Re:Ok, this is the "embrace"-part... (Score:4, Funny)
*cry*
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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"
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Well the question is, when Microsoft embraces you, are you facing forward or backward?
dave
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:Consumer vs Professional (Score:4, Informative)
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They didn't have an excuse at the time, either, which is why the courts convicted them of antitrust abuse for doing it.
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The courts did not convict MS of anti-trust abuse over Java. Sun sued them for breach of the terms of their licence (they included their own proprietary classes in the java.* hierarchy instead of putting them in e.g. com.microsoft.*) and won.
Apart from that you're right, MS licenced the source from Sun. I don't recall it being particularly buggy at the time either, although obviously as soon as the court case happened they dropped support for it.
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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.
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I agree J++ was a really bad idea. I've seen podcasts where internal MS VS team people admit that J++ sucked. In a way you can kind of understand what caused the fiasco though. Java was the next big thing, the .com bubble was in full swing and java was marketed as THE web programming language. So MS needed a
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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 subje
Did I read that right? (Score:2)
Its yet unpublished format ISO OOXML will not be supported before the release of the next Office generation.
Microsoft doesn't even support the format they've been bribing through the certification process? Wouldn't you think they'd want all their products supporting that standard before embarking on such an ambitious process? Talk about Ready, Fire, Aim.
After a while one comes to expect that MS is more chainsaw than timber but this effort seems even less organized than usual.
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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".
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.
Can we not see straight even here??? (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting that anyone should choose to phrase it that way, since it was already an open question (ISO had missed the deadline, by a lot, with no explanation, and no announcement as to when the standard could be expected) before the appeal, probably because it was and is such a massive mess that they were overwhelmed by the task.
April FOOLS! (Score:2)
Hahahahaha!
Oh, it's June? Crap, and now fire is falling from the sky. I guess this is the apocalypse.
Let's not get too excited! (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, this is the first shoe to drop. (Sorry British Columbia, no offense)
The is the "embrace" part. Once they start using the format, just you watch, like Java, HTML, CSS, SQL, C++, C, etc. they will add features that break compatibility, because of, wait for it, "customer demand." As we all know "customer demand" will be asking a room full of carefully collected idiots a set of loaded questions.
I have worked closely, in the past, with Microsoft and they view any real standard as a threat. They wield their monopoly power and "defaco" status like a sledge hammer. They've done it in the past, and they'll do it with ODF.
The computing community has to monitor the situation and fight incompatibility as the run of the mill consumer has absolutely no idea what is going on.
I was in this session... (Score:5, Informative)
And in fact asked the question "Is this just Microsoft doing the first stage of embrace, extend, extinguish?" I was not happy with his response. He floated the idea of merging the two standards, which really concerns me, and also seemed to acknowledge that there was going to be some extension.
From the impression I got, we got thrown a bone, and ODF and OOXML are going to be merged in the next couple of years, and MS will have de facto control because OOXML allows for proprietary extensions.
MS is not going to take this lying down.
I did shake Stuart's hand afterwards, however. He deserves props for showing up and taking a little abuse, although I was not near as hard on him as I would have liked to be, just because other people also deserved a chance to ask questions.
One thing that struck me is that one of the Singapore standards guys was there, and he was NOT happy. He was pretty pissed off that they could not provide even one reference implementation.
But... like I said. Props for showing up, MS. Now you just have many years of monopolistic behavior to live down, and I'll never trust anything you say again.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
From the impression I got, we got thrown a bone, and ODF and OOXML are going to be merged in the next couple of years, and MS will have de facto control because OOXML allows for proprietary extensions.
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 [
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: (Score:2)
First Hillary saying she would gladly support Obama as the Democratic Party nominee. The only things missing are "Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!"
Re: (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 dec
ODF Compatibility test utility (Score:5, Interesting)
We are in a very important phase. We (someone) needs to create an ODF compatibility test utility, like an HTML validator, that will test the compliance of an ODF file.
It can be used to catch Microsoft's crap. Remember, a word processing document is unlike HTML. HTML is likely to be seen by a multitude of people where as a document is probably only going to be seen by a specifically targeted group. Microsoft will be able to add incompatibility and almost no one will be able to notice until they wish to open THEIR document with a non-microsoft word processor or spread sheet. At that point it will be too late.
We also have to make sure that Microsoft's products render ODF compliant documents correctly when they are created by non microsoft applications.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe we can add an extension to "Google Desktop" that will test ODF files when they are indexed and warn users that their applications are producing broken documents.
Re:ODF Compatibility test utility (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
i.e. what we need is an Acid Test for ODF.
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.
Something seems fishy (Score:2, Interesting)
OOXML Porn:Microsoft&Novell-Two Companies,One (Score:2)
The only thing that makes the two companies actions even more perverted is that the number of Microsoft and Novell advocates/astroturfers who were "wacking off" while watching it unfold.
Microsoft is not stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
Just possibly, Microsoft is sincere about supporting ODF.
Microsoft cannot possibly be ignoring Apple, Google, the EU, the emergence in the last year of mainstream desktop linux and the $400 laptop, the OLPC, the mixed press that accompanied Vista and Office 2007, the bad press received by Windows mobile and the Zune, etc. It is a company that will go through major changes in the next few years. Ballmer is the boss, but probably not for long. Ray Ozzie is CTO and he and a host of managers below him will ultimately be rewarded for figuring out how to succeed in this new world where Microsoft has lost a lot of its market dominance and even more of its mindshare.
If I were at Microsoft I'd be figuring that hardcore corporate MS shops are going to stay MS shops for the forseeable future whether I support ODF or not (they've probably built their business around Exchange server). The fringe --- governments, small business, K-12 schools, universities --- are gone in the next two years unless I start to interoperate in a serious way. So I would support ODF, and I would do it sincerely, and I would figure that by doing so I'd be holding on to some of my customers in the short run. In the long run, well, everything is up for grabs. I'd be better be doing some heavy R&D in the hopes of competing with Apple, Google, and the linux community.
What war?!? (Score:2, Insightful)
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).
Finally! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:yay (Score:4, Funny)
You obviously used OOXML to post your comment.