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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."
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.
But, I guess everyone will have a great time bashing MS for doing the obvious...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
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
Why should Microsoft change formats? They are presently in a position (in regards to office software) where they can force their own "standards" on everyone else. They continue to dominate because there are not reliable, transparent converters. If they were to adopt a document format where other companies software could edit documents created by Word, there would be little reason to stay with Office. I personally always use plaintext wherever I can, I don't want to rely on any document format (no matter how common) to continue to exist for long periods of time.
"XDocs," the code name for a new product in the Microsoft Office family, streamlines the process of gathering information by enabling teams and organizations to easily create and work with rich, dynamic forms. The information collected can be integrated with a broad range of business processes because XDocs supports any customer-defined XML schema and integrates with XML Web services. As a result, XDocs helps to connect information workers directly to organizational information and gives them the ability to act on it, which leads to greater business impact.
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Cheese it! It's the FEDS!
RTF and Text are not good at all... Especially when you want send an email saying "The meeting is at 10:30am. See you there", we need Office XP doc file, with a couple of signature attachments -- better yet, copy a PPT slide from standard company template and highlight the 10:30 with big, bright colors.
Call this post a flamebait, but most people that use "Word" do that stuff.
S
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
Straight-up ascii? That's what XML is (and RTF for the most part, except when you want to embed stuff).
And don't even get me started on RTF. Have you ever looked at that crap? I worked on an open source xsl:fo to RTF converter and I'd have to say that RTF is extrememly anoying to work with.
Microsoft has a RTF specification doc. but this is notoriously full of holes and ambiguities. There is a reason that RTF still works best with Office: they don't tell you how exactly to implement it.
It's tremedously hard to debug, ugly, verbose(more so than xml), hard to read. I hate RTF. I've had dreams when i kick it in the forehead and strangle it underwater. But that's just me.
Compare an XML document with a RTF document and you'll see what I mean.
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
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.
Have a look at this http://www.1dok.org/eng/index.html
The site says : 1dok.org is part of a programme of the Ministry of Economics, Technology and Transport (MWTV) and the Schleswig- Holstein Technology Foundation (TSH) funded out of the Innovative Actions of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) by the European Commissions GD Regio.
I believe their intention is to base it on OpenOffice format, they want to make it the official office data format for the German government, and may later for all the Europen governments.
It's not that Microsoft didn't *want* to contribute. Here's their proposed DTD:
Err..umm..UNIX is a proprietary OS. There's a very good reason Linux is referred to as a 'UNIX work-alike.'
Ye Gods, though, go take a look at a 'history of UNIXes' chart. You think Win95 vs 98 vs ME vs NT4 vs 2K vs XP is bad? You kids don't know how nice you have it now adays; even several years ago, at least it was starting to coalesce into BSD versus SVR4.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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.
Tell your writers to check what MS is doing before putting their foot in their mouth and auto-bashing MS. MS has been talking about Office 11 for weeks now with their new XML based file format. Also they said on this issue they are taking a wait and see approach. Now I fully believe MS will tweak their XML so it's not fully compatible with others, but I'm going wait and see so I can legitimately complain.
In related news, slashdot.org has changed its mission statement. Instead of bringing you the latest _news_ (which is now done more effectively by Google), they are now commited to keeping you up to date on each and every way MicroSoft protects its assets, screws it's customers, and opens the web to anyone by spreading software with severe security holes. After the physical move of the servers a while ago, the editors now announce the immediate move of the site to the new domain: slashdot.microsoft.com .
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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.
This week we learned that Windows and Office are the heart of Microsoft's monopoly, financially speaking.
Office, one of MS's two profitable divisions, gives Microsoft a 79% profit margin for each product sold. I have a feeling that if your average Joe only KNEW about openoffice.org as an alternative, they'd use it in a heartbeat. Businesses might be harder to convince, but when I told my dad about OO.o, he just about shat himself. $400 saved.
If the Internet community can raise $100K (in what was it, 5 weeks?!) to free Blender, surely if given enough time we could raise a million for say, a Superbowl or Oscar ad in 2004. I'm sure there's more than one corporate competitor of Microsoft's that wouldn't mind kicking Bill in the financial balls by making a modest contribution to the OO.o publicity effort.
I can see the ad now...
"Coming up next, the Oscar for Best Picture..."
CUT TO BLACK.
FADE UP:
MEDIUM SHOT OF a SILVER CD-ROM on a DESK with "openoffice.org" scrawled in BLACK SHARPIE.
AS WE SLOWLY ZOOM IN TO THE CD-ROM...
ANNOUNCER: Hey, America. Four hundred bucks is too much to pay for Office software, don't you think? But now there's an alternative you can download for free and copy for your friends. It's called OpenOffice.org. The people who make the "monopoly" version of Office don't want you to know about it. But we do. So visit www.Openoffice.org and give it a try. This message was paid for by thousands of Internet users around the world who thought you should know about alternatives to supporting the monopoly.
TEXT: "OpenOffice.org -- A free alternative"
FADE TO BLACK.
I'd put ten bucks in for this ad. Just the articles ABOUT the ad and how it was financed would be great publicity.
(Oh, and I hereby release all the text above under the open content license, v1.0.)
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
Microsoft XML Architect and W3C XML Standard Co-creator Jeal Paoli announce XML integration with "Office 11" on November 14th...
Open Source community (in no doubt lead/prodded/cajoled/wrangled by Sun's Scott McNealy) tries to upstage W3C's work on XML by producing their own standard on November 20th.
Can you say "wanna-be"?
Also, I think the "editors" of /. should be lynched for turning an honest response from Microsoft into a "we-don't-play-that-no-mo" response. Microsost NEVER said that they weren't going to work within that working-group or not. CowboyNeal et. al. are just a bunch of freakin' gits who love to "sucker-punch" anyone they can.
I think /. should change their background color to "yellow" - because this STINKS of "Yellow Journalism"
ScottKin - looking for CowboyNeal so I can PUMMEL him into consciousness.
I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!
This is no worse than my company sending out a new e-mail policy as an attached Word document.
It had no fancy formatting, and was essentially a list of do's and don'ts for corporate e-mail usage. One of the items on the list was "don't include unnecessary attachments - if it can be said in plain text, don't make it a Word document"...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
So maybe McAfee or Symantec or someone like that, slipped a few bucks into Microsoft's pocket to ask 'em to oppose the new format. ;-)
(I love coming up with this crazy shit.)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Because XML is highly compressible, use of XML does not necessarily increase file size. The Gnome apps that use XML data formats store it compressed as gzip; I just took a typical small Excel spreadsheet, which takes 20.5 kbytes in Excel format, and saved it in the Gnumeric XML-based format: it's 3K. Uncompressed, it's 37K, but that doesn't matter, as the uncompressed format is never kept either in disk or in memory all at one time.
It would be much smarter of Microsoft to participate; then they can obfuscate and delay the new standard. Their refusal to participate makes me suspect that perhaps they beleive they have some patents that might apply, and don't want to get accused of acting like Rambus when they spring the patents on the committee to try to shut down the new standard.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
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.
My deviantArt site
.doc is a simple dump of the memory state,
False. The ".doc" format is definitely not simple. It's also not a raw dump of memory, it's objects that have been serialized into OLE structured storage, which you can think of an evil twin of the already evil FAT file system.
Probably one of the *least* robust file formats I know of
Yes, that's true.
The era of adding genuinely useful features to productivity software is long past. I defy you to find any company (including Microsoft) where more than 5% of the people use more than 5% of the features in MS-Office. Feature creep in that product is addressing a diminimus minority. Sure, you can do all kinds of clever stuff with VBA - who actually needs to? Very few people.
The one and only time in recent memory I have tangled with VBA was to borrow from a colleague a script which implements a basic feature that MS-Access (2000) is simply missing - save a table as CSV. That's right, it can't do it. It can put it on the clipboard, but as any non-techie who wangs data around using Excel will tell you, the world stops at row 65,535. Lame.
Why do people upgrade from MS-Office 97 to 2000 to XP? Not for features, for one of two reasons - (a) they get a new computer and the old version won't run, or far more commonly, (b) they start receiving too many .DOC files by email that their software won't read. MS not only has the sense to stick with the impenetrable binary format, but to make an incompatible change to the default save format each release to force the upgrade path. Forget XML - the .DOC is the lingua franca of non-techie document exchange. There is a 3-way tie for second place between .PPT, .XLS and those little winmail.dat calendar thingies from Outlook.
I use StarOffice 5.2 for day to day munging of MS-Office files, for which it is fine, and it has come a long way from earlier versions, but it still needs work in the one word processor feature that really matters - handling .DOC - nowadays it supports even fancy stuff like change tracking, fonts are mostly their though it suffers from more "layout creep" than exchanging files from one setup of MS-Word to the next (what a bunch of lameness, making layout depend on the print driver, Word's worst bug IMHO).
ISTR that MS was originally proposing to use XML in Office 2000 when it was first on the drawing board. Some PM pulled that piece of business suicide away right quick.