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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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Sounds like the making of a third rate suite...
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'?
They might do that eventually, but right now they will just give the software away to the state for free.....IT managers like free, and it avoids TCO arguments.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Last time I checked, it wasn't possible to embed "voice-over-IP" in M$ documents either..
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
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.
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.
However, I suspect we may see a reversal soon. Because the traditional MS response to this sort of thing is either to claim support, but embedd MS extensions in it (which is more or less what they did with the last version of Office and it's suposed XML support), or to write support but make it really suck. Watch for the next version of Office to have OpenDocument support, but for the support to be poor and buggy.
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
We can easily solve this dispute by stating that both interfaces are crap.
-- Cheers!
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."
I can't believe that Open Document does not address pictures, but what I find even harder to believe is that anyone would want to put VOIP in a document.
-- Cheers!
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.
Rumor has it that MA has been threatened with a chair...
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.
What makes it more humourous is that I believe he meant to say "HTML standards". If it didn't comply with HTTP standards, it might have a bit of trouble connecting to servers. :-)
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
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...
Just for clarification - what do you mean by 'eats large documents' - do you mean it copes well? I hope not because having had to work on courseware developed by others in Word, in my experience, the software chokes (ie crashes and corrupts files) big time on large documents regardless of whether they are in one large file (ie: >200 pages) or split into chapters. Image placement is very erratic and on most Word-originated projects we move all of the text and graphics into either Pagemaker or InDesign.
If you have ever seen a large Word document where all the image placeholders have become replaced with a large red cross you will know what I mean. Hooray for regular backups.
AT&ROFLMAO
Yeah they will get a million monkeys typing away on word and a million monkeys typing away on open office and the monkey that actually figures out that it is doing something pointless will be the one who decides which word processor is best. Then microsoft will spank that monkey... forgive me Im tired and I have to go to bed now.
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.
It really depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Editing math equations in MS Office is quite painful. You have to click on things to get symbols, and it takes too long. With OO.o, you can just type and have the symbols appear, or optionally, you can click on symbols and have everything happen much slower. Lets remember OO.o is only in its infancy compared to MS Office, and is being developed much faster. It won't take long for before it surpasses MS Office. Just look at how much more advanced KDE/GNOME/APPLE UI, is than Microsoft's desktop. Microsoft improves things so slowly, that open source will be lightyears ahead of them in about 3 years. Internet explorer should be getting tabs as soon as IE 7 is released, probably sometime in 2006.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The corporate version of a temper tantrum. We're going to take our XML schema and go home!
MSFT employees are, by and large, smart and intelligent. Collectively all that goes out the window. Makes me wonder if Ballmer is taking too much of a hand in day to day operations. That kind of stupidity can only come from the top.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I love the statement from microsoft that it agrees that xml is a great idea but that the think the current standards are low and that they do not want to be forced into using them.
I know nobody here needs to be told this, but that is bullshit.
If the xml based standards are too low, M$ with its gazillions of cash reserves could come up with a superior xml office document format, release it under a completely open format, and then use their monopoly, um market share to force it into use.
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.
That is NOT Word. That is a user inserting an image as a link on a drive you do not
That said - Word does accumulate large amounts of cruft. We regularly pass docs aorund for review, and because the department is using a multitude of language settings, I invariably have my nice English text come back thinking it is Brazilian Portuguese or French.
It also had a document shredder called the "Master Document" feature. Something writers tell each other to never use.
Is anyone working on an open source OpenDocument import/export filter for Microsoft Office? Just like Firefox for Windows (as a transition vehicle from Internet Explorer), that'd help start to wean people away from Microsoft Office.
Have you tried OOo 2.0 beta yet? It kicks ass. It's quick, stable, smaller footprint than MS Office, has all the functionality I've ever used from MS Office, as well as features that I need that AREN'T in MS Office.
If all that wasn't enough, it handles almost every oddball, complex previously created MS Office file I feed it. I have some spreadsheets and Word templates that I'd never expect to work in OOo, but all except one work perfectly.
Wanting to print in booklet form, I downloaded a MS Word template, and it works fine in OOo 2.0 beta under Suse. The template in question is at http://rickyspears.com/blog/?p=76 . However, I've found that it may not be necessary -- it appears that the functionality is built in to OOo, in the form of some of it's print options.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
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...
And obviously these free office viewers work on other systems than windows? No.
You still need to buy MS system to view them.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
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..
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?
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:
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.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
And it is big business. Lawyers, accountants, etc dictating, saved in a word document then sent over IP to a secretary either in the office or in India.
You're seriously suggesting typing maths as a reason to use OpenOffice.org? <boggle>
Have you ever used a serious maths typing tool like TeX?
Then wouldn't it be a good idea to wait most of those three years to be sure of that before committing to a change?
I can understand moving away from MS Office because of the closed, proprietary document formats. In fact, I think that's one of the two really good reasons to do so right now, the other being cost. But let's not kid ourselves that OpenOffice.org is a technically superior product, OK?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
...is that is was Microsoft THEMSELVES who helped form OASIS - the group that came up with the OpenDocument schema. If Mr. Ballmer can stop throwing chairs and primal screaming for a few seconds, perhaps he can explain why MS pulled out of OASIS at the last minute and why MS Office will not accept that format. Specifically now MS, why is this format less functional? HINT: it's not an answer to say, 'because we don't control it'.
Either way, MS will have a lot of dancing to do to explain why it is that every other word processor will use OpenDoc but them. Expect to see the battle happen over and over again in other states governments, schools, etc.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
It doesn't need an email client, because Mac OS X itself comes with an full email client.
...
... Reading in various formated CSV files (different delimiters, different encodings) or writing them.
Pages is a very nice write program for more the home user, or somebody who writes a lot with templates etc.
Keynote is really great and gives PowerPoint kick in the ass. And PP is the most used program in my company. The Mac Users are prefering Keynote over PP
But I really miss a spreadsheet app. Thats what I use most the time. and I really dislike Excel, cause it doesn't do what I want
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
That's why the policy reserves PDF for read-only publication.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Don't forget that word documents are actually OLE containers, alowing embedding of an OLE object, much like a plugin in a web page. In fact it is that aspect that causes problems sometimes, when the plug-in software is not installed on the platform where it is being viewed.
For my 5c worth, MS Office is a good piece of software, but I just find it a little too expensive for using at home. If it was $200 CAN, or less, as opposed to $700 then I might actually consider paying for it.
I have used the MacOS X version of office, and except for the major issue of not supporting Cocoa data formats, in the copy-paste process, its a very useable piece of software. I just wish they would address the outstanding issues. See this thread for more infor on the copy-paste issue. NeoOffice on the Mac still feels like it could do with a fair bit of GUI refinement.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
OO.o is technically superior. I'll give you two reasons. Draw, and Base. Draw is really nice to have when you want to do page layout with lots of pictures. Coming from a coreldraw background, its' nice to have an application that can do good page layout without having to pay through the nose for coreldraw, pagemaker, or quark. It's also nice to have it integrate nicely with the office suite. Which neither corel, pagemake, or quark do.
Base is also superior to Access. Access is a terrible database system. Base lets you connect to just about any database system. Imagine all those crappy databases strewn all over your organization centrallized on a single computer running MySQL. Access doesn't support some very useful SQL statements, and it scales terribly.
Oh, and if the formatting gets messed in word, you're pretty much screwed. You can't do much to save your document, short of doing a copy, paste unformatted, redo all your formatting. With OO.o, I can unzip it, look at the XML, and remove the unnecessary XML that's causing the problems. Really they should add a "reveal codes" feature like there used to be for Wordperfect 5.1. It's nice to know that I can fix it if I need to though. I don't know why they ever developed a word processor without this. You have to admit, that no matter how good your wordprocessor is, there's always going to be a time when you want to edit the formatting directly. There's always going to be problems. Might as well allow the user to fix them.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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?
as a resident of MA (and i am sure others will agree with me here) I have to wonder how much this is due to the desire to use open standards as it is because the money allocated to buy Office "disappeared". Money has a tendency to disappear here and things end up being more expensive than initialy planned. Take a look at the big dig, took 20 years to make, costing 9x more, just opened and it is already falling apart.
Elected officials arent really elected, since we dont really have elections here, there is no opposition. We like to call it the peoples republic. My prediction; when more money is allocated or ms gives a bigger discount, they will switch back to office.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
The format is, in theory, compatible. They're all bloated OLE memory dump based files.
Moving from Windows to Mac can screw it up, having different printers can screw it up, and sometimes one version of Word just decides that it doesn't *like* that file from another version. Sometimes Word can't open files that it created itself. Sometimes different versions will render completely different.
Hell, sometimes you have to open a Word doc in OpenOffice, save it, and then go back to Word. If you ever open a document and it comes up blank, Word probably decided it's having a bad day. Try the OOo trick and it comes back.
Basically, OOo is more version compatible with Word docs than Word is.
Also, don't forget the new Office format is XML. That makes it incompatible with all other versions of Office.
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!
They will "support" those open formats in a broken way and keep their own proprietary format.
That will discourage users to choose those formats yet fulfill the requirement to support open formats.
Alternatively they will interpret it in subtly different ways that make the saved document only usable in Word. (Think HTML and IE...)
It goes to show that not all MS users are borg drones. Some people actually see that paying a few hundred bucks when you can get the same thing for free is just plain stupid. Capitalism is closer to Communism that you think.
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."
I own Word licenses for OS X and Windows, but I just like OO.org better - seems simpler and stays out of my way when writing. I used OO.org for 2 of my last 3 books.
The OO.org 2.0 beta is especially good.
I have written a few blog entries on the massively huge advantages of open file formats - I won't repeat myself hereexcept to say that took me 5 minutes to write Java code to perfectly handle OO.org and AbiWord file formats. For my GPLed NLP project, I spent huge amounts of time trying to dea with Microsoft Office formats, and did no really do very well.
As a Microsoft stock owner, I wrote a letter to Microsoft compalining about their failure to also support OO.org file formats - I never received a response, which I think is rude behavior. After not receiving an answer since the 3 or 4 months that I wrote the letter, I am thinking of dumping their stock.
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
Someone needs to explain to MS what 'lock-in' means. (Or at least, ensure that any audience they spout this drivel at understands it - although it does seem like the decision-makers in MA understand)
Using OpenDoc does not in any way shape or form lock-in the choice of software used to manipulate it, unlike in the MS World, where using MS-Word 'DOC' format *does* lock-in one to using MS software only.
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
It has every feature I need in a music player and it updates automatically with software update.
It doesn't play Vorbis files.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Couldn't someone just "develop" an OpenDocument converter for MS Office from the Microsoft SDK and release it for free. Or under LGPL.
Someone had to develop the WordPerfect, Wordstar, RTF, and all the other optional text and graphics converters that Microsoft includes with MS Office.
It seems the SaveAs "OpenDocument" function would be just as simple.
Maybe even the code that's used in OpenOffice reader and writer converters could be plugin-ized so the streams could feed a generic software harness to spoon feed MS Office on the way in.. and out..
I've noticed there seems to be a lot of thinkers but few people willing to suffer through COM programming or lesser methods to add-on to villian-ware.
Perhaps Microsft was just stating "We won't invest money in paying our programmers to do this.." and it was just a general statement.
It might even be seen as defensive in an SEC filing to their stock holders.
We won't spend owner dollars in undermining our current native formats.
I'm really neutral on this.. but it looks rather harmless.
KB Q111716
The files included with this Application Note comprise the software development kit (SDK) for 16-bit and 32-bit external text file converters.
This SDK provides the technical information you need in order to develop external file converters that can import and export formatted text between
Microsoft Word for Windows and foreign binary files.
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.
Ok, that was written on papyrus but there really isn't all that much difference between papyrus and modern paper.
Sure there is... every try to use Liquid Paper on papyrus? And Liquid Papyrus is really hard to find nowdays.
Obscure Factoid: Liquid Papyrus was invented by the mother of the famous bard Homer.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target