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A Look At MS's MA Talking Points
tbray writes "It may not be a Halloween Document, but one of the lobby groups in the thick of the Massachusetts office-doc standardization fray passed me 'The Other Side's Talking Points', so I've published (and slightly deconstructed) them with a barnyard-animal picture." From the article: "The direction toward interoperability using XML data standards is clearly a good one. However, limiting the document formats to the OpenOffice format is unnecessary, unfair and gives preferential treatment for specific vendor products, and prohibits others. The proposed approach and process for use of XML data is quite open to multiple standards, yet the proposed standard for documents is quite narrow, preferential, and may not enable optimal use of the data-centric standards."
unfair and gives preferential treatment for specific vendor products
Somehow they never seem to object when, say, the Feds sole-source Microsoft products. Big surprise.
Let's hope someone throws that back into their faces....
The fact is that choosing ANY file type narrows the field somewhat and whatever type is selected will give preference to someone. It makes the most sense to pick the type that does the least amount of "damage" in both fields.
Using an "open" format allows the docs to be read by users of pretty much any OS. Also, it gives preference to the open source community, not some corporation looking for nothing beyond profit. Finally, anyone that wants OpenOffice can get it, and for free. No other possiblity would be less narrow or preferential!
So isn't MA supposed to be providing service to its residents. Let's face it, do you want to be the one who has to train all these government employees how to use OpenOffice.
/. crowd, it is likely to gum up the works for some time in the state of MA. This doesn't even get into explaining to grandparents how to file/read state tax forms online. I think there are going to be a fair number of annoyed taxpayers.
Those the change may seem minor to the
I like open document types, but I think this is a bad way to try to handle things.
However, limiting the document formats to the OpenOffice format is unnecessary, unfair and gives preferential treatment for specific vendor products, and prohibits others.
Oh please. Am I to understand that Open Office documents are blocked by things like patents, constantly changing specifications, no interoperability between versions, and licensing fees?
Oh, wait, that's MS Office! Open office standards are open? Free for all to use, if they choose?
Wow. Go figure.
All I know is I personally don't CARE what the format is, what's underneath, just friggin' well let it work with all damned Word processors!!!
RTF, HTML, XML, whatever. JUST MAKE IT WORK!!!
Not only that, but a reason MS gave for not supporting the format is that it doesn't support all of the features of the MS Office XML formats. So they won't add write or read support for OpenDocument.
I find that really strange, considering MS Office currently has read and write support for plain text and rich text documents. Are they really trying to tell us that plain text documents support more features than OpenDocument documents?
I call bullshit on that statement. It is an utterly stupid reason for them to give. No one is asking Microsoft to make OpenDocument the default format for Office, but to simply support it, just like they do RTF and TXT files.
This is simply a case of Microsoft kicking and screaming and throwing a tantrum because someone is telling them to take their lockin schemes and shove it up their ass.
I've been doing Customer Support for various sized organizations through the releases of Office 97, Office 2000, Office XP (2002) and Office 2003, and every time there is a new release there are documents that break. Excel spreadsheets and Access databases (hahahahaha!) are the worst offenders, breaking with almost every release. A lot of employee time gets eaten up fixing these corrupted files every cycle. Does MS reimburse us for the time wasted? Nope. We PAY Microsoft for the priviledge of dealing with broken documents.
Moving to an open document format would stop most of this from happenning. It would also remove the only barrier keeping WordPerfect, or the Mac or Linux, out of the office environment: document interchange.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Simply replace "Open Document Format" with ASCII and you will see clearly how rediculous the argument is from Microsoft. I know the analogy isn't perfect. Damn close, though.
I was going by the orginal form of the text as reported by Forbes.
The state of Massachusetts is proposing to make all its workers stop using Microsoft's Word, Excel and other desktop software applications and switch to open source software, said the Financial Times.
The report said OpenDocument, which is used in open source applications like OpenOffice, and PDF, a widely used standard for electronic documents, would be the only software permitted.
If this has changed, I am sorry. Perhaps you could link? If that is the case, then I strongly support MA's case. It is just that OpenDocument is just too unknown outside the techie world to have as the the only document format supported by a govt agency. Having *only* OpenDocument would be a bad thing but I greatly appreciate when such agencies make sure to at least some form of open standard.
I don't care if MS owns the spec for my document files as long as all competing products can open/save my files like they were native to that application.
IMHO portability is the most important issue here.
Look, the OO file standard is open! Nothing is keeping MS from supporting it. Let's face it; whatever esoteric shit that they claim that the OO XML format doesn't support is probably nothing that normal users would run into anyway. Add a new import/export filter to MS Office to support the OO format. And, if MS Office is as great as they say it is, there would be way more people that would use it instead of Open Office; they would just read/save their work in something other than the native MS Office format.
Or isn't MS Office really all that great?
My only concern is that Massachussetts is using the threat of going "open" just to extort better pricing from Microsoft. That's happened as often as not in the past few years. I just hope they're sincere.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Nothing to stop them from Embrace...Extend...Extinguish either.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I don't understand why it is so "assumed" by the author and most of the readers that there is something inherently wrong with a 72% profit margin. Many industries routinely mark up their final prices more than 1000% percent over cost - and that is perfectly justified as well. It's called capitalism... charge as much as you can get away with. Where is the crime?
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