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."

Comments

Gee, MS Hypocrites?

[Rick Zeman]

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....

Re:Gee, MS Hypocrites?

[Spoing]

It's a vendor's perogative to complain about anything. Any company would want sole-source contracts with anybody, not just Microsoft. Is it somehow better if Oracle was the one doing it? How about the small software shop down the street?

Nobody complains about TCP/IP being vendor specific. OpenDocument falls in this category. Word DOC and Excel XLS files do not.

narrow? preferential?

[soma_0806]

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!

Re:narrow? preferential?

[Col. Klink (retired)]

Not only that, but Microsoft (or any vendor) are completely free (speech and beer) to implement the doctype that MA selected. MS's idea of an "open" proposal was patent encumbered and not GPL compatible.

Open Office

[superspaz]

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.

Those the change may seem minor to the /. 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.

I like open document types, but I think this is a bad way to try to handle things.

Re:Open Office

[JMZorko]

... but if it's going to hurt now, won't it hurt even _more_ later? These sorts of arguments don't make sense to me. If changes need to be made, better to make them _sooner_ and minimize the headaches, then make them _later_ and have to deal with even more pain. Anyone who has done software engineering knows that it's easier to refactor earlier than later.

So, congrats to MA for attempting to refactor, and boo / hiss to MS for trying to stop it.

Regards,

John

Re:Open Office

[iabervon]

MA isn't going to switch to OpenOffice unless Microsoft forces them to. If MA goes forward with their plans, MS will almost certainly add support to MS Office for OpenDocument. It's not like it's difficult; multiple people have already written MS/OpenDocument converters even without MS's internal documentation. They're only making it sound like MS Office can't support other formats now because they'd rather it didn't. Faced with people actually defecting, they'd change their story.

As for filing taxes online, you've never been able to read a MA tax form in a Microsoft format; it's all PDF, which MA intends to keep using. Filing forms online is done through one of a number of commercial services, which will deal with whatever format MA wants them in. Forms you can fill out on your computer, print out, and mail in are exclusively in PDF (because that makes the form part reliably identical regardless of where it gets printed out).

Whatever....

[Anonymous Coward]

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!!!

Re:duh

[rm69990]

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.

Re:Hidden costs

[RatBastard]

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.