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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."
Microsoft Employees themselves are saying that open office formats (at least partially, or for old versions) are a good thing. Others are saying they want to quit soon. Note that this open revolt against their management is being spearheaded by the mysterious Mini-Microsoft.
Will these attitudes finally change MSFT from the bottom up, or just get these guys fired? I suspect the latter, but hey, we live in interesting times...
"limiting the document formats to the OpenOffice format is unnecessary, unfair and gives preferential treatment for specific vendor products, and prohibits others."
prohibits others? i know this is obvious to everyone here, but the fact that the oasis format is open and fully documented invalidates this argument. there is absolutely no reason why any vendor cant implement the oasis format.
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
In light of your sig, I would suggest not posting while drunk as well. Otherwise, you write stuff like this.
the OO format is open. MS does not document anything about their format. Neither does WP or Ami Pro. Every thing that is known about all of them, is from reverse engineering. That is not a good way to preserve data.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Maybe someone should remind Microsoft that they sponsored the development of OpenDocument.
"Yields falsehood when preceded by its own quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its own quotation.
Somebody at one of those associations knows somebody who's on a mailing list with me and thus I got these talking points; I can't say for sure who wrote them, but I can guess. Let's give them a look, then walk through point by point.
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Yep, nothing like first-hand information. So now, I've read this from a guy who posted an article based on information he got from a guy on a mailing list who knows a guy... I'm confused already.
I see that Microsoft reported 7.915 billion profit on $11.013 billion in revenues for "Information Worker" products (i.e. Office).
. .
But (see previous discussion) there will also be some pay-offs; you take the pain now or you support a 72% profit margin forever.
This is rather trivial, but I should point out that profit margin is calculated as profit/cost (cost to the producer, not the consumer). The cost to the producer (Microsoft) would be their $10.013 billion in revenues, minus their $7.915 billion profit.
This makes for a profit margin of 255%. In other words, they're getting back more than 2-1/2x what their paying in. Not a bad return on investment, if you ask me.
Sent from my computer.
Now GET OFF MY LAWN!
"Let's face it, do you want to be the one who has to train all these government employees how to use OpenOffice."
The point of the switch isn't to save money but to support the freedom of information. If commonwealth employees have to be retrained in order to ensure that commonwealth citizens will be able to have access to commonwealth-published documents without being locked into vendor-specific software (or worse, a specific version of said software), so be it.
The commonwealth is there to to serve the citizenry, not sell software from an out-of-state vendor for the sake of saving a few bucks.
#1 is almost a red herring.
Not all of the documents will be checked. The critical ones (i.e., current rules, policies, public documents) will be checked, of course.
Others that most of the users think will be tough to convert will actually convert quite well, because 99% of Word users do not use styles, really know much about using fieldcodes or embed/link to parts of other Office documents via OLE, and a few more might actually use tables meaningfully. So the big problem here then becomes how badly does OO mangle any typeface conversions w.r.t. layout-by-whitespace, especially with regards to forms.
Instead of linking to other Office docs, it's generally just easier and more meaningful to copy-and-paste the information, and it's far easier to distribute that way, because it avoids the "F9 to refresh/can't find parent document" scenario. Especially if you've got a chunk of data that you really want to span a page break (OLE link container cannot span page breaks).
The poweruser spreadsheets might also not convert well, especially if they use user-written VBA functions or add-ins. But that won't be too many XLS files, either.
The rest will be checked when they're opened or when someone tells them there is a problem with them, and at some point, old documents might even just be left as-is.
But, really, #2 is going to be a red herring anyways, because it can be of concern whenever a new version of Office is released as well.
Access databases? Well... The data should be in a server RDBMS (even if it's on a workstation) anyways. Postgres could fill in nicely. Front-end? There are ways around that (even use OO's spreadsheet to do the front-end). This is one tool that will require probably a suprising amount of developer time, but there's always just linking to the data via ODBC, and keeping the front-end part. The data should not be in MDB files, though (this is good Access design practice anyways. move data to separate MDB/RDBMS ).
"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."
I had to re-read that line twice. I thought they were talking about Microsoft being preferential, narrow, etc, etc... not OpenOffice.
Can someone actually Orwellian-like bend their mind so that 2+2=5 for me, and explain the logic behind that statement where choosing an open standard over a closed-patented-licensed-EULA'd-sign with blood-give up your first born is a bad choice?
Or is this just what I think it is, one of Microsoft's "A Few Good Men" speeches:
"I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very OS that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said "thank you" and went on your way. Otherwise I suggest you pick up a keyboard and start writing code. Either way, I don't give a damn what open standards you think you are entitled to."
I8-D