Microsoft Wins Industry Standard Status for Office 281
everphilski writes "The International Herald-Tribune reports that Microsoft has won industry standard status for Office. EMCA International, a group of hardware and software makers based in Geneva, approved the MS file formats with only one dissenting vote - IBM. IBM backs the OpenDocument standard, which was approved by the ISO in May of this year." From the article: "Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president for open source and standards, called Microsoft's Office formats technically unwieldy - requiring software developers to absorb 6,000 pages of specifications, compared with 700 pages for OpenDocument. 'The practical effect is the only people who are going to be in a position to implement Microsoft's specifications are Microsoft,' Sutor said."
Sounds about right (Score:2, Insightful)
6,000 pages (in what format?) (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, 6,000 pages to describe an "open" format? Never underestimate the power of committees.
Sutor, IBM's dissenting voter says: "The practical effect is the only people who are going to be in a position to implement Microsoft's specifications are Microsoft." This in the context that the OpenDocument (competing) standard is only 700 pages. Seems like both must be quite verbose, but I'd opt for mastering 700 pages.
6,000 is a lot of pages to master, but it should be freely available for others to interpret, correct? On the other hand, since it is "essence of Microsoft", there's probably lots to misstep with and lots to nuance for interpretation letting Microsoft essentially maintain a proprietary flavor of a supposedly open standard.
Also of note from the article:
Van den Beld might be an idiot. Using his logic we should strike Microsoft Windows XXXXX as the standard for OSes, not.Hopefully there is still some inertia for the OpenDocument (yes, I know it's an ISO Standard) standard to gain purchase and compete. It is largely the emergence and work done with OpenDocument that has pushed Microsoft into the uncomfortable arena of pretending to like open standards.
Bias (Score:4, Insightful)
This piece of information is of little use without comparing the supported *features* in both format and their implementation.
Will it backfire? (Score:2, Insightful)
why are there two standardization groups (Score:4, Insightful)
One question... (Score:3, Insightful)
Then WHY was it approved as a "standard"?
Will Microsoft stick to it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft as a company may decide product features mean more to them than adhering to a standard, even one they created. I'll never forget Microsoft's FORTRAN compiler under MS-DOS described by Microsoft as "a superset of a subset of FORTRAN 77." In other words, whatever they hell they felt like implementing.
This will make for some slick legal arguments... (Score:3, Insightful)
Damn, they're good.
Re:Just to set things straight... (Score:2, Insightful)
- Microsoft "open and royalty-free" licenses are normally non-transferrable: users of software written by licensees have to get their own license to use the software. This sounds fine in principle, but in practice it makes writing free (or even open-source) software relying on such licensed technology impractical: people who download your software will have to individually logon to Microsoft's website, identify themselves, and exectue a license. As you are probably aware, the GPL is incompatible with such a setup. You see, non-MS people expect "Open" to be more than just "open for anyone to implement", it also means: "open for anyone to sublicense".
- In particular, patents related to this technology must be made clear from the get-go.
MS adding ODF support to Office is great. It's what they should have done from the start (MS-Word has always supported import/export from other word processors, in large part to attract customers to switfch).Re:6,000 pages (in what format?) (Score:3, Insightful)
2. I guess I kind of look at standards like the dictionary...just cause I don't know everything in there doesn't mean I can't speak at least at some meaningful level. I'd also take 6,000 well written, well thought out pages as opposed to 700 if they were missing content. Comparing page count to me is like comparing CPU Ghz....it's not the whole story. I've seen neither document, so I really don't know.
3. Now I understand why word.exe was so huge...
Re:6,000 pages (in what format?) (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, if we know anything about Microsoft, even if they're doing it with otherwise decent intentions, they're writing Office-the-software first and Office-the-standard second -- and therefore, there's a significant risk that the standard will always lag the implementation, and since their installed base is so big, the implementation will just win over the standard.
Exactly what was happening on the web for a while when IE's implementation of HTML/CSS could trump the standard to the degree that other vendors had to encode "quirks modes" into their own implementations to deal with people who wrote to the implementation rather than the standard. . .
And I would feel differently about this if it weren't for the fact that MS is bolting an XML format onto an existing product, which means that reverse-compatibility decisions are likely going to be determinative in the engineering.
So it's not the 6,000 pages -- it's the internal memos interpreting the 6,000 pages that we never get to see that are the problem.
Re:Sounds about right (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:6,000 pages (in what format?) (Score:2, Insightful)
From TFA, "the newest version of its Office file formats". Actually the previous format (the OLE container format) has varied slightly from Office version to Office version.
The other interesting point is from TFA:
The vast amount of data in the world is in the OLD format. I doubt very seriously there is very much content in the world in the NEW format in comparison to the old.
Re:Sounds about right (Score:2, Insightful)
A perfect description of printing in vb.net.
And it isn't so much that miker$of buys and mods crapware, which they do, but on top of it they try their damnedest to make it just incompatible enough to cause headaches for anyone who wants to work with them. I have no reason to expect that they will do differently here. They have a very valid reason for doing so. Open Office [openoffice.org] is getting closer to being good. This is a quick way to muddy the waters before a real standard gets established and undoes them.
Think that my view is unfair? Try to creating (pretty much any standard) compliant websites that play well with internut explunger 7. Without hacks. Bring painkillers and/or inebriants of choice.
That being said, miker$of has a right to make a profit and is under no obligation to make their software compatible with anyone, or if you believe the validity of the EULA, make it work at all.
Re:Bitch, bitch, bitch...... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bias (Score:4, Insightful)
But here's the point: by reusing MathML, instead of reinventing the wheel, Open Document also allows existing implementations of that standard to be reused.
The size of Microsoft's spec is a real problem. A Word developer estimates [msdn.com] more than 4 years for a team of 5 (within Microsoft) to implement just the Word portion in Word for Mac. Apparently, that's too much work, so they're just going to "port" the Windows version.
Is a standard with only one, proprietary implementation much use to anyone?
Re:6,000 pages (in what format?) (Score:3, Insightful)
This "standard" was not created by committee. It was simply offered by Microsoft and rubber-stamped in an effort to "recognize the reality" that "the vast amount of data in the world is in Microsoft format."
Granted, this vast amount of data is in older binary Microsoft formats, not this one, which isn't yet supported by any released products. But why let facts stand in the way of a good rationalization?
Re:Sounds about right (Score:1, Insightful)
de facto (Score:3, Insightful)
MS Office formats have always been a "de facto" standard, meaning they appear to be standards merely because a majority of people use them, and because there is only one implementation of them (regardless of versions). No matter how many industry groups, in this case ECMA, give them a stamp of approval, they will never achieve true "standard" status.
Just because the vast majority of people use something (especially when they have no means to consider alternatives) does not make it a standard. That is textbook "de facto" status.
Standards are what everyone agrees on after open, cooperative discussion. MS simply churns out what they think would be useful, influenced more by their bottom line than by user need. As long as alternative formats exist, are implemented, and are actively used and developed, MS Office formats will never be truly "standard", no matter how lopsided the usage shares are. The patent and IP issues just make this more true.
I'm sure everyone would laugh just as hard if ECMA (or any other group) had declared AIM a standard over Jabber, ICQ, MSN messenger, Yahoo IM, or even IRC (Jabber and IRC being the closest thing to standards among all of them).
There are countless examples of multiple ends to the same means in hardware and software. Which is the standard among SCSI/IDE/SATA? AMD vs Intel? MP3 vs Ogg? Gnome vs KDE? Emacs vs vi? None of them.
MS is incapable of producing a real standard, unlike the *NIX community which has been doing so for decades. I can't think of a single RFC published by MS that has influenced other platforms, meanwhile MS is forced to implement (sometimes badly) such things as TCP/IP and email (among many other).
Calling the MS Office formats a true standard is a meaningless label that can only be explained by MS having bought it. So they put a bright red "ECMA says this is standard" sticker on every box of Office 2007... the average person has no idea what the ECMA is.
Not sure why parent was modded 'flamebait' (Score:3, Insightful)
I am also pro-open and have my own irks with Microsoft. And I do use OpenOffice.org when I can.
But like it or not, MS Office is still in the lead as far as being intuitive and functional. OO is close, but certain parts of it still fall short of MS Office. Microsoft has been developing and refining this stuff for a long time, and it is by far used by more people (and businesses) than any other office software suite.
Plus, it works. Sure, MS Office has its flaws, but let's face it: So does OpenOffice. This doesn't change the fact that it's the most widely used, and as such would be a reasonable candidate for becoming an industry standard.
(Of course, I use 'industry standard' loosely since different groups seem to declare different standards for document formats...)
Since it's apparently grounds for automatic down-modding to express a valid opinion in favor of Microsoft on Slashdot, you people can 'troll' or 'flamebait' me all you like. Doesn't make my point any more or less reasonable.
Big, Fat, Stinking PIG. (Score:3, Insightful)
This piece of information [6,000 M$ vrs 700 ODF pages] is of little use without comparing the supported *features* in both format and their implementation.
No, that order of magnitude difference is informative. I imagine 6,000 pages can buy you:
And then some because I'm only at seven.
300 pages is roughly two inches of shelf space. M$'s specification will take up 40 inches of your shelf and burden your floor with a hundred pound load. I don't even want to think of how log it would take to read 40 inches of XML specs.
For all that, it will be incomplete in a typical Microsoft way, rendering it useless outside of PHB relations.
old format*s* (Score:1, Insightful)
For a supposed member of a standards board he sure is going out of his way to be misleading.
Specification Weight (Score:5, Insightful)
While I'm inclined to a cynical view that Microsoft is unnecessarily burdening the specification - and they probably don't mind the fact that this will impede the development of competitors products - I do have to admit the possibility that they are addressing a different criticism that many have made of them in the past.
Namely, that Microsoft specifications are incomplete and/or imprecise (corner cases, etc.).
Albeit verbose, is their specification technically watertight?
Or is it merely, "Here's everything Word can do as a result of development since 1985." with no overall logical structure?
Embrace and extend, business version 2.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
The Microsoft license to use ECMA OOXML is contingent on following the standard to the letter, which is a seemingly innocuous condition until you realize that Microsoft itself is under no legal obligation to follow the standard to the letter. So you will have a bunch of third party software that follows the standard which won't be able to accurately read or write documents written by the dominant office software, it will just look like the other software is defective when really it is working according to the standard. And even if the other software developers want to break the standard in favor of microsoft compatibility, they won't be allowed to do so under the OOXML license. Microsoft wouldn't do this at first of course, what good is a trap sprung before your prey are fully in, so I am sure that Microsoft would spend a year or two adhering rigorously to the standard, just enough time for other software to incorporate OOXML compatibility. Then it would be time to break compatibility and continue the microsoft monopoly for another few years, while things work their way through the courts.
If Microsoft itself makes a legally binding and enforceable commitment to follow the ECMA OOXML standard to the letter, then I don't see a problem with another document format standard. But as the licensor, I don't see how they could be forced to adhere to the OOXML standard. Unless Microsoft itself can be forced to rigorously follow the OOXML standard, then this is just a monopolist's trap.
OpenXML is not open (Score:5, Insightful)
Down the road a bit they will begin strategic law suits and try to make FOSS programmers look like a bunch of thieves for implementing the "open standards" they pushed through without paying royalties.
Microsoft is not even a bit interested in competing on a level playing field. For a very long time they have used their monopolies to gain unfair advantages; antitrust laws be damned. Now they want to use their monopoly muscle in their Office package to control a "standard" that they feel will lock out their greatest competition. They know that GPL'd software CAN NOT be encumbered by patents.
They have no intention of real cooperation.
The solution: EVERYONE must work to make them irrelevant. Put them into a position where they either start playing fair or die. Not an easy task. We must press our Justice department to hold them accountable for breaking antitrust laws. The Courts MUST break Microsoft into a least three separate companies. This can easily be justified by their continued disregard for the law.
We should only support protocols and "standards" that are truly free. No unacceptable licenses, no royalties etc. As Linux gains market share there will come a time when Microsoft's insistence on being incompatible with OSS will begin to work against them.
We should push for laws that force standards and protocols to be truly open and available to everyone including Open Source.
which one? (Score:3, Insightful)
Fact is that even though MS tries to cover it up by keeping the names constant, the office file formats are just as fragmented as the various versions of windos. It's a neat trick, but "Windows 3.1" and "Windows XP" really don't have much in common except that the later contains a backwards compatability layer, i.e. "Wine from Redmond".
Same with the file formats. Yes, newer versions of MS Office contain importers for the older file formats. That just hides the fact that there are probably 10 different versions out there.
Re:6,000 pages (in what format?) (Score:1, Insightful)
Depends what you consider data to be. There's a lot of DNA out there...
Re:6,000 pages (in what format?) (Score:4, Insightful)
It's pretty clear that ECMA exists mainly as a tool for rich corporations, when they want to add a veneer of respectability to something (and/or subvert government purchasing regulations).