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Microsoft Just Says No to .Doc Replacement Panel
Schlemphfer writes "OASIS is a nonprofit consortium backed by top technology companies, and the purpose of this organization is to set open standards for desktop and business software. They've just announced a working group that will create an XML-based document format standard for openoffice.org. And even though Microsoft is a member of Oasis, they aren't going to be taking part in this group. It's a logical move on Bill's part, considering that standardized XML docs are sure to weaken the hold that Microsoft's proprietary .doc format has on business software."
Office 11 will have an XML format available, but the default will still be .doc.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Proven in court. Why would they turn away from monopolistic behavior when their punishment for it is negligable?
Office is the cash cow, and they have done their best to eliminate viable competition.
The only reason that Corel Wordperfect lives on is the legal community, and a few bullheaded supporters that will not change. (not that refusal to change is bad in this case.)
Why would anyone logically think that they would embrace a standard that will put their competitors on an equal playing field?
A standard that they cannot "extend" easily at this point without lots of bad publicity.
I think that they are going to "wait and see" if it flies, then embrace and extend it after it sticks. It is in their benefit to wait for it to fail, or for more time between their conviction and their extension of this standard. They don't want to get their hand slapped again so soon.
Cuchullain
"If sharing a thing in no way diminishes it, it is not rightly owned if it is not shared." -St. Augustine
I believe you've misunderstood the article. This isn't about Microsoft publishing specs to their .DOC format (which Kotar-Kotelly's Final Decree requires them to do) but rather their unwillingness to participate in the creation in a new format that will be the doom of Microsoft Word.
As you say, hardly surprising, but it's important to note the details.
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
First, although XML seems more 'open', in reality it is simply a higher-level encoding that may or may not be easier to understand but is guaranteed to both take longer to parse and take up more space than the conventional .doc format because of the size of the tags, making this a downgrade 'optimization' of both speed and size -- where is the win here?
;-)
.doc and .pdf instead of HTML, and giving HTML a fancier name for the new millenium isn't going to change it. Anything tougher than bold, italics, and tables has been proven to be an O(n^2) representation in HTML and has been neglected because nobody wants to download a meg of webpage.
Funny. I just made a "hello world" document using Word 2000 and it was 19 KB.
Lack of features -- there's a reason people are still using
If you seriously think that XML is just a fancy HTML, then there's no hope of you understanding why this open standard is a good thing in the first place.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
IMHO, Microsoft's closed office formats are the basis for its monopoly in the Office market. I love LaTeX and use it when I author articles myself. But when I work with others, guess what? I have to use Word.
I've tried using LaTeX with several groups and each group has decided to move back to Word. It is just too familiar, too standard.
The sad part is that I absolutely hate Word as much as I dislike any other program. It has nothing to do with my feelings towards MS. Word is just a poorly done program.
In the real business world, Office will be king until MS opens its format. StarOffice (which I've used quite a bit) is nice, but at 99.5% compatability, it just isn't good enough. No one wants to lose a business deal because they don't use the standard.
I highly doubt MS will ever release its hold on the Office formats. Of course, they are going to XML, but that doesn't mean the format will be open and readable to competitors.
Isn't Microsoft .doc format based on XML already?
Yes, but this doesn't really help a whole lot. XML is a standard for designing document formats, it is not a format in its own right. The fact that Microsoft's format is "based on XML" really only says that they will use HTML-like tags <foo>some text here</foo>, it doesn't say that how their word processor will interpret those tags, or even what the tags will be, etc.
What's wrong with RTF or straight-up ascii?
Try embedding a spreadsheet in RTF, and get back to us (is this question for real ?)
I was under the impression that Microsoft Office 11 was promoting their own??? version of XML. If that is the case, I am sure that BillG wouldn't want anything else as a standard
No, Microsoft are using their own document format. It's not a "version of XML", XML is a specification for writing document formats. It isn't a format in its own right. Bill couldn't care less if something else became standard, but the issue here is convenience. Microsoft may want to be able to add tags to their document format, as they add features to their software. It's really a case of the "not invented here" syndrome -- everyone likes to invent their own format. Even with standards like POSIX, C++, C, and HTML, any vendor of consequence adds their own vendor extensions.
Yes, MS isn't going to open up one of its proprietary license. Especially one that is so widely used. If this comes as a surprise, you need to soak your head.
"Proprietary licenses" are not the issue here. Microsoft are moving to an XML based format, and they already allow developers access to documentation for their formats. Moving to XML will make their formats more accesible -- it might not make much difference to a serious implementor, but it will make it much easier for the average perl hacker to do something with their documents.
The issue is that MS don't want someone else controlling the format that their software uses. It's simply more convenient if you have complete control over the specifications of your format. Compatibility requires some discipline, and possibly a certain amount of inconvenience. Whether or not that inconvenience is worthwhile depends on the merits of the format, which is why Microsoft are playing "wait and see".
In any case, I doubt Microsoft would use a standard format as their native format, at best they would base their native format on a standard and add a bunch of vendor extensions to it.
Why do people think XML is a panacea for proprietary document formats?
.doc file here]
[Insert binary blob of data that is currently a
Lookeee! Now it's XML. Isn't that so much better?
No, I don't think MS is going to do anything that awful, but realize that XML is not magic. It does nothing by itself to make a document more open. If you have lookup table values in the XML data then you're still screwed unless you know what the actual lookup table is. You can have utterly meaningless tags with random data in it. If you don't have agreements on what fields actually mean then all you have is content without value. Yay.
Frankly, all XML really does is explode a file's size by encapsulating data with tags. Whoop de doo. You have to have a rigorous and complete document specification, and while a DTD may fulfill that need it doesn't always. With a rigorous and complete spec though then XML is redundant - you can just as easily parse a binary file at that point. And look! You can do it with less memory and CPU. Funny that.
Microsoft Office file formats are the lynchpin to their dominance of the computer software world. Because everyone has Office, no one can switch since the defacto exchange format is MS Office docs. Small companies/organizations can effect wholesale change to some degree but still have difficulty trying to interact with other businesses. Non-techs don't understand why you can't read their Word doc b/c what else could you be using? This causes pain for anybody who tries to switch and the quickest relief of pain is to fork out a few hundred smackers for a copy of Office.
Microsoft also enforces its planned obsolesence in the same way. Since new machines only come with the new version of Office, any existing organization is eventually infected with the 'upgraded' versions (complete with their 'smart' features that are either annoying or useless to 99% of the consumer base). Once these documents begin to float around and not open quite right in old versions of Office, everyone needs to upgrade. Otherwise, countless billable hours will be lost to futzing with file formats. $400 for an Office license quickly pays for itself when you're billed out at $50-$100 per hour. Its not the most desireable path, but for a struggling business, its the quickest pain relief available.
File formats also further entrence the Windows operating system. Clearly, linux and unix are out with no native MS Office suite. While I admire the open source projects and their ability to continually reverse engineer the moving target of MS file formats, it is impossible to keep up and they can never provide 100% compatibility which is imperative for a working daily interaction with MS Office users. Even on the Mac with Office X (touted by MS ads for its full compatibility), there are roadblocks to easy transion. My wife uses Office at work because she has to interact with others who do. She recently tried to move to Mac but couldn't because her files weren't quite right. The symbols didn't translate correctly, which might not bother business folk, but as a scientist, it meant that all her technical papers would require endless fixing just to do a little work at hoem. So she's back to a Microsoft Windows box. How fortunate for Redmond that the software they supplied wasn't capable enough for her to make the 'switch'.
All of this hinges on the ability of Office to maintain a closed file format. It keeps users trapped in Office due to compatibility with their coworkers and colleagues. It forces users to upgrade their perfectly good software and shell out more $$$ to MS just because someone else in the office has a new machine. It locks users into the blessed Windows OS again solely for the sake of compatibility and ease of document exchange. MS will never agree to a default open file format for its applications as it would break their stranglehold on both office productivity software and operating systems, the only two profitable portions of their business. Even the new XML formats that promise self describing data storage will only pay lip service to the critics as they wrap up their proprietary binary formats in easy to read, text tags.
And this time it would be very simple. Once the XML document standard has been settled, the US government needs to mandate that any wordprocessing software used by the government must use the XML open starndard, no exceptions. Give the industry one year from the adoption of the the standard to implement it in their software. After which, any document processing software which does not conform is automatically excluded from any consideration by the government. No one is forced to open up their proprietary systems. It's their choice. Choice is good, even for arrogant companies like Microsoft.
-- Will program for bandwidth
With the amount of marketshare that Word has on the wordprocessing market, I don't think anything will cause its 'doom' anytime soon.
OpenOffice.org is a tremendous threat to M$ Office. I have said before that all OOo needs is for a few major corporate users of office suites to spend a fraction of the $ they send to Redmond instead on funding the final polish of OOo and the benefits of essentially zero $ cost coupled with open file formats and free-as-in-freedom will take care of the rest. If M$ does not see this as a real and serious threat, they are fools. (I believe they do see it as a threat, and will act accordingly) Boeing is on board, it shouldn't be too hard to get AOLTW and a few other obvious examples, and soon the dominoes will begin toppling. M$ cannot win the fight in the long term. They may win some battles, but they cannot win this war.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
I doubt anyone has any kind of special attachment to word
Actually they do, it's called experience. Word sure may not be the best WP out there, but people are familiar with it, and in the terms of business productivity, that means more than being "the best". Businesses have a HUGE investment in training their staff on how to use software, and once that expense is incurred, you better have a damn good reason to incur it again. And seeing as how businesses make up the overwhelming _paying_ majority of Word users, I don't think it's going to disappear tomorrow.
RagManX
Hmm... maybe I've just made your point for you. =) The albatross around Microsoft's neck has sort of always been that backward compatibility, hasn't it?
What's most important in the article above, though, is that it makes Microsoft's stance on interoperability crystal clear.
Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!
If AbiWord, Open Office, Star Office, Word Perfect, and any other Office Suite package (KOffice?) settle on a standard common XML format, it IS going to be big.
All it takes is one *single* library to convert Microsoft
And then the CMS solutions start using it, and then Microsoft has to upgrade Office so that Office can read these files, then you suddenly do have a viable alternative.
Will it happen? Beats me. If the standard is good, simple, easy to understand and all the other office suites implement it then yes I think it has a very good chance of having a big impact. If everybody bickers about it, nobody implements it, or the standard sucks (look at RDF) then Microsoft will eat our lunch.
Frankly, all XML really does is explode a file's size by encapsulating data with tags. Whoop de doo. You have to have a rigorous and complete document specification, and while a DTD may fulfill that need it doesn't always. With a rigorous and complete spec though then XML is redundant - you can just as easily parse a binary file at that point.
That's just false. With a rigorous and complete specification for a language you still have to write a parser for that language. But with XML, you use one of the dozen off-the-shelf parsers, including the one that probably ships with your operating system or browser. Guess what, these office documents will probably work _out of the box_ with pre-existing XML browsers (Mozilla, IE 6) and CSS stylesheets. Or at worse, an XSLT could do the transformation on either the client or server side. The virtue of standards is that you can leverage standard tools.
A binary file format would typically need a binary plugin.
That's a cool idea, but unfortunately it will never happen. Have a look at AdBusters. They've got a number of great ads ready to air, but no network will show them because they run against the commercial grain of the rest of the sponsors. Rest assured, the media giants do *not* want to waste all their hard work kissing Microsoft's ass just to throw it away for a few million worth of ad revenue.
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