Microsoft Lashes out at Massachusetts IT Decision

scoop writes "Infoweek is reporting that the plan to eliminate the use of Office by the Massachusetts state government (previously covered on Slashdot) has not gone over well with Microsoft. Microsoft's Yates said the company agrees with the adoption of XML but does not agree that the solution to "public records management is to force a single, less functional document format on all state agencies." Microsoft also states they will not support the OpenDocument format. Looks to me Microsoft is scared their biggest cash cow is in danger from a free alternative. Soon I'm sure we'll see a Microsoft funded comparison between Office and OpenOffice."

Comments

Re:quite stupid decision

[Pipedings]

Well, I don't understand why they don't want to support it. The Office 2003 XML format is also open (perhaps a bit less "open", but open anyway) It's not open just because it's XML. XML littered with calls to undocumented, vendor-specific libraries isnt any more open than the previous .doc Formats. And Microsoft is not "stupid" for not supporting OpenDocument. What good cause would you have to use M$ Office for 500$ when you can get OOo free? Oh sure, somebody might actually make use of an obscure M$ Office feature. Then again, an Office suite that can't handle page counts in the hundrets isn't worth anything to me.

Re:Flexibility?

[Bert64]

He also states:
"this proposal acknowledges that Open Document does not address pictures, audio, video, charts, maps, voice, voice-over-IP, and other kinds of data our customers are increasingly putting in documents and archiving."

how would you put voice-over-ip into a word processing document? if it's stored in a file then it's not exactly travelling over ip anymore.. it's merely a voice recording in a file, for which many formats already exist..
As for voice, audio, video, pictures etc, there are already documented open standards for such files, and opendocument will include these files in their original format inside the zip container.. what's the point of converting existing open formats into an xml representation of the same format?

Re:Beware of Bribery

[mwa]

However, don't be surprised if Massachusetts backpedals on their decision...

They already have. Only they backpedalled away from Microsoft Office XML.

The previous draft of the standard allowed the use of Microsoft's XML file formats. Microsoft even changed their XML licensing in response to Massachusetts initial concerns.

Not to be hood-winked, lots of open source/open data/open information supporters took time to educate the drafters on exactly how Microsoft's format was not free. Take note of Groklaw articles regarding Mass., XML, and OpenDoc.

This is a huge win for open standards and democracy. The MA drafters' first priority has been citizen access to information and, once explained, they clearly understood that Office's formats are not "free" as in "freedom of the people to access government information."

Arguments about any quality or attribute of file formats other than free access to all citizens are not going to fly anymore in MA. Here's hoping other governments learn from this.

OpenDocument is a Good Thing

[chris-chittleborough]

OpenDocument is an OASIS standard, but it comes from the StarOffice/OpenOffice people. They obviously put a lot of work into developing a good set of formats for office documents, as opposed to letting the coders design the format. (I'm a coder, but ...) They make heavy use of W3C standards such as CSS, XSL-FO, SVG and MathML, so there's lots of potential for interopability. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument for a good introduction. You can download the OpenDocument specification itself from http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?w g_abbrev=office. From what I've read, it's an excellent piece of work.

Contrast this to Microsoft's poorly-documented new XML format, which is mired in the deep and dangerous swamps of backward compatibility with everything from OLE onwards.

Which would you trust?

Some areas where Writer is worse than Word

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

What specific gripes do you have with Open Office? What does MS Office do for you that Open Office doesn't?

I'm not the poster you're replying to, but I've also expressed the opinion that OpenOffice.org is (at least for now) inferior to MS Office in several ways. Here are a few, from direct personal experience, about Writer vs. Word in particular:

• The usability is terrible.
  • Shortcut keys for selecting styles and inserting special characters, anyone? Writer is a goddamn word processor, and I shouldn't have to reach for my mouse every two or three characters in order to type common special symbols and do routine formatting.
  • I have similar gripes about direct formatting. Where are the shortcut keys (or even the menu commands, sometimes) to simply remove all character formatting or all paragraph formatting and return to the style's default settings?
  • Navigating the cursor around things like text boxes and tables is almost impossible to do reliably.
  • Want to update a table of contents that's marked non-editable? Try right-clicking on it to get the menu option and... oh, you can't.
• Mail merge is terrible. It has basic limitations when it comes to the output produced (though in fairness some of these are expected to be fixed in the forthcoming OOo 2.0). The whole data sources architecture is broken horribly, particularly if you're using a Calc spreadsheet as a source. In MS Office, it just works. I have watched more than one person give OpenOffice.org a fair try, experience its mail merge, label it something we wouldn't repeat in polite company, and go back to Word, probably never to return.
• Tables of contents don't work reliably. Try doing a typical book thing of having an abbreviated table of contents with just the chapter titles, followed by a more detailed one with the sections as well. Writer can't, at least not without getting all the page numbering and title information seriously wrong.
• The styles system isn't just confusing, it's broken in several places. Try doing anything non-trivial with numbering, and it all goes to pieces. Try specifying useful things like relative sizes in a supposedly hierarchical system (as in, I'd like the test for a Heading 1 to be 120% of the size of the main body text) and you find that either you can't, or your relative information is just converted to absolute values immediately, missing the point completely.
• The page layout tools have some frankly bizarre limitations. You don't seem to be able to place a text frame of an exact size, and then insert a table into it to fill the frame, for example. You have to have a blank line outside the table afterwards, whether you want it or not.

I could go on for a long time, but the upshot is that OpenOffice.org Writer is fine for routine word processing where all you need is typing a letter. Then again, so is any glorified text editor. When it comes to the extra stuff a WP is supposed to bring you -- better formatting/page layout, stylesheets/document templates, tables of contents, mail merge, etc. -- it just has too many elementary bugs and usability flaws for me to recommend it over MS Word any time soon. It's a good effort, and with time and some insight from the project leaders, it could easily overtake Word in these areas, but it's not there yet.

Re:Some areas where Writer is worse than Word

[Noksagt]

What specific gripes do you have with Open Office? What does MS Office do for you that Open Office doesn't?

In this context, the argument should really be about OpenDocument vs. .DOC or MS XML file formats, as that is what MS has complained about. I think people would find it far more difficult to come up with gripes.

In fairness, that isn't the question parent post responded to. I agree that OO.o isn't perfect. But I disagree with some of the complaints.

The usability is terrible.

Applies to both products. There was an IT Conversations piece about how some support guy helped some famous actress/screenwriter with MS Office & ended up removing all functionality except save, print, and bold.

Shortcut keys for selecting styles and inserting special characters, anyone?

This doesn't work for me in MS Office. I'm sure that the problem exists between the keyboard and chair, but I assign a shortcut key to the angstrom or degreee symbol or various greek letters & they don't persist beyond the current session. That is, I close office & reopen it & the shortcuts don't work. Even if I open the same document.

Assigning persistent macros in OO.o works fine for me. (What's your problem? Ease of assigning them?) However, a better solution is to use deadkeys, Multi_key and/or Mode_switch in X. This makes my special symbols work in every application.

Writer is a goddamn word processor, and I shouldn't have to reach for my mouse every two or three characters in order to type common special symbols and do routine formatting.

Again, this is far from my experience. I'm anti-mouse as well.

I have similar gripes about direct formatting. Where are the shortcut keys (or even the menu commands, sometimes) to simply remove all character formatting or all paragraph formatting and return to the style's default settings?

I have a macro to do this:

MyText = Shape.getstring()
Shape.setString(MyText)

Navigating the cursor around things like text boxes and tables is almost impossible to do reliably.

Different from MS is not impossible. I find programs to be frustrating. But I also think Word Processors were never intended to be layout programs, so I forgive both.

Want to update a table of contents that's marked non-editable? Try right-clicking on it to get the menu option and... oh, you can't.

Works over here (OO.o 1.1.4 on Linux).

Tables of contents don't work reliably. Try doing a typical book thing of having an abbreviated table of contents with just the chapter titles, followed by a more detailed one with the sections as well. Writer can't, at least not without getting all the page numbering and title information seriously wrong.

Again, seems to work here.

OO.o (and Abiword/Gnumeric) are already serving as needed supplements to MS Office in our organization & are solely used for some major documents by some people. Despite your personal gripes (some of which are legitimate bugs), it is being used right now.

Re:It's about ideology not flexibility

[arose]

OOo puts the images together with the XML into an archive (a simple zip in fact), this not only gives you a self-contained document, but also saves space.