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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."
And this customer chooses OpenDocument, an XML schema. So, it would appear that either MS Office or Microsoft is not flexible enough to actually "support any XML schemas that a customer chooses". Microsoft spokesman lying through his teeth, sun rises, sun sets, film at eleven.
Money for nothing, pix for free
From the article:
These articles are delicious with irony. I sometimes find it difficult to believe these are real! Do any of the Microsoft PR people ever sit down and read statements they've made?
Anyway, so now Microsoft thinks it knows best what constitutes (irony) the best solution for a government. Certainly Microsoft knows better than any company about ..., force a single, less functional document format... .
Of course the obvious solution (and I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't figured this out, though we may see this in the next article) is for Microsoft to purchase Massechussets and force their document format by fiat. With that approach they get the convenient side effect of being able to foist the format on the state's populus by law.
I think they deliberately misunderstand the issue. The issue here is not functionality. Yes opendoc may actually be less functional than the word-format but guess what Microsoft? I haven't used any of this additional functionality since 1997 and neither has the US government.
The battle for features is over and what's replaced it is a lot more important. What we have today is a battle of ideology. Don't you think there's something a little perverse in a government investing huge amounts of tax payers money in creating all this intellectual property but having made this tremendous investment in time and resources they have to pay a private corporation to get the tools to access that investment?
To be fair, it's not just Microsoft who are perverse like this. Sage Line 50 is a great example of corporate greed. You pay £800 for the piece of software but lord if you want to insert or update information in a third-party program you need to pay around £1500 a year for the developer license. It was this that made me wake up to the reality of the situation: Our company is paying nearly a hundred thousand pounds a year in accountants who enter data in to your software package yet we have to pay you AGAIN to update that data? It's us that paid money to put the data in there in the first place, why should we have to pay you again just to use it from a homegrown program?
It's this greed that the US government is rejecting. In the early days everbody wanted software to help deliver the tremendous savings that computers can bring to a business. They would be a license from whatever vendor they would sacrifice much to get it. Now companies are starting to expect software to deliver a return on investment and they're not willing to tie themselves in to one company. Having many suppliers after your business drives down prices. This is as true with IT as it is with any other sector. The way to ensure you can get many suppliers knocking for your business is to make sure it's easy to switch. Open Office might be a pain at first but the opendoc standard will make it easier to switch. It's a good move in the long run.
Microsoft, Sage or any other company do not have the automatic right to make a profit. The lesson to Microsoft is simple: you were beaten here not because your product was inferior but because you failed to allow people to compete with you effectively. The role of a government in a capitalist society is to promote competition not subtract from it. In this case Massachusetts has done everyone a favour by telling Microsoft that it can cram its vendor-lockin into a bloody big pipe and smoke it.
Simon.
So Microsoft's official position is that a format for public documents that is readable for everyone without exceptions is a bad thing?
Nice to see that they believe in one of the fundamentals of democracy: open access to government information for all citizens.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Also, What do they mean with this "less functional" argument? Last time I checked I could write, draw, do calculations and present with OpenOffice. And I can print all those things too. Witch functionality they're missing? At work, at Rio de Janeiro City public health department, our users don't miss anything... mostly because they were unaware of those "extra functionalities" bundled with MSOffice. Pehaps they're talking about the ability to hold a trojan playload? OpenOffice as far as I know don't support a single macro virus... Ha!
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
What is meant by that anyway?
/. when Bill Gates or another MS friend drops by again.
The goal of a document is to document. Since about version 2 of every document application, it has been able to do that (OpenOffice is not at version 2, but at version 8 if you count StarOffice releases). So if you take a program from the seventies (nice frontend: textmode!) it will also do the trick.
Now looking at modern document formatting applications like MS Word, OpenOffice, Word Perfect and many great others, what does MS Word offer which is so much more functional in document format, so not in general functionality, but just document format?
This is one for Ask
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Every day I see training courses for office announced everywhere, IMO the main reason for those courses is that the interface is so horrid that you have to learn how to do things. I don't call that a "intuitive" interface. I wonder what the people like apple would be able to do if the wrote a office suite from scratch...
What have you been smoking?
I've been given OpenOffice.org trainings to people who had never used it before, and all of them were very impressed by the program. They think the interface is almost completely the same at first sight. There are just some small differences in the way you use it (related to styles etc), but it's only a matter of a few hours to explain these differences. After that, people are at least as productive with OOo as with MS Office. Some are even more productive, because during the training they learned things they did not even knew in MS Office!
Open standards increase competition and MS doesn't want competition. They want domination as do most businesses with a majority market share.
Consumers are starting to realize open standards give them more options and that is a GOOD thing. Businesses are starting to realize the risk (and long term cost) of putting all of their data in a proprietary format. Proprietary formats often make it harder to
* Interoperate with other systems
* Switch to a competitor
If a proprietary format offers NEEDED functionality not offered by an open standard then I say maybe replicate the data for that use.
It is time for gov't agencies to require open standards for data.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
As long as they refuse to support other formats than their own proprietary formats, MS will be easily identified as the bad guy. Not only geeks realise and understand this.
;)
MS will keep fighting, claiming that much of Office's functionality is closely related to their format (which is both true and false), and saying that an open format delivers less value to customers. However, they always risk making people understand they dont need (the advance functions of) office at all, because it is far too complicated.
Naturally, word processors and spreadsheets are 20-year-old inventions - why should a single company be able to keep making huge money from this year after year, with no useful innovation? They simply shouldnt! And they wont. But as long as people believe an office suite should cost $500+ MS will be able to charge that amount. Isnt much they can do when people stop believing that though
Supporting other formats will just increase the speed that people replace MSOffice (because it makes it so much easier to replace it then). So, MS will never support open formats, and will always be the bad guy - which they deserve!
You forgot prong three of the Typical MS Response (tm):
To offer it for free and moot any TCO points.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
I wouldnt say we have a battle of ideology. However, software industry is so old now, that the rest of the industry (and society) expects it to be mature and efficient (like everything else). Proprietary and expensive formats are simply not mature and responsible.
Those using MS Office start questioning: what do we get for our dollars. The value is not there, and closed proprietary formats are good for no one but MS. So people will switch, because they can, and it is the only responsible thing they can do.
I think this is a very good example for what happens if a company gets to big.
Imagine a small software company would do the same: "What, you want us to support OpenDocument? No, I think that's a very bad idea. We won't do that."
What would be the customers reply: "Thank you, Sirs. We think that we try it with one of your competitors."
How can it be that a software company tries to totally ignore a customers wishes? Hey, guys at MS: The customer is the one who pays. You're the one that wants money from customers. Either listen to what your customers want or go to hell!!!
Unbelievable! Sheesh!
D.
But seriously, we are seeing what was predicted with Netscape in the late 90-ties slowly becoming real. When Netscape decided to open their source code many believed (including me) that the open bazaar of OS developers would wipe out then clunky and not to be taken seriously IE. It turned out we were wrong, but only about the timing. Look at the situation now - it's IE which has to catch up.
Back 6 years ago, when I tried Star Office for the first time it clearly wasn't a match for MS Office '97. It simply wasn't good. Now I'm using Open Office 2 beta and I must say it is closing very fast on Microsoft. It's not as polished and not as smooth to use, especially if you are accustomed to MS Office's way of doing things but it improved immensely since Open Office 1 - and that was pretty usable already. I think that now for most of your average office or home word processing or calculations etc. you just don't need MS Office anymore.
And, furthermore, we are dealing here with the same phenomenon that many other industries went through. Word processing and all the other components of office software are becoming common place, just like plumbing, transistor radios or cars. It's not high tech anymore, it's not a big deal, anyone can do it. It's commonplace. And for that you just don't pay premium prices, especially in the field that doesn't deal with material goods.
So the problem Microsoft has with Open Office is twofold. On one hand it's the normal evolution of the technology's acceptance in the society that makes them less and less indispensable. On the other it's the same problem they had with Mozilla - it's not a company, so they can't hurt them by throwing piles of money on the problem. Worse, it's not animated by greed. And, let's be frank, MS guys don't think beyond money - software is their tool for making money, not a way of making a difference. That is a cultural barrier that makes it hard for them to understand those who have different motivation.
However, don't be surprised if Massachusetts backpedals on their decision after Microsoft's promises free copies of XP for the schools, or a new computer lab for "underprivileged" children. Microsoft is a pro at getting their way by any means possible. Massachusetts pols will have to get up pretty early in the morning not to be out slicked by Microsoft's professional grifters and con-artists.
Massachusetts citizens need to let their elected officials know that this decision has popular grassroots support. By the way, RMS is a citizen of Massachusetts, isn't he?
Because everybody knows that Microsoft does not want to force a single, closed document format on all state agencies.
Join the anonymous, help develop the network: http://www.i2p2.de
Well, don't wonder - look at the Keynote and compare it to Powerpoint.
is supporting OpenDocument, Sun, IBM, Corel, KOffice, Adobe, pretty much every company which has something remotely office like, only Microsoft does not do it. Given that the US and EU government also had their hands in the specification of this format, you can expect more things like that to happen. Microsoft finally either has to adopt open standards (which is the usual situation outside of the software world, with government contracts, but Microsoft does not see that) or is shot out. I expect similar things to happen from the EU soon...
Once again this reveals that the real source of Microsoft's wealth and power is actually Office and not Windows. When organizations start to get away from Office, they soon discover that they can escape Windows too. If the state of MA is serious and not just using the threat of OpenDocument to get cheaper licenses for MS Office, then it won't be long before they discover that they can save some more money by moving to Linux rather than having to upgrade thousands of computers to run Windows Vista once MS drops support for earlier versions of Windows.
As we move into a post PC era, large accounts like government organizations will become even more important to Microsoft as the consumer business begins to shrink. So they're going to fight very hard to keep Office in play. So expect a really sweet licensing deal for MA. The funny thing is that MS Office is still a strong enough brand that even if they supported OpenDocument, it probably wouldn't cost them a lot of Office sales and it would avoid the true losses that a hardline stand seems guaranteed to result in. Maybe Gates will realize this and step in...
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Massachusetts's decision is based on idealogical choice and less about technical one. It makes perfect sense for citizen of the state to be able to view government documents without having to require an expensive software purchase. Even if OpenDocument format was inferior to Word's format technically, it still makes sense for them to go with OpenDocument due to idealogical reasons. I just think it's so obvious that government should strieve to be platform agnostic as much as possible. Also it isn't fair for a government which runs off of tax payer's money to endorse one particular proprietary software over another. Imagine if government adopted WordPerfect document format as the standard. Microsoft would have gone nuts over that. I do believe that this is a start of something bigger over time. The idea that government should use open standards is as obvious as reason for the separation for church and state.
I do think it's Microsoft's refusal to support OpenDocument is just making their problems even bigger. Let say f the state government sends some document to school system. Now receiver has to install OpenOffice to open that document instead of just using Word. Having said that I have a feeling Microsoft isn't going to just go away without a whimper. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft sues the state over something like this in attempt to intimidate or delay the migration. Perhaps Microsoft may threatens to audit every government desktop computers for license violation. They already pulled this sort of stunt with Oregon public education and I don't see this sort of tatics as being outside of their usual playbook.
Probably. But that's just a glorified link with some metadata. Not embedded content.
To truly embed VoIP in a Word document, the first thing to do is embed the IP, and the voice can just follow.
Quite why you'd want to confuses me though: it's not like Word documents can have conversations back, so we're basically down a sound file with some IP headers for no good reason.
Well XML is one thing, but PDF (which is the other half of the policy) is a fairly inflexable format for most people. Opening a pre-existing pdf document, edititing, and saving it is not a common-place operation for most office suites. Try googling "free pdf editor" or "gpl pdf editor". You will get links to a bunch trial pdf *writers* and a few evaluation versions of editors. I don't know of a completely free (as in not an evaluation version) PDF *editor*
My other bitch about pdf is that some morons don't know the difference between a scanned (i.e. picture of text without ocr) document that has been saved as pdf and a actual text document that has been written to pdf. Ofcourse, with the actual text, you can atleast highlight, copy, and paste into a new document. No such luck with the picture of text.
I much prefer the layout of OpenOffice. Other than a few holdovers from MS Office (like finding word count), I had no trouble making the change. Going backwards is much harder. For example, it makes sense that controlling paper size and margins would be under the format menu, no? Well, they are in OpenOffice. In MS Office, they are under the file menu in Paper Settings. In OpenOffice, if I want to insert a table, I go to Insert->Table. Of course, that would be altogether too logical for MS. They have a seperate table menu. Now, I suppose that has its own logic, but I haven't seen any reasoning as to why tables are special enough to get their own menus. It's always nothing more than people who are used to one thing being shocked by something slightly different.
Excuse me for using the f-word in my title, but since I got you attention, I'ld like to try and make a point.
A lot of institutions worldwide have tried to force MS into a less monopolistic role. People have tried to get refunds for unused copies of Windows which they had forcedly bought. People have tried taking MS to court. The EU has tried to make MS behave nicely by forcing them to make a Mediaplayer-free version of Windows and there are several other examples, but they all failed to catch the main issue.
Microsoft's monopoly is not built on forcefully sold, pre-installed copies of Windows, nor on some Mediaplayer application, nor on Internet Explorer or even Windows.
Microsoft's monopoly leans on Office, and almost exclusively that. The Office file formats are secret. MS has - in a very clever way, namely by letting people pirate Office in the beginning without shouting bloody murder all too hard - made half the world use Office, on way or another. And now loads and loads of documents are in the MS Office format, people can't switch.
By forcing MS to adopt the OpenDocument format (MS _is_ a member of oasis, by the way) Microsoft monopoly is broken. Boom. With one computer batch-converting old MS Office documents to the OpenDocument format and all other computers running {$anyOS} with {$anyOfficeSuite} you can both choose your own software, save money and be free. Or not, your choice.
If the politicians want to break the MS monopoly, let them break it where it counts: in the MS Office document format area. That's where it matters, hardly anywhere else.
So, this leads me to draw 2 conclusions:
1) Politicians do NOT want to break the monopoly, sadly and ununderstandable. 2) Bill will have nightmares for the rest of his life if the Mass. idea catches on in the rest of the US and the world. I hope it will, though - in the light of the vast marketing budget of MS - I doubt it...
One interesting thing about this. Is if there was a comparison between microsoft office and other free alternatives the free alternatives will generally show up as having fewer features than the microsoft products tested. However any real comparison should really see how many of those features are actually used by the vast majority of people on any occasion. Taking that information on board will probably show that many of the office suites are more than just word processors spread sheats etc etc..
As you say, perhaps MS will come around to supporting OpenDocument when it becomes a common government purchasing criterion. However, given their past record (such as the POSIX interface in Windows and Internet Explorer's idiosyncratic view of HTML), one can expect that it will turn out either to be subtly broken or simply a lowest-common-denominator of support, present only to grab contracts and not intended seriously to be used.
In other words, I don't ever expect to see full-featured, comprehensive support of OpenDocument from MS.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
I have PCs runing win2k, XP and , until recently, even win98. Each newer windows had a newer and apparently "more" functional format for .doc files. the file exetension being no reliable guide to whether
a file would open correctly, and more importantly, save correctly
on any given machine, I gave up. MS obviously means something different
when they say "functional". I have had Open Office for over a
year now and don't screw with incompatibilities that are promised
as increases in "function" but work as a gimmick to force me to pay
for a newer version of the word processor.
Ballmer, will you and Kim Jong Bill please get a clue: The resentment
and rejection of your product is not just due to
the hurt and jealousy of all the little programmers whose careers you
swamped with your bullying ways in the market, its the damn software!
You COULD have sold a "vanilla" or cost reduced version of word that
just stuck to the basics, never obsoleted old documents and left your
flagship product free to bloat up with every feature you could debug
[more or less] but noooo, one cadillac fits all.
'Bye from massachusetts!
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
to put it politely... BOLLOCKS... word throws a wobbly and sticks red crosses in for no apparent reason... even if the embedded object is inside the document (such as an equation, if it's lost the internal bitmap representation, then what you'll see is a BIG RED CROSS. I get it all the time at work with big documents and I'm heartily sick and fscking tired of it... I get the case where there are BIG RED CROSSES in the page view, yet it prints out fine... WHY??? why does it get it together for printing, but cannot get it together for normal viewing... and don't get me started on Word's propensity for completely bollixing up automatic paragraph numbering for no apparent reason...
I'd love to get off word onto OOo 2 at work, but we're trapped in our own fscking morass of obfuscated custom-macros and Access database links that were written ages ago and no one knows how on earth they work... cos the genius who fscking wrote them didn't document them cos he was worried about his job security and wanted to make himself fscking fireproof... pity he left of his own volition and took his knowledge with him...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
That's why the policy reserves PDF for read-only publication.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Try doing anything non-trivial with numbering in Word and it goes seriously wrong a lot of the time as well and requires manual intervention. Automatic numbering is one of the clumsiest parts of Word and should be left out of this comparison since it sucking in OO just makes it the same as Word.
Tables of contents are pretty shambolic in Word too. Try embedding a Visio flowchart in Word then generating a TOC and it creates a copy of the Visio chart as a TOC entry. I mean who the hell thought that piece of genius up.
Auto text is also broken, what it's supposed to do is when you type the first four characters it brings up what it could complete it with, you hit enter and it saves you typing a very long string. However what it quite often does is have the string flicker and when you hit enter it does a CRLF.
So although I'm not defending OO Word is very far from perfect and only sells because there aren't any real alternatives.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
Voice-over-IP in documents and archiving? Does that make any sense at all?
Of course, maybe he means recorded conversations since he also seems to classify "audio" and "voice" separately, but if you have to call the same content by three different names to make it sound like you're offering more features, then he's really not offering as many extra features as he wants customers to believe.
Trying to lock out GPL's software with their little patents and UELA back fired on them in a big way this time. Had they actually proposed a open format in which anyone could play they could have perhaps even strengthed their market. Instead the worst possible outcome has happened the customer turned their back on them. Instead those dirty tactics may have just spelled the end or at least hastened their demise.
Don't think the rest of the states will not follow it is in the best interests of the people. Yes they have plenty of bribery money but it is a no brainer to support a open document format.
Got Code?
So what if Open Office can't support sound and multimedia? It's not like if a government would send out glitzy documents with animation!!! They're civil servants, for crying out loud! They're people who have been trained to be excessively dull, uninspiring and certainly not innovative, so the "dull" Open Office format will suit them perfectly!
See aren't you glad I took that complicated string and enclosed it in XML? Fantastic work! Now all you need to do is fine the encryption string for it to reveal the secret password.
The point is, XML is only useful in complicated schemas to the program that wrote it. Sure you _COULD_ program something to recognize Word's XML, but you're going through recognizing every tag for bold, tables, paragraph marks and so on. That's not really open because it's in XMl. It's open because they publish a clear and easy to use schema for us to implement into other programs.
XML has become the new buzzword but to Microsoft it's nothing more than an ability to stick proprietary data between some XML open/close tags.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
how would you put voice-over-ip into a word processing document?
o cument approach is poor design to begin with, but is VERY poor design for public documents.
No, the question is, why would you put voice-over-ip into a word processing document? The purpose of a word-processing document (text of, e.g., laws and regulations) is entirely different from the purpose of a video or audio record. No need to mix 'em in a single document that citizens need open access to. You can't print video, so keep it separate from things in printed form. It's much easier to access the pieces separately (video players and text processors don't fundamentally need to read one another's formats, and are available separately in platform-agnostic forms.)
Simplicity and ease of public access are best served by uncluttered document formats; all this every-dang-media-format-conceivable-in-a-single-d
Swami predicts: Microsoft will change its mind (either very quietly, or by claiming that this was always their intention) when the cost of stubbornly snubbing the open format becomes insupportable, as other governmental users start mandating open formats.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Bill Gates is probably more right than wrong. If you look at the last 10 or 15 years, hardware costs have droppped a lot compared to software costs. Some hardware is almost at some very low marginal cost level (eg. keyboard, mouse, sound card, etc). A sound card used to cost $100 to $150 around 10 years ago; it costs $20 to "$0" (if integrated into motherboard) now.
Video game consoles are literally sold at a loss becaus the profits that can be made on teh software (i.e. game) is much higher. The console still costs quite a bit but it wouldn't surprise me if companies offer free game consoles in 10 years.
Even the valuation placed on Google (although I'm not sure if Google is a tech company or a media/advertising company) by the stock market sort of indicates a new trend where software companies make money, while hardware ones struggle.
I think Bill Gates will turn out to be right. I don't know if hardware will be free per se, but it will be very cheap comapred to software...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Millions of dollars saved on fruitless lawsuits, perhaps millions more generated by innovative suppliers who employ people to create such software (or who provide paid support for the existing FOSS office suite(s)). Anyone who wishes to interact with the government from that point forward will also have to have the capability of reading and writing documents in the new format.
Problem solved.
This won't work in all cases, perhaps, but when a viable, well-supported open standard exists (tcp/ip vs. SNA, anyone?, Ethernet, perhaps? Maybe a little HTML/XML?), why support a proprietary standard which does nothing but enrich a monopolist and locks you into their format to boot?
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
Microsoft isn't serious about not supporting the format. The fact is that as the OpenDocument format grows in support, Microsoft is going to have no choice but to support it unless they want to start losing chunks of their customer base.
Of course, Microsoft doesn't have to be nice about it. My suspicion is that any OpenDocument file opened in Word is going to be somewhat broken, and likewise any Word document will be somewhat broken as well. This is all due to OpenOffice being a broken format, obviously, and not Office's fault.
Of course OpenOffice will probably do just fine converting between OpenDocument and Word, or at least better than Microsoft Office anyway.
But I do agree that it is important to get a good Outlook killer on board.
Finally, someone in American IT at large stands up to Microsoft. My hat is off to Massachusetts for having the courage and the brains to do so. And, my God, look at Microsoft's nervous, deer-caught-in-the-headlight response. Rattling off a litany of technologies that rarely (if ever) find themselves in bread and butter word processing documents isn't really moving. If that's the best perspective MS can bring to the bargaining table, it should be no wonder why Massachusetts is going open source.
But Microsoft is at a disadvantage here: it's quite rare that a government or corporate IT professional in this country doesn't just sit back and suck-up to MS's bullshit. Up until now, Microsoft has rarely needed to explain itself to it's customers, or (gasp!) evaluate the validity of it's own products. This case shows just how out of practice they really are. An almost historic occasion where the "nobody got fired for choosing Microsoft" idiocy finally checked itself at the door. Here's hoping it won't be the last.