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)
Re:Sounds about right (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sounds about right (Score:5, Informative)
buggy- well, it can't be buggy but it can be so complex that its hard to implement without bugs
bloated- a file format can easily store data in unefficient formats
insecure- hold important data without encryption
unreliable- hold the data in a lossy way
overpriced- Standards don't have to be free, they can charge a license fee (or even refuse to license on a RAND basis)
nonintuitive- Ever tried to decode all the variations of
clunky piece of dog shit- A hard to implement format is easily described as clunky
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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
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Yes. I wrote a BMP parser at a previous job just so the Web browser could display those cutesy little icons in the address bar and bookmark list. BMP is an ill-specified piece of $#!+ and should be slain in the public square before jubilant onlookers.
Schwab
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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.
Re:6,000 pages (in what format?) (Score:5, Funny)
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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
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:6,000 pages (in what format?) (Score:4, Informative)
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If you don't know, Office 2007 changed file formats after nearly a decade of staying the same...
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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:
Van den Beld of ECMA International said the standard recognized reality. "The vast amount of data in the world is in Microsoft format," he said.
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.
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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: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).
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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 should make it clear that a spec is not necessarily enough for a 'standard'.
I suggest that standards committees (ISO, ECMA, etc.) require not just human-readable documentation for a new standard, but also BSD-licensed code that implements that standard, i.e., a 'reference implementatio
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So would I, but I don't even have to go that far.
Fact is: Ever crack open a WordML document? I thought it'd be easy for a work project to do some specialized convert-Word-to-XML -- just a quick XSLT, or maybe I'd actually have to write a quick Perl script...
Took one look at it and gave the fuck up. Ok, I Googled it, found nothing, took another long, long look, still couldn't even figure out where to start.
Remember: Saying you use
EMCA (Score:3, Interesting)
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ECMA (Score:5, Informative)
It's ECMA. It even says that in the page you've linked to. And the original article. This Slashdot typo's infectious - it seems to have spread to half the comments posted already...
EMCA != ECMA ? (Score:3)
More likely theory: editorial dyslexia.
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Actually, Netscape submitted the JavaScript spec for standardisation as ECMAScript in November 1996.
Re:EMCA (Score:4, Informative)
ECMA have ratified a few standards relating to JavaScript - for instance, ECMA 262 defines the language that JavaScript, JScript, ActionScript and QtScript are implementations of, and the E4X extension that allows XML literals is also an ECMA standard.
Re:EMCA (Score:4, Informative)
Standards for Standards. (Score:5, Funny)
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Bias (Score:4, Insightful)
This piece of information is of little use without comparing the supported *features* in both format and their implementation.
OpenDoc is NIBM (Score:2)
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Even assuming that's true and the meat is only the remaining 2000 pages of the specification, its still over 3 times as big as the 600 pages cited for OpenDoc.
What value does it offer (aside from currently being implemented by Microsoft) that OpenDoc doesn't for the additional complexity?
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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?
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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:
Just to set things straight... (Score:5, Informative)
What's also interesting is that MS will be offering a "bridge" (as a separate download) that enables Office software to read and write ODF (the OpenOffice Open Document Format) files.
Re:Just to set things straight... (Score:5, Funny)
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This sounds nice, but is a serious trap.
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Reverse compiling Microsoft's software to figure out how they implemented the spec, on the other hand, is a whole other kettle of fish. So don't do it. Get the specs directly from ECMA and start implementing.
Someone must be confused... (Score:3, Interesting)
Malice, or an incompetent journalist?
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Industry Std or approval by one stds body? (Score:2)
Will it backfire? (Score:2, Insightful)
why are there two standardization groups (Score:4, Insightful)
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European Computer Manufacturers Association
International Standards Organization
Capisce? See wikipedia for digested details.
Sure ECMA rubberstamps stuff that gets adopted more broadly (or has already been)
e.g; LiveWire/LiveScript/JavaScript/ECMAScript, but they aren't the defacto int'l
group.
Really though, there's plenty more than two, don't forget IETF and W3C
Industry Standard? (Score:2)
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.
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Hear me out: remember from math that the null set, {}, is a subset of any set -- so if you're just supersetting the subset that is the null set, you can do whatever you want.
And it's instructive that MS thinks so.
Seriously, parent post is spot on -- MS's allegiance (and profit motive) is for the implementation, not the standard. And if they need the format to do something funky to enable the next wave of you-can't-live-without-it super-collaboration mumb
No (Score:2)
One question... (Score:3, Insightful)
Then WHY was it approved as a "standard"?
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Then WHY was it approved as a "standard"?
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Now if the lone vote were Sun (of StarOffice, predecessor/cousin of OOo) then yes.
IBM's special interest would be in the Lotus office suite.
Two more articles on the issue... (Score:2, Interesting)
...that people might find interesting:
In other news.... (Score:5, Funny)
"Actually the Open standard we propose is six thousand pages, but that's only because we printed it in 256 point boldface fonts in order to be handicapped accessible for the visually impaired, you insensitive clod."
Microsoft further countered allegations of being too hard for developers by pointing out,
"If you take away the title information, the table of contents, the index and the pages that say This Page Intentionally Left Blank, all the standards document says is 'Buy a copy of Microsoft Office'. What could be simpler than that?"
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Actually the layout was done by an ex-editor for the New York Post.
"OPEN STANDARDS WREAK HAVOK ON CITY!"
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OSI is an "industry standard" protocol, too... (Score:2)
I sure don't care (Score:2)
OK then. Well, since neither of these documents seem to be intended to be read by mortals, I'm personally feeling more than a little "emotionally detached" from these news...
This will make for some slick legal arguments... (Score:3, Insightful)
Damn, they're good.
Meaning MS Office docs will have public specs? (Score:2)
I don't expect this to be true. What I expect to be true is the same that has been true for the Windows API. In Win32's API, you can know all the documented functions and features, but could never implement the stuff that's not documented... at least not publicly.
Now would t
6000 pages (Score:2)
And in other news (Score:2)
iWork? (Score:3, Informative)
BTW It should be noted that Office essentially uses OLE for its binary document formats. For this reason anything you add to an Office document is essentially an embeded data type. Their XML format is another beast.
The question is ... (Score:2)
Bitch, bitch, bitch...... (Score:2)
Equal number of pages with Open Document = "Microsoft sucks, they copied Open Document."
6000 pages = "Microsoft sucks, the format is too complex for anyone than Microsoft."
Apparently, no matter what they do, Microsoft cant suck enough.
Re:Bitch, bitch, bitch...... (Score:4, Insightful)
MS Office XML sucks badly (Score:4, Informative)
From a practical point of view, OpenDocument already works for interchanging between multiple open source apps.
In addition, Microsoft's file format is patented and Microsoft uses that patent to spread FUD. While the patent probably wouldn't stand, it's an additional reason not to use MS's office formats.
definition of 'standard' (Score:2)
Most people use Office, few use Open Office, why should it becoming the standard really suprise people? When you force standards which few people are already following you get the farce caused by the W3C who are constantly revising and ammending what was an established format so that every browser has a different implementation of the supposed standard and everyone of them has flaws in meeting
Whatever. (Score:2)
I sincerely hope this does not gain wide adoption (Score:2, Interesting)
If you guessed "Microsoft", you may advance to the head of the class."
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2006/10/leap-back.html [robweir.com]
Tips on writing a "standard":
http://www.robweir.com/blog/index.html [robweir.com]
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.
It's The License That Kills It (Score:4, Interesting)
No right to create modifications or derivatives of this Specification is granted herein.
There is a separate patent license available to parties interested in implementing software programs that can read and write files that conform to the Specification. This patent license is available at this location: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/ip/format/xmlpate
The link with the actual license to READ and WRITE a file to their specifications is dead. This one works though, http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/xpspatentlic.ms
Some handy excerpts: "Necessary Claims" do not include any claims: (i) that would require a payment of royalties by Microsoft to unaffiliated third parties; (ii) covering any Enabling Technologies that may be necessary to make or use any product incorporating a Licensed Implementation,....
This says to me that they have not indemnified developers from patent time-bombs for the functions one step beyond their proposed standard or other patent time-bombs laid by lesser-known Patent IP firms. Maybe someone with more coding skills can explain if it would be possible to implement a standard without so-called "Enabling Technologies"?
(iii) covering the reading or writing of documents other than XPS Documents, or rendering of XPS Documents in a manner that is different than the rendering allowed by the XML Paper Specification. "Enabling Technologies" means technologies that may be necessary to make or use any product or portion of a product that complies with the XML Paper Specification, but are not expressly set forth"
To me this says Microsoft can come after you if you do something they didn't think of.
I don't see how this benefits any developer outside of a select few.
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.
The Power of ODF (Score:4, Interesting)
I implemented a photo directory for my church congregation. Since it would need to be easily updated I kept the information in a CSV spreadsheet, including names, addresses, and the name of the photo file. I looked at doing a mail merge with either OOo or Word and it didn't look like I could get what I really wanted with either. So I made a sample doc in OOo Writer and saved it. I then renamed it to a
I'll admit that you would have to be a programmer to do something like that, but it was really easy and required no documentation or specialized knowledge. That is the power of the ODF. I'm guessing the same isn't possible with the MS format.
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.
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another post down the drain
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As the Devil usually isn't in the altruism business, I would expect that we would be asking his usual fee, either explicitly or through deception.
So, my choice: So long, been nice to know ya.
You certainly made an interesting choice for an analogy.
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The question isn't whether I'd take the medicine, it's whether I'd let Satan set the standards for the medicine, set the price for the medicine, and change both at will.
In the first scenerio, I get cured. In the second one, I may be cured, but those after me might g
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This should not be an emotional argument. Microsoft's format is unwieldy, and there is almost zero chance that anyone else will ever be able to implement it 100% - which calls into question anyone who labels it a "standard". And you are implying the people who don
Anybody can compress a file. (Score:2)
Anybody can zip a file, doorknob. In fact that's what OpenOffice does automatically.
It is also going to be more widely used because despite the best efforts the OSS community Open Office just can't compete with Office 2007 in the work place.
I would bet differently. The good thing about Open Document is that everyone is implementing it:
Word, WordPerfect, OpenOffice, Koffice, Abiword, and many others
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With Open Office downloads at 76,972,853, I'd say Office 2007 is the looser here. People and businesses are tired of the forced obsolescence and the re-occurring $300 usage fee.
http://stats.openoffice.org/index.html [openoffice.org]
Enjoy,
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Do you have any evidence to back this up? In my experience I have found OpenDoc text files to regularly be shorter than MS Word documents. In addition, MS Word documents continue to get bigger as you edit them, even if the document itself isn't getting longer. A lot of garbage is left in (which is also a privacy problem). That doesn't sound technically superior to me.
Also, what is the magic compres
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ODF on the other hand is controlled by a group of companies, a group that microsoft was given every chance to join. Any standard should be controlled in this way, either by a group of competing companies or an independent body, otherwise it can always be twisted to favour one vendor at the expense of another.
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You create a 'framework' thats a standard and people can build on that, and that at some level all products that meet that standard can share data.
MS has a history of changing thing unexpectedly, and that is bad for a standard.
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Fair enough. So here's a comparison of the ODF and MS-XML formats [groklaw.net].
In this case, it means "unwieldy".
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
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AIX conforms to posix and uses utilities common to all Unixes.
Websphere can conform to the specs for J2EE.