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

Flexibility?

[richie2000]

"It's this need for choice and flexibility that led Microsoft to design Office in a way that supports any XML schemas that a customer chooses"

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.

Re:Flexibility?

[Kamiza Ikioi]

I agree 100%. And, you also have to understand MS mentality here. They see each individual user as a flower of creativity. Ok, that's BS, they don't see that at all.

What they fail to understand is that *shocker* governments should use a unified format for very specific reasons. Anyone from any branch can read any document from any other branch of the government. And, such format should be 100% open, so that should a future format come along that they want to change to, they can write up their own free utility to automatically update all documents.

Wow, that mean that governments can actually move away from the days when every department used its own forms/formats, and paper copies had to be made of everything because every system was proprietary, so the only way to transfer information was to print it out, hand it over, and re-type it in.

That would sound amazing if it had said it in 1995. Its about time that governments stepped up to the plate. Such changes are long overdue.

And, they obviously can't choose a patented/DMCA locked format by MS, which is what MS wants. With the MS Office suite looking to use DMCA to lock out their documents from open source solutions, governments will have high barrior costs to ask MS permission to unlock their documents for them.

MS on the other hand sees such as a way to lock in customers, and exact ultra-high fees to unlock the documents. Anything less, and MS will tell you you're a Commie bastard who's not open to "freedom of choice".

I think it's a given that we all know what MS's definition of "choice" is. Choice is only that which chooses (or by default) to use MS products. Everything else is obviously not choice, because it slaps MS's hand away from your wallet.

By the way, the political opposite of communism, is naziism. I think I'd MUCH rather be called a Commie.

Re:Flexibility?

[PoprocksCk]

This is just Microsoft stretching the truth to spread FUD.

For people who have never used a word processing program that supports OpenDocument (OpenOffice.org being the predominant contender here) -- they would read these claims as "OpenOffice.org cannot put pictures, audio, video, etc. into its documents" which is certainly not true.

Re:Flexibility?

[Trepalium]

In Microsoft's strange twisted world, this is almost true. I doubt the OpenDocument format has any support for compound OLE objects that make up pictures, charts, audio and video embedded into typical Microsoft Word documents. In this case, converting from MSWord to OpenDocument means that you lose the in-place editing of any embedded Excel charts or graphs, or any other editable COM/OLE object you might've inserted into your document.

I suspect the Microsoft spokesperson is well aware of the distinction between what he said and reality, though. What he said has the potential for perhaps someone to re-evaluate the decision. If he had properly represented the deficiency of the format, he would've been ignored because the people making the decision should've already realized they were giving up on the deep Microsoft integration features.

It's about ideology not flexibility

[Ckwop]

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, let me get this straight

[mvdwege]

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

Less Functional?

[vhogemann]

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!

Less functional document format

[jurt1235]

What is meant by that anyway?
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 /. when Bill Gates or another MS friend drops by again.

Re:Less functional document format

[benjcurry]

As far as I can tell, the main breakthrough all these Office suites have made in the last 20 years is to require a 2 GHz processor dedicated to typing.

Re:Results are in early

[Freggy]

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!

I guess Microsoft did not know

[dyfet]

I guess Microsoft did not know the Government of Mass. worked for and must make choices on behalf of the PEOPLE of Mass., and not for or on behalf of Microsoft. Or maybe they still do not understand this. What is one to make of a vendor that publically demands someone choose its products, and on it's terms? Perhaps Halliburton should demand the government choose it to reconstruct New Orleans using Halliburton and demand it is done the Halluburton way, if another vendor is chosen? Perhaps when someone comes out of the "Apple" store, someone from Best Buy should come up to you and demand you purchase Dell PC's from them instead?

Open standards increase competition.

[Monoman]

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.

Always the bad guy

[Zo0ok]

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!

When companies get to big

[dhoughal]

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.

I can't help but wonder...

[Eminence]

After the recent dicussion on their reaction to Google I can't help but wonder what Steve Balmer threw across his office this time.

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.

Beware of Bribery

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many forms of bribery. Massachusetts is not known for having the most honorable bureaucrats and pols. Perhaps Microsoft is too slick to resort to some clumsy form of direct bribery to a politician (but then again . . .) .

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?

Okay...

[Mathiasdm]

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."

Because everybody knows that Microsoft does not want to force a single, closed document format on all state agencies.

Re:Results are in early

[Eminence]

I wonder what the people like apple would be able to do if the wrote a office suite from scratch...

Well, don't wonder - look at the Keynote and compare it to Powerpoint.

So everbody

[MemoryDragon]

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...

Big Win for Citizens and Open Source

[bluelarva]

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.

XML yes but PDF no?

[HighOrbit]

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."

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.

Re:Some areas where Writer is worse than Word

[deaddrunk]

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.

This is probably just me being stupid, but...

[Phase Shifter]

Further, he added, "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."

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.

Re:Battle of ideology?

[hairyfeet]

I can tell you why people around here are switching(students anyway) and that"s $139 for crappy student office.

Having just installed Open Office 2.0 Beta i can see why they are mad.Nice layout,Looks easy to learn,And you can't beat the price!

I can see now why Microsoft wants to lock them in with formats,How else are they going to compete with free?

Gotta love the irony,Open Office is going to do to Microsoft what Microsoft did to Netscape.If the program you are in competition with is $140-Over $400! you don't have to be a perfect replacement,Just a "good enough".And I'm betting that a LOT of those who try Oo 2.0 are going to find it "good enough".

Most folks I've seen aren't using any more features than were around in Office 97 anyway.Funny how the new MS Office ads feature Dinosaurs,With Microsoft not supporting the newest formats and having crazy prices they are starting to look a little Dino to me. ;-)

Wrong Question!

[OmniGeek]

how would you put voice-over-ip into a word processing document?

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-do cument approach is poor design to begin with, but is VERY poor design for public documents.

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.