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Microsoft are the masters of biased algorithms.
After being forced to give users a choice of browser, they made an 'honest mistake' that favoured IE:

https://www.robweir.com/blog/2...

"Your survey" is full of crap.
 
If the sample size were 100 here's how it would break down...
 
30 heard of OO
20 gave it a go
16 continue to use it
 
  but
 
  Put it altogether, and the estimated user share, the percentage of US internet users who use OpenOffice “sometimes” or “regularly” is 16.1%
 
So 100% of your install base who left it install after trying it used it on a regular basis? Doubtful. As I pointed out earlier, even MSO doesn't swing those kinds of numbers and it's a paid software. but I can see that you didn't care to address that... you just went to another thread and started spouting garbage again.

I actually have been looking into that question and tracking it via surveys. Of those who tried OpenOffice, 78% continued to use it "sometimes" or "regularly":

See: http://www.robweir.com/blog/20...

Unless you are a business user you are unlikely to use any office application daily.

All you need. Click here.

He already said "I've done the usual [....] use a credible Internet Security package." At that point, the major danger is going to come from "zero days" and Internet Explorer browser attacks which will entirely bypass any form of AntiVirus etc. Changing which particular "credible Internet Security package" is used is going to make a very marginal difference. In fact the main OS difference will be in turning off useless services.

To make a step change up in security you want to talk about things like OS diversity; driving backups from the admin account and offsite backups. You may also want to consider switching her to cloud services of some kinds. Wait you say, he already said "I would love to switch her to Linux, but she struggles with change and wants to stay with Vista and MS Office." ... well sure; that's true. But it's a matter of interface. You can keep the Windows as the front end for now; probably for as long as she continues to be a desktop user; but use a different OS such as Linux for storing and copying her data.

When you set this up, consider very carefully the trust between systems. Obviously you don't want your Linux system to trust the Windows system (do the management from your own Linux system as well) but the opposite is true too. Due to Linux's design which encourages applications not to need aministrator access there is less malware for linux, but there are plenty of attackers and bad passwords can compromise your system. Ideally you want to have no dependence in either direction. Just have the administrator account on your Windows system backup files automatically to the Linux system. Have the Linux system automatically archive those backups so that the Windows system can't delete them and you will have a major recoverability improvement.

If you know them well you might want to consider using something like OpenBSD which may be easier to configure securely. Don't bother if you don't know them.

Offsite/Offline backups can be done by buying three huge slow disks which get copies off the NAS swap the last updated one for the one in the NAS each time you visit. If she has fast internet, just encrypt (GPG will do fine) and upload to a cloud service. Download a copy of those to your own offline backup for when your cloud provider makes a mess.

You haven't said what you mean by "security"; so far I've assumed the normal stuff; integrity, recoverability etc. If you also want to consider privacy you will want to think very carefully about gradually moving her to more private solutions. Microsoft has very much the same advertising and spying capabilities as Google but without the level of sophisticated systems Google uses to keep partners and employees away from the data. Just because you keep Office and Windows available to her, doesn't mean she can't start to diversify:

• Install LibreOffice but only to handle Open Document formats; this will avoid data corruption issues with Excel which have been a problem for a long time
• Move her to a more modern/secure browser such as Chromium or Opera
• Encourage her to use a different email system; yahoo; gmail; anything which will later make migration easier.
• Occasionally send her useful information in other formats
• Teach her to always convert and save MS Office documents as PDF for mailing and archive - show her that different versions of Office are not actually compatible with each other so sending office formats is never a good idea.

Long term, being dependent fully on Microsoft is something you can't be sure about. They may stay as they were; however the use of Active Tiles in their new operating systems really suggests a move to a much more advertising and

Re-read my first comment. The license mismatch most certainly doesn't guarantee LO will surpass AOO. If it did, proprietary forks of open source projects would have taken over the world long ago.

Spending resources to chase the tail of another project distracts from other work you COULD be doing, and could convince your contributors that instead of the extra work, they should just go upstream and skip the whole thing.

And those theoretical "10X as many improvements" makes it HARDER to merge patches from upstream, as "project A" is the one diverging, rather than upstream sabotage, but still has the same effect.

it seems that AOO has the mindshare of the users and LO has the mindshare of the developers

I'd like to see some proof of that. The LO guys have a bad tendency to lie through their teeth about all their statistics they give to the public and the press:

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2012/11/libreoffices-dubious-claims-part-3-developers.html

I don't think it is juvenile at all to point out that comparisons of committer counts is meaningless where the contents of the commits, in terms of how many files are changed, varies by a factor of 4 between the projects. The difference in VCS used as well as what kinds of contributions are measured by Ohloh (and are not measured) makes any naive comparison hugely problematic. In fact I'd say it is intellectual dishonest to perpetuate these kinds of apples to oranges comparisons. On the other hand, if your only story is Ohloh code statistics, what else are you going to do?

Rather than looking at the code, I've focused more on looking at the users, doing apples-to-apples comparisons, looking at name recognition, usage stats, user satisfaction, etc., comparing OpenOffice and LibreOffice. And the real world numbers show LibreOffice is in a bad position and declining:

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2013/06/the-power-of-brand-and-the-power-of-product-part-2.html

So please, tell us more about how many lines of code were removed by your long tail. We'll all entranced and want to hear more about how hard you think you are working. But also occasionally take a peak at the real world and see how you are really doing. There is a big difference between riding a stationary bicycle in a gym versus traveling cross country. Personally, I think LO is mainly churning code and spinning its wheels, though the sweat you feel is real.

MS was caught using third world countries to stack ISO committees with their supporters to help them ram a very flawed standard through an ISO approval process.

luckily Excel has an excellent record in handling dates http://www.robweir.com/blog/2006/10/leap-back.html

Two points:
 

if they have a sizable chunk of users it could work like the reverse of Microsoft's formats in the past. "Save that in .odt because everything reads .odt."

1) If it's Microsoft implementing Open Document Format, I guarantee they'll find some way to implement it subtely off-spec so that an ODF file created in MS Office will work correctly only when opened with MS Office, or an ODF file created in any other application will suffer degradation when opened in MS Office (like, for example, stripping out the formulas in spreadsheets). It simply isn't in Microsoft's DNA to play nicely with anything else. They are the Daleks of the software industry.

LibreOffice just won't bury the Office suite until Calc catches up with Excel.

2) Impress (the slideshow part of LibreOffice) is also going to need MASSIVE improvement before it will even be able to find the city that Powerpoint's ballpark is in. At the moment, you can't even use Impress for presentations with math equations, because the built-in LibreOffice math editor is buggy, clunky, and produces the ugliest math typesetting this side of a 1st grader's handwriting, and the LaTeX plugin option currently suffers from a regression in LibreOffice's svg handling (going back several versions) that corrupts the output.

Face it, Microsoft Office remains king for the forseeable future, and I've been watching the open source field long enough to suspect it will never muster the kind of vision, focus, and sustained drive necessary to topple that behemoth, no matter how many missteps MS takes or how complacent it gets.

He probably meant impossble for anyone not being Microsoft. There is, for example a tag called autoSpaceLikeWord95 standing for Emulate Word 95 Full-Width Character Spacing; and there is more.

That's a pretty old blog post... it's from 2007, but ISO 29500-1 wasn't officially standardized until 2008. IIRC, the issues he's talking about were problems with the draft standard that MS submitted. They were cleaned up for the final spec. The real ISO standards cost $$$ to get, but a quick Google search shows that MS has documented autoSpaceLikeWord95 as:

9.7.3.4 autoSpaceLikeWord95 (Incorrectly Adjust Text Spacing for Specific Unicode Ranges)

This element specifies adjustments (detailed below) which should be applied to the spacing between adjoining regions of non-ideographic and ideographic text when the autoSpaceDE (Part 1, 17.3.1.2) and autoSpaceDN (Part 1, 17.3.1.3) elements have a value of true (or equivalent). This algorithm typically results in the following:

• An increase in the inter-character spacing added between non-ideographic and/or number characters and certain full-width characters
• No inter-character spacing between non-ideographic and/or number characters and certain half-width characters

Typically, applications apply additional spacing between ideographic and non-ideographic characters/numeric characters when the autoSpaceDE / autoSpaceDN properties are applied. This element, when present with a val attribute value of true (or equivalent), specifies that applications shall apply the following adjustments to this logic:

• Characters in the following Unicode ranges should be treated as ideographic, even though those characters are full-width forms of non-ideographic text: U+FF10–U+FF19, U+FF21–U+FF3A, and U+FF41–U+FF5A. [Note: This results in the unnecessary addition of space. end note]

• Characters in the following Unicode ranges should be treated as non-ideographic, even though those characters are ideographic: U+FF66–U+FF9F. [Note: This results in the omission of the intended additional space. end note]

Several of the complaints registered by members of the ISO approval committee (which were ignored by the paid-off chair), involved sections of the specification that caused it to be physically impossible to actually implement.

How bizarre! So what exactly is it that makes it impossible to implement?

He probably meant impossble for anyone not being Microsoft. There is, for example a tag called autoSpaceLikeWord95 standing for Emulate Word 95 Full-Width Character Spacing; and there is more.

Once that's complete (if it's not already), they'll still be quite a bit behind where LO started, even if they don't end up removing any functionality, because Go-oo wasn't donated to Apache, and is still under the GPL. So, they'll have something that is much larger, much slower, much harder to maintain, and they'll be way behind on features. At that point, the question becomes can they possibly catch up?

Well IBM is apparently ending the Symphony fork, which may help in terms of features. Besides, the Apache license is better than the LO tri-license. I always thought having three copyleft licenses was kind of defeating the purpose of copyleft, since someone could easily fork the code under only one of the licenses which would be useless to the original project.

That Gregorian calendar issue was for the Microsoft Excel OOXML bug canonized as a feature...

Unless a lot of things about this project change it is pretty much doomed. (Well, doomed to be ignored by everybody outside of IBM; they can finance their own Symphony devs, but nothing else will come of this unless things change.)

If you glance at the Apache openoffice mailing lists, a few things become clear:

• Rob Weir, who is basically running the show and who seems like a perfectly reasonable person from his blog, acts like a caustic, sarcastic, and poorly socialized adolescent in communicating with other developers. He's alienating people right and left. People have tried to get him to stop, but he either ignores it or just acts like it's those he's offended who are to blame for any unpleasantness.
• Due to Rob's attitude and other unfortunate factors, any chance of gaining cooperation from anyone who's been involved in LibreOffice has pretty much evaporated. If there'd been a little bit of diplomacy, I bet a lot of people would have been OK with dual-licensing their patches for Apache OO to use as well, and the two projects could have gotten a lot of mutually beneficial effort in support, security, localization, language tools, and extensions; AOO folks have instead opted to prioritize insulting LibreOffice folks over getting anything done.
• They tore a lot of functionality out of OpenOffice for their license compliance crusade. I can understand that they can't ship copylefted code, but tearing out the use of LGPL'ed libraries seems kind of ridiculous. (For me personally, the loss of WordPerfect import is going to force me to LibreOffice.)
• Apache OpenOffice 3.4 won't be released until the middle of next year-- the first OO release since this January, with relatively little improvement over OO 3.3 and a fair bit of missing functionality-- LibreOffice will have gone through three "major" releases and another dozen point releases, fixing a lot of bugs, refactoring a lot of code, and introducing a few new features. AOO will have taken roughly a full year (June 2011-2012) to make their first code shipment and people will have long since moved on.

I really wanted to see Apache OpenOffice succeed and become the main branch; I think that for a project like OO, having either a permissive license or copyright assignment to a well-governed nonprofit (as with GNU software) is a really wise idea. But I can't see them making much progress as things stand.

An interesting comment on this comes from Jeremy Allison on the blog of an Openoffice.org developer (found via Dave Neary's blog):

This is about copyleft vs. non-copyleft licensing

Finally the argument about which style of licence is best will be settled once and for all! :)

At the minute, BSD style licences are more trendy from a business perspective and big organisations like Apple, Google and so forth see it as the best collaborative way forward. However there are GPL-esque projects have proven popular with companies (e.g. KHTML/Webikit) so it is far from clear which side will prove more popular. I'm just happy that at least there's something open source that lets me open MS Office documents in a reasonable manner - in 1999/2000 it was a lot more painful.

This is standard operating procedure for Microsoft. They use BSA or CompTIA to attack any open standards policy that is worthy of the name "open".

One way to point out the absurdity of their logic is to replace the reference to standards with references to any other useful technology that a government might adopt, like electrical standards.

For example:

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2008/04/embrace-reality-and-logic-of-choice.html

Really? IBM doesn't sound all that enthusiastic.

Huh? That article doesn't seem to weigh in either way on whether LO is good, bad or indifferent. It merely points out that it's not the first derivative of OOo to appear, which is plainly true. Nor is there any indication that he's speaking for IBM. It's simply a statement of Rob Weir's opinion that LO is not as unprecedented as some people seem to think.

If that stands as anything, it stands as evidence that Rob Weir doesn't like the term "fork". It offers nothing about either Rob's opinion or IBM's opinion of LO as a project.

That said, the reference I was using to claim IBM support turns out, when I read more closely, to have been speculative, so I'll mark them as neutral for now, until more evidence appears.

And I think it is very possible that the community will line up behind LibreOffice

Pretty much already done as well, at least as far as the Red Hat, Novell, Debian, Canonical, FSF, IBM and Google parts of the community.

Really? IBM doesn't sound all that enthusiastic.

There is precedent for this. For example, ISO approved a standard that redefined leap year calculations to match a bug in Microsoft Excel.

It comes from reduced spending someplace else? Or increasing consumer or business debt, right?

This is an old, old economic fallacy. I tried to debunk it once in a blog post: "Broken Windows and the Ghost of Keynes" but you can't kill the undead.

We have to make every clock in the world inaccurate because Oracle's software is crap...?

That's nothing. Read this (The OOXML leap year bug and the Chernobyl design pattern) and weep...

An inefficient system is a boon for those who benefit from helping people manage the inefficiency. Make the system more efficient and they lose. Sometimes they revolt as did the Piemen of Erie.

You can read my submissions supporting Groklaw in the past (I have, what? Maybe 10 accepted SCO stories with Groklaw as a source? I don't remember any more.). I have trumpeted her site quite loudly for several years and cheered SCO's slow demise. I hope you're not going to lump me in with shills & astro-turfers. I honestly question how many of those there are, because PJ lumps *anyone* who disagrees with her in with them, or so it seems. I've also fought against Microsoft on OOXML and the rest and supported IBM's Rob Weir when discussing how much OOXML sucks ass (seriously, he's a good guy, his blog also has some information on wine making, if you're into that). If I'm some kind of shill who hates Groklaw or IBM for no reason, well, I must have been replaced by a doppleganger recently. Here are a few links that go allllll the way back to 2004, when hardly anybody knew who the hell Groklaw was and show me agreeing with and promoting the site. I've read her site daily since the RU days and remember when she had a hard time surviving a Slashdotting, before she moved to iBiblio. I think I contributed one or two of those early, hard-to-survive Slashdottings, for that matter.

That support is in the past, I'm afraid. PJ is a huge jerk, mostly in private, and you'll probably only see that if you disagree with her. I can give you her real email (it's close to the public email, pj@groklaw.net, which has more filtering), if you want me to prove that I've been in contact. I don't think it's a big deal to put that out here because she's more than capable of switching it if the spammers get hold of it.

She's had way more than three fallings-out, incidentally. But most of the people feel like they're the only ones. AllParadox is a good example because he wrote stories for Groklaw once upon a time. It's not like he's some nobody who lurked for a little while. It's more like almost anyone who worked with her closely got driven out. Except for Mathfox, I guess.

There are quite a few people she's parted ways with. Heck, ESR may be next on that list for saying that she "jumped the shark" when she attacked his friend, Jay Maynard (who got booted from Groklaw, even though he has nothing to do with TurboHercules the company; even if he's a friend of some of the founders thereof). His crime? Saying he felt threatened when IBM called the QPL-licensed Hercules emulator an "infringing platform." He's not Darl McBride. He's not a party to the EU complaint. He's a guy who dresses up in a Tron outfit and writes an emulator, for crying out loud. We're not talking "conspirator" here. But PJ sees "conspiracy" everywhere these days. I can't blame her, after SCO, but I won't agree, either.

You can read AllParadox's account of his departure here, incidentally.

Sadly, now, apparently, anyone who refers to "AllParadox" risks having their post deleted. If past complaints by former Groklaw regulars are any guide, anyone who naively trys to re-post a deleted post, or innocently inquires of PJ about the problem, also risks having their Groklaw account deleted.

Bullshit.

Mart

• Office 2010 will conform to the Transitional consumer and producer classes defined in the OOXML standards. Any bugs that are found in the shipped version of Office 2010 will be "fixed" by retroactively changing the standards to match what Office actually does, as is currently being done by Microsoft-packed SC34/WG4 committee with similar bugs found in Office 2007's OOXML support.
• Office 2010 will not have conforming support for OOXML Strict producer or consumer classes.
• Office 2010 will write dozens of non-interoperable, proprietary extensions into their OOXML documents, extensions which are not defined by the OOXML standards and which have not been reviewed or standardized by any standards committee and which will not be fully interoperable with other OOXML editors, or even with previous versions of MS Office.

That and more from my 2009 blog post

Every one of these has come to pass. If the scales are falling from Alex's eyes, then great. But the rest of us saw this coming a long time ago. In fact, Microsoft told us at the SC34 meeting in Seattle last year that the "Strict" conformance class would not be supported until Office 16. Alex knows that. So it is odd that he is pretending that this is something unexpected.

Clearly you haven't been following this topic for very long. The top 5 browsers are always on the first screen; though the order is randomized. (Though they didn't do it very well as you can read here: http://www.robweir.com/blog/2010/02/microsoft-random-browser-ballot.html)

Essentially they have a list of highly popular browsers and a list of other browsers some people seem to use. They shuffle both lists then put the list of popular browsers first followed by the other list.

If you define correctness as "producing the desired results on one particular version of one particular platform", then you have a recipe for non-robust code that won't survive in the real world.

No what Rob demonstrated was that replacing the call to sort made the error go away. But several things were changed here as well (most notably the random number generation and initial seeding were probably altered substantially).

Damn, I've been wasting my time. Now I know you didn't properly read the article. He includes the test programs he used. They are pretty short, and easy to verify that there is no difference at all in the random number generation, nor in initial seeding (whatever that is supposed to mean - you seed the random generator once at the start of the program [or better still, when the machine is powered on], and never touch it afterwards). What a waste of a couple of hours.

So, while he is right that calling sort to get a purmutation is a bad idea and he is (probably) right that the sort was the problem, this is never actually shown in the article. He just assumes that the bug went away so it must mean that the sort was the problem (but as I showed above this need not be the case).

Not worth responding to, just reinforces that you never looked at the source code.

As for your concern for me, I doubt if my code has appeared on TheDailyWTF, but I do know that I recently had some of my work in the ACM proceedings of "Verification Model Checking and Abstact Interpetation" on modeling the semantics of programs for later verification applications. So, I do know a bit about program correctness and specification. How about you?

Conference proceedings don't count for much. I can't see any evidence that you know anything about devloping robust programs. Not that I'd expect you to, it is quite a different game to developing verification software anyway (although if the verification software itself needs tp be robust, then we have a problem).

Did you actually read the article?

But issue was poor distribution in the random numbers

No, the random numbers themselves were just fine. If there was a problem with the random number generator, then the results in the section 'Fixing the Microsoft Shuffle' in the article would have not produced a uniform distribution.

The real problem is explained clearly in the article:

If you know anything about sorting, you can see the problem here. Sorting requires a self-consistent definition of ordering. The following assertions must be true if sorting is to make any sense at all: [...snip definitions of less-than and equivance operators...] All of these statements are violated by the given Microsoft comparison function. Since the comparison function returns random results, a sort routine that depends on any of these logical implications would receive inconsistent information regarding the progress of the sort.

Garbage In, Garbage Out.

If you want to analyze the behavior of a specific implementation of an algorithm given input that violates the preconditions, then lookup the source code for your javascript interpreter. That may be a fun exercise to do, if you are bored, but it isn't very illuminating unless you want to understand why browser X produced that specific distribution. If you call sort() on data that doesn't satisfy the requirements of a comparitor, then you are not actually sorting the data. You can follow through the algorithm and see what it would do instead, but for sure it isn't sorting it. Consider for example the behavior of a typical hand-coded routine for sorting an array length 3 (sorry about intending, can't figure out how to get it to work properly in ecode):

sort3(a,b,c)
{
if (b < a)
{
if (c < b)
{
swap(a,c);
}
else
{
swap(a,b);
if (c < b) swap(b,c);
}
}
else
{
if (c < b)
{
swap(b,c);
if (b < a) swap(a,b);
}
}
}

For an exercise, try following through the probabilities of each outcome, if we replace the comparison operation with a coin toss. An unbiased random shuffle should have an equal probability of producing each permutation of the array. For 3 numbers, there are 6 possible permutations so each outcome should have probability 1/6. Is that satisfied here? (hint: no!) Try the same exercise with [insert your favorite sort algorithm here]... Try it with bubble sort too. That is probably what Rob had in mind with the 'may cause infinite loop' comment.

Unless you have some non-garbage to contribute to this discussion, I'm out of here.

I thought it was originally going to be that they forgot to seed the random number generator or something.

Out of curiosity - why would they need to seed the random number generator?

Wouldn't -not- seeding it be better? That way MS don't have to include some seed number in their script and have everybody thinking they're manipulating the results by using seed numbers that they know would generate a certain ordering in various versions of IE.

I actually found this bit...

Repeating the same test on Firefox is also non-random, but in a different way:

...rather interesting. How are two browsers using the same script resulting in different ways of being non-random; presuming that, in itself, was not by chance?

Although I can't verify this, as the test page provided... http://www.robweir.com/blog/shuffle.html ...won't actually run in IE8 here :D

That said.. odd method of getting random results out of an array.. I'm sure it's more efficient but KISS would dictate you grab one random result out of the array, delete the one you chose, pick a new one, delete, etc. until the array is down to 1 and you stick that last one at the end. Can't really go wrong with that unless the random number generator itself is hosed, and even non-mathematicians can understand how that one works. It's not like it's a high-performance application.

They changed a standard to make it compliant with a software??????

Read this and weep: The Final OOXML Update: Part III.

It is so bad as to be almost unbelievable. If this is really true, to call OOXML a standard is just a lie. Standards don't suddenly retroactively change.

True. But when they refuse to do so when offered money for it - then it might become a different matter.

Context? Not sure what you mean here.

After ODF was ratified, some gov'ts were asking M$ what would it take for them to implement ODF support. Requests were refused based on M$' past mantra - "nobody needs ODF support."

happens when they refuse to make their product interoperable with rest of industry what hampers competition.

It already is.

e.g.

[ File Reader for .doc ] -> [ MS Word Editing Engine/App ] -> [ File Writer for .doc ]

No, you wont get support for your own pet format for free from MS. You have to write the plugin yourself like many people have.

Uhm... What are you smoking???

For all the time WinWord exists, M$ was asked/begged/etc to release the filter API. They consistently refused.

Again: there is no filter API published/available to 3rd parties which would allow to implement seamless integration of another file format into M$O suit.

There is a lot of crap floating around, but most of it works through various hacks. (E.g. my friends did implement special import/export for one company - through clipboard copy/paste functions. Sun's ODF plug-in does it by telling M$O that it actually has an EOOXML and does the translation on the fly.)

.. happens when they bundle stuff nobody asked them for,

Untrue. Customers were demanding PDF support. MS puts it in, and Adobe threatens to sue or collect money from MS, while there already exist thousands of PDF writers, commercial and opensource outside of Word.

Likewise customers were asking for ODF and M$ was flat out refusing even acknowledge existence of such requests.

Later they were pressed against the wall and forced to do something on their own - and did it extremely poorly.

MS is just as free to implement the OpenDocument format as anyone else; and they have in fact implemented ODF support.[1]

[1] Microsoft resisted the inclusion of ODF import/export filters for some time, but finally decided to include them:
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050930181153972
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_software

steveha

Credit where it's due. MS did not write the original MS Office ODF support. Sun did. And they open sourced their plugin for MS Office. What I'm curious about now, is: was microsoft dumb enough to re-write the ODF support when they did cave, or did that at least run with what they had? Re-writing would be my guess, just so they could claim ownership and also introduce bugs.. but I'm really curious. And it would appear I guessed right.

LOL reality must be biased too, then.

Remember how they "complied" with the - stupid - EU required ballot screen.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-10363306-75.html

Remember how they basically discredited ISO with the ooxml "do this as word95" standard.
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/01/how-to-hire-guillaume-portes.html
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Microsoft-Office-2007-is-incompatible-with-OOXML/0,130061733,339288332,00.htm

And remember MS own internal memos, halloween documents and all.

Even King Hammurabi got it better than this. At least he ensured the laws were open to all.

But Microsoft has added support for ODF in Office 2007 SP2,

Please let us know when they've managed to get it working.As Rob Weir (among others) has noted:

"If we note the arguments used by Microsoft in the recent past, they have argued that OOXML must be exactly what it is -- flaws and all -- in order to be compatible with legacy binary Office documents. Then they argued that OOXML can not be changed in ISO, because that would create incompatibility with the "new legacy" documents in Office 2007 XML format. But when it comes to ODF, they have disregarded all legacy ODF documents created by all other ODF vendors and take an aloof stance that looks with disdain on interoperability with other vendor's documents, or even documents produced by their own ODF Add-in. The sacrosanctness of legacy compatibility appears to be reserved, for strategic reasons, for some formats but not others. We'll redefine the Gregorian calender in ISO to be interoperable with one format if we need to, but we won't deign, won't stoop, won't dirty ourselves to use the code we already have from the ODF Add-in for Microsoft Office, to make SP2 formulas interoperable with the other vendors' products, to benefit our own users who are asking for ODF support in Office. As I said before, this ain't right."

however it was the ODF guys who weren't even able to spec out something basic as formulas in a spreadsheet specification.

It's not that "the ODF guys" (OASIS TC) "weren't able to", rather they decided it was better to take sufficient time to create a quality OpenFormula language (due in ODF 1.2) rather than do a rush-job on it. In the meantime, pretty much everyone (except MSFT) uses OO.org's formula language.

Since ISO rules (AFAIK) forbid having multiple standards that do the same thing, during the OOXML ISO battle, OOXML was positioned as merely an archival format for the existing corpus of MS Office documents. Now it's been ISO-approved it's increasingly being positioned as a direct competitor to ODF. Think Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD. This war will end the same way eventually with ODF winning and Microsoft on the losing side which it already knows.

This makes me want to live in Germany. Though it seems amazon.de has a bunch of linux notebooks and netbooks, the same models aren't even on amazon.co.uk. I wonder if amazon.co.uk will even list arm based netbooks when they finally hit full force. The paucity of choice on amazon.co.uk is incredible, mostly older models and mostly out of stock.

When you live in a country in hock to M$* so deeply, maybe it's not surprising.

*The use of M$ in place of Microsoft is and indicator of the many years spent watching Microsoft compete fiercely for their market share, in both a legal and illegal manner.

Well, let's see, the OpenXML was definitely in the pipeline before Bill left, and the take no prisoners tactics that he loves is what got it pushed through the standards committee.

Next is ODF translators... which don't work, and in fact delete formulas. Not to mention there Smear Campaign. So we are saying maturity is going back to their ruthless kill-them-subversively methods that got them in trouble in the EU?

Oh, wait, maturity is killing declining products... which Bill did often

Sorry, I don't see a real change listed in at least that section

Well, let's see, the OpenXML was definitely in the pipeline before Bill left, and the take no prisoners tactics that he loves is what got it pushed through the standards committee.

Next is ODF translators... which don't work, and in fact delete formulas. Not to mention there Smear Campaign. So we are saying maturity is going back to their ruthless kill-them-subversively methods that got them in trouble in the EU?

Oh, wait, maturity is killing declining products... which Bill did often

Sorry, I don't see a real change listed in at least that section

Advertising something as "multi-platform" is a joke when one platform is always at least one version ahead of the other platforms: it looks like silverlight 3 support will be available on Windows before Moonlight actually supports silverlight 2.

Now, keeping things that way might not be Microsofts intention in this case but knowing their track record I'm not betting on it.

Having two good standards for office documents would be okay.

Oh oh - more fuzzy thinking there. My research informed me that having two good standards for office documents would definitely not be be okay!

Check this out "The Piemen of Erie" by Rob Weir. In this article he dramatically demonstrates just how harmful it can be to have two standards.

Raven - turns out that everything you say in this comment to which I am responding is so slanted towards condoning Microsoft's boorish behaviour in respect to their bullying through their OOXML that it really makes me wonder how an intelligent man like you could be so badly informed on the issues. I an just curious - were you away in some far away jungle or off on another planet when this whole MSOOXML affair came down? How could you get it all so wrong? When we look into what you have said it certainly appears like you have an agenda, and that agenda does not involve the search for truth. It is as if you just rephrased something you read on an official Microsoft FUD guide. Anybody can see from your record here on Slashdot that you regularly contribute thoughtfully on a broad range of subjects. Nobody could accuse you from that record of being a paid MS shill, but your words come out like one all the same. This is deeply puzzling to me.

Raven - while I was at it, I would like to bring something else to your attention, as I fear that your sources of information may not be the best. You say...

"The [ODF] standard at this version was a little over 700 pages, meaning that the reviewers working every day would have had to review around 4 pages per day; more if they didn't work weekends. This is far from enough time to be able to do a detailed review."

Now in light of my response and the other submitter's observation debunking any lack of attention to detail of the ODF standard, I found the following description of OOXML in the blog "How many defects remain in OOXML?" with an extract pasted below. Turns out it was 10 times the size of the ODF specification - wow! You may find this helpful to clarify your misunderstanding on the situation...

How many defects remain in OOXML?

DIS 29500, Office Open XML, was submitted for Fast Track review by Ecma as 6,045 page specification. (After the BRM, it is now longer, maybe 7,500 pages or so. We don't know for sure, since the post-BRM text is not yet available for inspection.) Based on the original 6,045 page length, a 5-month review by JTC1 NB's lead to 48 defect reports by NB's, reporting a total of 3,522 defects. Ecma responded to these defect reports with 1,027 proposals, which the recent BRM, mainly through the actions of one big overnight ballot, approved.

So what was the initial quality of OOXML, coming into JTC1? One measure is the defect density, which we can say is at least one defect for every 6045/1027 = 5.8 pages. I say "at least" because this is the lower bounds. If we believed that the 5-month review represented a complete review of the text of DIS 29500, by those with relevant subject matter expertise, then we would have some confidence that all, or at least most, defects were detected, reported and repaired. But I don't know anyone who really thinks the 5-month review was sufficient for a technical review of 6,045 pages. Further, we know that Microsoft worked actively to suppress the reporting of defects by NB's. So the actual defect density is potentially quite a bit higher than the reported defect density.

Raven - I appreciate your attempt to enlighten me on the subject. I found your information interesting enough to stimulate me to do a little research of my own. I thought you may be interested to learn that your assumption that there was some kind of equality or similarity in the way that the ODF and OOXML standards were vetted and approved is mistaken. It turns out that there was a vast difference between the two different track taken through the standards approval process for ODF and OOXML. Turns out that ODF passed through a rigorous process called PAS, while it was OOXML that took the easy Fast Track route. This is explained in great detail here - Scroll down to "Fast Track versus PAS".

Permit me to quote from an authority on the subject, Rob Wier...

"In any case, that is why I roll my eyes when people lump PAS and Fast Track together, and say that they are essentially the same process. They clearly aren't. PAS Submitters like OASIS are given intense scrutiny, and are required to document in great detail how their organization and their proposals meet JTC1 criteria. The scrutiny never ends, as a new Explanatory Report is required for every submission, and their status as Recognized PAS Submitter only lasts for a few years before requiring re-approval."

"Fast Track submitters, as Class A Liaisons, on the other hand, are the monarchs of JTC1. They serve for life and are answerable to no one. They can submit a Fast Track on any subject they want, at any time. So a standards consortium like Ecma, with primary expertise in optical disk standards, but never having produced an XML standard before, can rubber stamp the world's largest XML standard and submit it for Fast Track processing to JTC1. And no one can do a thing about it."

Which makes Rob Weir what, exactly?

http://www.robweir.com/blog/rob.html

... I work for IBM, as Chief ODF Architect ...

Also interesting is the fact that, as far as I can tell, these "shills" are editing Wikipedia with their real names, or with well-known handles uses elsewhere that identify who they are. As opposed to "WackyButterfly1965" or something - not a particularly hard thing to do on Wikipedia at all.

Facts. Presented out of context (or without enough of it) have been used extensively on Wikipedia and elsewhere to paint Microsoft and everything they do in a negative light. I'd suggest these people either suck it up now, or stop whining about how Wikipedia is being gamed and use their considerable energy and time to work the website's bureaucracy. $Deity knows they're going to need it. I loved this part of that Groklaw article:

This certainly is an interesting statement. There is nothing I can point to that is false here. Everything here is 100% accurate. However, it seems to be reckless in how it neglects the most relevant facts, namely that the proposals did not make it into ODF 1.2 at Microsoft's sole election.

For anyone involved with OOXML on the Microsoft side, this is sweet revenge. Hoisted by their own petard and so on. I think it's funny as hell.

I heard that ODF documents created in, say, OpenOffice weren't entirely compatible with AbiWord.

Here is a simple study.
Any spec is going to have some ambiguity about how things should be handled in some cases, so compatibility will always depend, to some degree, on whether or not software authors want to be compatible with other implementations. As ODF matures, more of the details will get nailed down, and there should be less compatibility wiggle-room.

Oh come on, Timmothy. Edwards has already been discredited for his astroturfing fake ODF news which he ran under the "Foundation" he's now moved his shit to Facebook and others. His foundation actively lobbied against ODF. He was a shill then, or at least one of Bill's "Useful Idiots", and he's the same now.

Two guys gave themselves a fancy name ("Open Document Foundation"), which opened them doors to some panel discussions. They don't have any role in ODF standardization. All they did in the last couple of years was to act like little MS shills. Last time they attacked the Open Document Standard their role was quickly uncovered.

Their insignificant role does not deserve any attention, but as they trolled their way into mainstream media IBM's chief ODF architect Rob Weir was bothered enough to discuss the technical merits of their "contribution" .

Formulas in OOXML are also underdefined and misdefined, as the spreadsheet formulas in OOXML are not defined and there is no open source implementation.

BTW, here is a link to compatability issues between the major suppliers of ODF:

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/update-on-odf-spreadsheet.html

Also, please note that the version of symphony used in that comparison is 1.3, which is not currently available to the public. If using 1.2, which is the latest version available, there are a lot more incompatibilities.

If by "very old versions" you mean the very latest standards, then yes. ODF 1.2 isn't a spec, it doesn't exist. The ODF committee is working on an update to 1.1 which tentatively they are calling 1.2, but it isn't near completion yet, the number could change and any of the specs could change. The formula section of the (tenatively 1.2) spec references/link to OpenFormula, which itself is not a standard, is not complete, and isn't available to the public. So OoO may have implemented what they think will become the ODF 1.2 specification, they haven't implemented it. Unless you are willing to conceed that OpenFormula needs to be OASIS/ISO certified first, and OASIS is run by sun.... Who also is in control of OoO, so I suppose in a way they would know. Nice of Sun/ODF/OoO to be using undocumented... I mean unpublished not yet standard file formats, isn't it? How nice they are so assured that whatever they want the spec to be, it will be, and it'll be approved, it's almost like they control the standards committee.

It is "in the pipeline"; it's presumably not going to change very much more. So both MS Office 2007 SP2 and ODF 1.2 could have "converged" so to speak. I mean, surely that's a reason why they are members of the OpenDocument TC of OASIS.
An earlier posting by Rob Weir (february 2009): ODF 1.2 committee draft 1
Microsoft announced MS Office 2007 SP2 in april 2009; I do understand that it takes time to implement a large standard :-)
<dream-on-mode>
Now I hope MS will announce they'll support ODF 1.2 in their upcoming Office 2007 SP3, don't buy SP2 in the meantime because it's incompatible.
</dream-on-mode>

Let's see what the ODF 1.1 standard says in section 8.1.3 (Table Cell):

Addresses of cells that contain numbers. The addresses can be relative or absolute, see section 8.3.1. Addresses in formulas start with a "[" and end with a "]". See sections 8.3.1 and 8.3.1 for information about how to address a cell or cell range.

So, addresses are enclosed in square brackets. Now look at what Rob Weir found:

So, going back to my test spreadsheets from all of the various ODF applications, how do these applications encode formulas with cell addresses:

• Symphony 1.3: =[.E12]+[.C13]-[.D13]
• Microsoft/CleverAge 3.0: =[.E12]+[.C13]-[.D13]
• KSpread 1.6.3: =[.E12]+[.C13]-[.D13]
• Google Spreadsheets: =[.E12]+[.C13]-[.D13]
• OpenOffice 3.01: =[.E12]+[.C13]-[.D13]
• Sun Plugin 3.0: [.E12]+[.C13]-[.D13]
• Excel 2007 SP2: =E12+C13-D13
  I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which one of these seven is wrong and does not conform to the ODF 1.1 standard.

Note especially the difference between the Microsoft/CleverAge plugin for MS Office and MS Excel 2007. The CleverAge plugin is *older*. They could have re-used it (why do the work again?).
I just checked, and the committee draft ODF 1.2 has the same requirement (par. 17.645 search for table:formula).