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Tim Bray on Implications of OpenDocument Format
Jure Cuhalev writes "In todays keynote, at the OpenOffice.org conference, Tim Bray focused on what OpenDocument format means for office suits. He compared the impact that OpenDocument will have on regular documents to kick-off of the web with selection of HTML as file format. You can watch the video or listen to audio track. Also check out the media page for more conference coverage."
However, it would probably make for a nice tie in Times Roman 14.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I submitted a story yesterday commenting on James Prendergast's article: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,170724,00.html but it got rejected.
This clown's organization lists Microsoft as a founding member and he makes so many false claims it's not even laughable.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
what OpenDocument format means for office suits
What has a document format got to do with the company dress code? Or was that a veiled insult to the management?
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
What the hell? I cannot view this in Windows Media Player? WHAT'S HAPPENING? WHAT'S THIS OGG? IS IT A VIRUS?
Full Tilt
I can't hear audio, and online video is never high enough quality to lip-read from. And I'm not going to waste half an hour trying to connect and download the video when I can be 99% sure they won't have bothered to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act and provide subtitles.
So, like, any chance of a transcript?
If you put it in the recycle bin it can be retrieved/reused - not what you want!
43 - For those who require slightly more than the answer to life, the universe and everything.
You can watch the video or listen to audio track. Also check out the media page for more conference coverage or I could just NOT RTFA and spurt opinions. I prefer the true ./ way.
Disclosure: I'm stupid
In the suite,
Since you so 1337
Just one way
To Redmond defeat:
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Normal people doesn't know/doesn't care about OpenDocument, they only care about how they write documents and whether or not their documents can be read and/or edited by their colleagues. And the standard is word-documents for everything. Word doesn't read and/or edit OpenDocuments and that means that the new standard won't be widely accepted.
He said it would've cost $1000 for MS office per desktop, I couldn't hear how much he said it would've cost per openoffice.
This (friday) morning we just had an encounter with a Microsoft techie, in the Q&A session of the keynote conference about migration to OpenOffice.
Of course, he just kept repeating the standard Microsoft ideas, saying the speaker (!!) seems Anti-American, anti-corporate, saying that the Microsoft DOC format (the new one) IS open for everyone, citing some EU decision on that. This Microsoft guy has also agressively offered to "help the speaker get the facts right" for his slides for next time.
Then, in the corridor, talking with him lead of course nowhere, but what else did you expect? He only could repeat the standart MS panel replies to every question raised...
People from non-US don't have disabilities, hence the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Neither the audio or video have the complete presentation. Nice. Very nice.
Congratulation, you don't seem to see the difference between "the web" and "the internet"
Thing is, the web didn't indeed exist before the birth of HTML, the internet, on the other hand, did.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Personally, i find the MS response to the OpenDocument format quite interesting, and I think it is rather short sighted.
MS currently seems to be going through a phase where it is lacking innovation and agility, and is trying to buy these concepts (see for example their aquisition of Groove).
By adopting the OpenDocument format, MS would make it a lot easier for 3rd parties to create applications that interwork easily with MS Office documents, in all sorts of ways that they don't at the moment. For example, MS Equation Editor is a dog, so even though at work I have to use Offie, I do all my equation editing in OpenOffice, because the equation editor is much nicer.
If there is a sea of 3rd party vendors offering applications which extend the functionality of MS Office (by working directly with OpenDocument files), then there is an awful lot of scope for MS to aquire the best of them - and MS has awfully deep pockets.
So is MS missing a trick here?
Best regards,
treefrog
"He compared the impact that OpenDocument will have on regular documents to kick-off of the web with selection of HTML as file format."
What the hell does this mean? It's not even a sentence. The "editors" of slashdot have *really* been dragging their heels lately -- the quality of language getting used here is becoming appalling.
OpenOffice isn't in beta anymore, rc1 is out... so the beta "canard" that MS have been trying to fly is an ex-canard... days to do are getting few for the final full release.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
MS is like the Titanic. They are unsinkable I tell you, unsinkable. They need not correct course or reduce speed to avoid obstacles. Their sheer weight will carry them through.
Full steam ahead!
It's going to be an interesting battle between Microsofts 'Open' Document format and the real ODT, I'm sure MS's format uses Open in a very very very loose way...
Open Office is getting stronger and stronger, the new interface looks great, let's hope this persuades more people to use a truly open format.
Share your Knowlege - Kung-Fu Geekery
A little off-topic, but I was wondering about the standardization of OpenDocument. Several OpenOffice.org files have namespaces like "oooc:" in various sections (like formulas) and they are not imported correctly by KOffice. Any pointers to more information about this?
All this oposition from Microsoft is only play for the gallery. Fact is that it would be dead easy for them to wite a filter or plug-in to MS Office that could read or write files in the OpenDocument formats.
... Which of course all current software out there is equally incompatible with as the OpenDocument format.
Such a move would of course also invalidate many of the claims and concerns about replacing software, including the ones voiced from a disabilites point of view.
Of course there will be massive costs in converting documents from older Win-Word formats to OpenDocument, but Microsoft is planning on slapping this cost on businesses and states anyway since they will be changing the default fileformats in Office 12 to MS XML.
The future is in beta
Unlike some posters on this board, I never hated fox news, until now.
1 34232923
FWIW: here is my email:
Subject: Where is the full disclosure on this biased article?
To: Comments@foxnews.com
In regards to your article:
Massachusetts Should Close Down OpenDocument
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
By James Prendergast
Should you not, at the very least, have mentioned that the ATL is a Microsoft funded organization? And that the ATL has been caught in pro-Microsoft "astro-turfing" before?
Aside from that, the article was poorly reasoned, and full of outright lies.
I refer you to the following link:'
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050929
Thank you,
Walter Byrd
An ex-Fox News viewer.
The Cycle of the Standards
while (OSS != £) {
they start out great -> developers stick to them -> designers stick to them -> the public are happy, things are working -> our big fluffy friend Microsoft comes along and decides that everybody else has got it wrong to date, and its up to them, the unappreciated e-heros of redmond to step in and relese some inferior software -> read through all the GPL code -> claim they're sticking to the standard right up until release -> do no such thing -> within two weeks release security updates for IE6/7 and XP/Vista making the original standard impossible to use -> people buy microsoft products -> microsoft corner the market share for that particular product -> service industry depression, too much money going toward software licensing -> gov depts lose money, again licensing -> voters begin to feel the sting of less publically invested money -> lose faith in gov -> bush goes to war -> OSS community send out the message "there is another way" -> decides to write up a standard so them compatability is assured
}
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
He compared the impact that OpenDocument will have on regular documents to kick-off of the web with selection of HTML as file format.
Then he has to give up his clue card. Prior to HTML hundreds of people used "the web". Currently millions of people create office docs...this is just another page in the format wars.
On the issue of patents, Sun also did a clear announcement today on the issue of patents that Sun might/does have that could related to the standard (since it's based on work by OOo via Sun, naturally they do have patents): See this blog entry by Simon Phipps (Sun's Open Source Ombudsman) for more info. It's a blanket promise, irrevocable, global, not time-limited, reciprocal...
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Thats internet without the web, not web without internet as the grand parent asked.
Its just terminology. I assure you 9 out of 9.01 people don't really care if they call it The Internet, The Web, or "My AOL".
Learn to pick your battles, be glad the information superhighway died down.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
FTP, no, not for years. I don't really see a reason not to download a file directly from a webpage. Chat clients: *bing* yes, I stick my nose in one about once a year. Console-mode IRC is the internet without the web, granted; I forgot about that. And telnet and Usenet still around, of course. These days, you can even get Usenet archives in a nicely-formatted webpage. *sigh* OK, continue jumping on who you will, but I prefer just to assume what the speaker meant from context. By the way, I don't beat people up over saying "hacker" when they mean "cracker" or "desktop" when they mean "window manager" or "Linux" when they mean "GNU/Linux". I'm scandalous, I know!
The practicality of my world as a businessman is I exchange documents every day in Microsoft Office formats with other businesses, government agencies and internally within my company. I never ask what format we are going to exchange documents in (unlike the early days of PCs). It just works.
The cost of Microsoft Office is trivial to me compared to the benefits it brings by its providing me de-facto standards that allow my productivity. If I waste 4 hours of my time fiddling with files that won't convert, I've more than paid for the Office license. My mantra: PCs and Software are cheap compared to the business value of the time of talented people
When another format can provide the same ease of exchange, edit, return edit, return, etc then it will become the de-facto standard.
This can happen several ways. A big gorilla called the US Government can mandate it (but look how long it is taking them to implement the already mandated IPv6). A collection of smaller entities can mandate it and ultimately achieve critical mass. Microsoft can adopt it. But in any of these cases, it will take 5 years at least before the same trivial exchange can be achieved.
Until that time, any attempt by a single small entity to adopt a standard the rest of us can't use without change, training, hassle is a major problem.
We have developed much of our product documentation in HTML format for its ease of use as well as its portability across platforms. One set of documents has thousands of links within and between documents rather than massive indexes. We find no negatives in using that format for exchange because everyone can use it (if the feature set is somewhat restricted). But even that format would be a problem if it had to be shared with a Microsoft Office user as the returned document would be a nightmare to compare due to the differences in HTML formatting. And HTML has been out there for years.
My conclusion:
This isn't going to happen overnight.
It is going to take some serious players saying things like "I won't buy your next office product if it doesn't support xyz open standard."
There better be some darn good converters.
In the bast case, it will cost business billions to convert not in $ to M$ but in upgrades, training, lost productivity, etc.
Many moons ago, word processor software was sufficiently cheap, that most corporations had two or three different word processor packages on each desktop and people used whichever one supported the file format.
If MS Word cost $50, then the same would happen again and people would have MS Word, OOo, WP, KOffice etc and nobody would bat an eye about compatibility issues, All this drivel about compatibility and retraining is just a stupid non-issue, caused by the inflated pricing of MS products.
Oh well, what the hell...
If anyone can write a word processor that has 100% compatibility with the format Microsoft uses ... then what's to keep people using MSOffice?
People don't buy MSOffice because they love it or because it's the best or because it's the cheapest. They buy it because everyone else uses it and that means that everyone else uses that document format.
Crack the format lock-in and you've cracked the office suite.
Crack the office suite and you've cracked the desktop monopoly.
Crack the desktop monopoly and you've cracked Microsoft.
For Microsoft, an open document format means one thing, the end of their era. Of course they're going to fight this any way they can. Their revenues are going to plummet.
If I waste 4 hours of my time fiddling with files that won't convert, I've more than paid for the Office license.
You've had a lot better time with .doc than I have. I have dozens of old files that will not open in new versions of Word, and dozens more that open improperly in the current version of Word. I also work with a lot of people that don't have Word (engineers running Linux, or a BSD, or who just did not bother to pay to license a word processor since their are good, free ones available. You making the mistake of believing .doc is a format, when it is really a whole series of formats that are partially compatible with one another.
When another format can provide the same ease of exchange, edit, return edit, return, etc then it will become the de-facto standard. This can happen several ways.
You missed a couple of possibilities, like a widespread, destructive internet worm corrupts the vast majority of .doc files on the internet and people switch to avoid the same thing from happening in the future. Or, much more likely, the EU and China mandate the Open Doc format for all public organizations, businesses are forced to buy a word processor that will use that format (OpenOffice will do both .doc and OpenDoc and is free). At this point smart businesses migrate away from Word and MS will either be forced to provide the requested functionality or lose a lot of market share. Without being able to lock customers in using its file format MS will have to (gasp) compete based upon features and might actually fix some of the long-standing bugs in Word.
In the bast case, it will cost business billions to convert not in $ to M$ but in upgrades, training, lost productivity, etc.
Which will be more than paid for the next purchase cycle for PC's since a critical application will now be subject to competitive bids, with multiple free options available.
I'm willing to accept your claim that your time is wort $100/hr. But the same is not true for most of your customers and business partners. Your mantra makes sense for you, but by insisting on .doc, you're insisting that others accept the same time/money/value tradeoff. The ideal of an open format is that people can interact with data in whatever way they choose, rather than having to use a single program from a single vendor.
Though there are efficiencies that occur when everyone uses the exact same software, most of them can happen just by using a program that properly implements an open format. In other ways, an open format is even better, because different programs can be used to interact with the data in different ways, ways that a single vendor like Microsoft would never think of doing. So long as "de facto standards" are as acceptable as real standards to businesses like yours, you're going to have to accept the ongoing costs of vendor lock-in. It sounds like you have, and I can respect that. But it would be in your best interests if there were multiple vendors of your data exchange solution (It always astounds me that people use Office in that way) who were able to compete on price, quality, and features.
I think that, for a long while to come, non-Microsoft office suites will have to stick to providing their own converters. For the most part, I've never had trouble with OpenOffice's conversions. But if Massachusetts sticks to its guns, Microsoft doesn't have much choice but to create its own converter (which they'll probably try to limit to Massachusetts alone), and they should prepare for a brutal mocking if their converter isn't significantly better than OpenOffice's.
I'm not clear on the point you were trying to make about HTML. HTML wasn't intended to be a "presentation format", which is one of its strengths. Well-done HTML can be viewed in one way by a standard browser, another way on a mobile phone or other portable device, yet another way on a text browser, and still another on a "browser for the blind". HTML is for data, CSS is for presentation.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!