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

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: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: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.