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29 Comments
- astmanager, on 10/11/2007, -2/+45Per the usual, Microsoft is engaging in shady dealing and collusion in order to forward its own agenda. Not that this sort of corruption is unique to Microsoft by any means, but it is typical of large corporations who have reached the point where they lack the agility to compete on a technical level and therefore must do so on the playing-field of bought influence and barriers to entry.
- chowmeined, on 10/11/2007, -3/+28OOXML is not an open standard. It is an XML representation of Microsoft's proprietary data structures used in their line of office software. It is only designed to match the feature set of MS Office and nothing else. It ignores the pre-existing ISO standards for dates/times, mathematical formula as well as using poor XML design practices.
If Microsoft truly intended to use an open format for their office software they would have joined the committee for the ODF standard and proposed the features they needed to be added to the specification. Instead, they are trying to trick people looking for open standards that their OOXML is an open format. Even if the specification is open for use, and that it would be under the control of an independent organization (required for ISO standardization), you can bet that Microsoft will deviate from the standard as soon as possible once they hold the majority of market share, convincing users that the other software is 'broken'.
ODF isn't perfect, but it is much closer to what is needed. It uses common standards that are already supported and provides a vendor neutral specification for generating generic, compatible, documents. - thorndike, on 10/11/2007, -1/+22Tehsnappy, I dug you down because if MS was truly interested in offering an open format they wouldn't have to resort to such childish actions. Here in the U.S. we have seen the Republicans resort to such childish actions as turning out the lights and microphones on their opposition. It is amazing what people/organizations will do to maintain their grasp on power instead of competing openly and fairly.
- migla, on 10/11/2007, -1/+9I think the shady thing was considered to be the fact that "the person who is head of the ISO technical committee about to vote on Microsoft’s Ecma-376 wouldn’t let IBM and Sun representatives in, claiming there was no room!", not that MS is opening their file formats.
- generalloy, on 10/11/2007, -1/+8First of all Brian Jones works for MS and is paid to do PR for OOXML everyday. Secondly, Miguel (bless his heart) effectively is paid for by MS these days, and it is even more iffy since MS gave 400 million to Novell for the November patent deal, and much more money in other transactions in settling with the Novell (and other companies like Real, CCIA, etc) in their complaint to the European Commission. Only the FSF Europe is party to the Commission v. Microsoft lawsuits these days. So of course a Novell employee will help out their buddy who gave them lots of money in return for dropping an antitrust complaint. We don't know what secret obligations these contracts have, and can only assume that denigrating the European Commission is one of them. And make no mistake, the patent deal around the GPL is a way to denigrate the EC and free software.
Thirdly, Rob Weir debunks the debunkers around the ODF formula: http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/07/formula-for-failure.html
"As I've shown, in the rush to write a 6,000 page standard in less than a year, Ecma dropped the ball. OOXML's spreadsheet formula is worse than missing. It has incorrect formulas that, if implemented according to this standard, would raise important health, safety and environmental concerns, aside from the obvious financial risks of a spreadsheet that calculates incorrect results. This standard is seriously messed up. Shame on all those who praised and continue to praise the OOXML formula specification without actually reading it."
When OOXML can be fully implemented outside of Windows and outside of an IP license from MIcrosoft, that'll be the day. Unfortunately, MS has a habit of embrace/extend/extinguish and changing file formats every release[1]. In the end, OOXML is not even close to a standard, which is why it would originally have been voted down 6-1 by INCITS had MS not bought their way into the committees with puppet companies.
[1] http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/06/file-format-timeline.html - generalloy, on 10/11/2007, -1/+7Additionally, the proposed ODF 1.2 has a formula, just like they added accessibility into ODF 1.1 when the Massachusetts kerfuffle was going on (which Microsoft still has not added to OOXML). You see, unlike OOXML, ODF was designed and implemented by multiple vendors for the benefit of users. MS was invited, but chose not to contribute (this is a standard tactic of MSFT's in standards body -- join a body in discussion of a standard, take their ideas, and then either make your own embraced/extended version into Windowsm or take their ideas and propose a royalty-stricken standard to another body a la VC-1, or threaten the standard bodies with patents a la OpenGL). Try implementing VML, WMF, or DirectX which OOXML "references" on other platforms as well. This is why all such translators are a joke.
http://www.fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-questions.da.html
Six questions to national standardisation bodies
"#
Application independence?
No standard should ever depend on a certain operating system, environment or application. Application and implementation independence is one of the most important properties of all standards.
Is the MS-OOXML specification free from any references to particular products of any vendor and their specific behaviour?
#
Supporting pre-existing Open Standards?
Whenever applicable and possible, standards should build upon previous standardisation efforts and not depend on proprietary, vendor-specific technologies.
MS-OOXML neglects various standards, such as MathML and SVG, which are recommendations by the W3C, and uses its own vendor-specific formats instead. This puts a substantial burden on all vendors to follow Microsoft in its proprietary infrastructure built over the past 20 years in order to fully implement MS-OOXML. It seems questionable how any third party could ever implement them equally well.
What is the benefit of accepting usage of such vendor-specific formats at the expense of standardisation in these areas? Where will other vendors get competitive, compatible and complete implementations for all platforms to avoid prohibitively large investments?
#
Backward compatibility for all vendors?
One of the alledged main advantages of MS-OOXML is its ability to allow for backward compatibility, as also referenced in the ECMA International press release.
For any standard it is essential that it is implementable by any third party without necessity of cooperation by another company, additional restricted information or legal agreements or indemnifications. It is also essential to not require the cooperation of any competitor to achieve full and comparable interoperability.
On the grounds of the existing MS-OOXML specification, can any third party regardless of business model, without access to additional information and without the cooperation of Microsoft implement full backward compatibility and conversion of such legacy documents into MS-OOXML comparable to what Microsoft can offer?
#
Proprietary extensions?
Proprietary, application-specific extensions are a known technique employed in particular by Microsoft to abuse and leverage its desktop monopoly into neighboring markets. It is a technique at the heart of the abusive behaviour that was at the core of the decision against Microsoft by the European Commission in 2004 and Microsoft is until today continuing its refusal to release the necessary interoperability information.
For this reason, it is common understanding that Open Standards should not allow such proprietary extensions, and that such market-distorting techniques should not be possible on the grounds of an Open Standard.
Does MS-OOXML allow proprietary extensions? Is Microsoft's implementation of MS-OOXML faithful, i.e. without undocumented extensions? Are there safeguards against such abusive behaviour?
#
Dual standards?
The goal of all standardisation is always to come to one single standard, as multiple standards always provide an impediment to competition. Seeming competition on the standard is truly a strategic measure to gain control over certain segments of a market, as various examples in the past have demonstrated.
There is an existing Open Standard for office documents, namely the Open Document Format (ODF) (ISO/IEC 26300:2006). Both MS-OOXML and ODF are built upon XML technology, so employ the same base technology and thus ultimately have the same theoretical capabilities. Microsoft itself is a member of OASIS, the organisation in which the ODF standard was developed and is being maintained. It was aware of the process and invited to participate.
Why did and does Microsoft refuse to participate in the existing standardisation effort? Why does it not submit its technological proposals to OASIS for inclusion into ODF?
#
Legally safe?" - stalefries, on 10/11/2007, -2/+7Nice on schestowitz, submit your own blog.
- fantasticFlan, on 10/11/2007, -1/+5I love how people complain about bad things more than good.
- fugazi, on 10/11/2007, -4/+7When you can do more with Office 2007 faster than you can with Open Office cost efficiency tends to be more on microsofts side.
- generalloy, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3You could use it in MS Office, too (With a plugin). Or Abiword/GNUmeric, KOffice, etc.
- Darth_tater, on 10/11/2007, -5/+7not to mention the office 07 'ribbon' interface is fricking awesome.
//yes i know its either a love or hate thing with the 'ribbon' but still, its pretty cool - 4eloBek, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2corrupted... and where is the sith lord is hiding?
- corteze, on 10/11/2007, -5/+7*****.doc
- Urusai, on 10/11/2007, -3/+4Since when has management made decisions on a rational basis like "cost efficiency"? No, they always make the "safe" decision that won't get them fired. As a consultant many years ago, customers who knew nothing about anything would require me to use Visual Basic because it was the "standard" for crappy software. Well, they got their crappy software.
- Kahlnen, on 10/11/2007, -4/+5Yay for Open Source!
- TetchyTony, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1ISO really needs to review its 'governance' principles, for typical abuses. 'Off topic' but any country proposing a new Technical Committee automatically gets the chairmanship AND the secretariat. I had initial success (different ISO sector) in lobbying big non-aligned countries on votes that needed neutrality, but their reps were soon subverted by meetings hosted in 'attractive' countries (reps mostly get travel expenses paid). Plus most voting countries don't know or care about any given topic, and just paper-vote 'yes' to anything that goes round, because that's easier than justifying a 'no' and having it embarrassingly deconstructed by people who are better at English..
- iamlutheran, on 10/11/2007, -6/+7Go to Hell, Microsoft.
- Aero347, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0Steve Balmer is playing with the dancing paper clips on his desk asking which kind should go into Office 2010.
When hes not playing with dancing paper clips he's marketing dancing paper clips to foreign countries. - SVPirate, on 10/11/2007, -2/+2Microsoft have been beat up constantly for not sticking to 'standards', so now they are trying to engineer the 'standards' to fit them instead? Oh I am so surprised...
- xspinkickx, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1actually in this case its *****.docx
- Aero347, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0yes to fit them, and not their competition
- LordSlashstab, on 10/11/2007, -7/+5first the patent pending for embedded advertisments and now this! I may never click another Msoft update again., err enabling system restore now!
- Aero347, on 10/11/2007, -10/+5"There was no room left in the room for reps from IBM and Sun to get in and vote."
I'd really love to see how that passes in the states. Their format won't matter when no one buys Office 2007+ and opt for Open Office for sheer cost efficiency. - cryptoki, on 02/01/2008, -8/+2good point tehsnappy... seriously....
- ElbridgeGerry, on 10/11/2007, -10/+4See this? THIS is why I want OS X to stay the underdog.
- MabQueen, on 10/11/2007, -8/+1I love how Digg'ers pick on patents that "might" be put to use in a bad way, but never the good.
http://digg.com/microsoft/Microsoft_files_Malware_data_collection_patent - harlowsmonkeys, on 10/11/2007, -9/+2Most of your points are pretty effectively shot down here:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Jan-30.html
and here
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/02/20/beyond-the-basics.aspx - SSCrow, on 10/11/2007, -9/+2I hate ODF.
But thats just because I hate the crappy UI of Open Office.
I'm sure its a fine format otherwise. - TehSnappy, on 10/11/2007, -23/+3How is this even news? People have been kicking Microsoft's butt for years for not having open standards, and when they open their file formats as an ISO standard...it is corruption and sabotage? Good grief...
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