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Interview with Sun's Florian Reuter
silentbob4 writes "Mad Penguin is running a series of three interviews with people in the trenches working to bring you OpenOffice.org 2.0. The first of these interviews, with Sun's Florian Reuter, covers some of the differences between the truly open XML found in OpenOffice.org 2.0, and the closed MS Word ML found in the upcoming Microsoft Office 12. He also discusses the importance of simple end users in the process of improving the code with bug reports."
With the critical mass that the adoption of the open document format by Massachusets, google and others implies, the embracement of standards like XML and Xforms in OO.o that makes it pretty easy to create organisational workflows, this could be a real microsoft hobbler. Particularly if as seems likely, Microsoft keeps failing to adapt to an open standards world, and the price tag of OO.o stays lower than M$O.
Bring it on, I say.
"...we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that." B.Spears 2003
I've actually RTFA, and I'm still at a loss about exactly _what_ is better about OOo's XML Schema, or wrong about MS's.
In TFA the guy just goes on about how his own XML Schema is, you know, lovingly handcrafted and how he _cares_ about your data. Which is just a content-free judgment call. Yeah, so he likes his own XML Schema better. Whop-de-do, that's such a total surprise.
It's not like if I went around the office and asked 10 guys I wouldn't get 10 different schemas, and each loves his own more and is convinced that everyone else's sucks. Just the proper way to use attributes alone has everyone polarized in three camps, with everyone in one camp arguing that the other two are awfully wrong and against the very idea of OOP or of XML itself. Handling validation and showing which fields are wrong to the user who filled the form? Yep, another clean three-way split, and I've actually had to implement three different ways to handle it, to please all three camps. And so on.
So that he loves his own more and thinks it's a better way to store my data, is very much expected there. I was already sure he thinks that. In fact, I'd be worried if he said he didn't.
What really interests me is exactly which concrete problems should I expect with MS's, that supposedly aren't there if I use OOo's format. If I try to retrieve that data in 5, 10 or 100 years, as in his answer, exactly in which way is OOo's format better? Exactly _what_ kind of data gets more benefits from his schema than from MS's in that context? In which way, and for what concrete reasons does he foresee that MS's own converters (which so far still import Word 6 documents with no problems) will break down and cry like little girls if fed a Word 12 document some 10 years from now?
No, really, it's not a flame. I want to know. If I'm to go there and pester my boss to switch from MS Office to OOo, I damn better have some very concrete arguments and use-cases. If my whole argument is "but some guy from Sun likes Sun's format more" and "but Sun's format is lovingly handcrafted with love and care for your data", chances are I'll get laughed out of his office.
So can anyone shed some more light on that issue?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
There is no google web office. However there is and has been for many years think free office. Contrary to your prediction it has not been adopted rapidly or widely despite being available over the web and despite being a decent product.
evil is as evil does
There are more Web Office related tools on the web , indeed BUT it's Google who has the market-say these days and they have to cash on it. Web is the next stop and people ought to get that straight before it's too late.
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
People want something new! In the corporate and in their homes. It makes NO sense at all to tell all those word, excel and powerpoint experts that there's yet another Office suite which does JUST THE SAME. Whoaahh, now we're really excited. NOT!!!
MS Office product has a 90% domination in the World market! And that's a lot. There is no friggin way you can tell the *already tuned people/staff* to start working with a NEW breed of product. It's a challenging option. Lot's of desktop migrations from Windows to Linux see this as a MAJOR challenge.
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
And what makes you think MS won't follow suit
Because they said so? While that may mean nothing, at this point it is MS' position that they will not support OpenDocument formats, regardless of requirements by governments. MS Not supporting OpenDocument
Now MS is claiming the open document standard is inferior, yet they sit on the standards committee. Instead they support the MS XML standard which is a standard for MS documents. Which means it owns (under copyright and soon patent), the format and standard.
Office 12 XML documents will not have an easy introduction into many non-Microsoft products. To do so, you will need to license the format from MS, who has said it sees no reason to support OSS in this regard and the use of MS XML in a GPL'd product would invalidate the GPL, and the MS license. (Microsoft does have some very smart lawyers writing their EULAs and contracts). All the others would need to pay a fee and it is doubtful MS would provide a discount to the disadvantage of their own products.
A better read on OpenDocument vs. MS XML is found on Wheeler's page
The format matters because a company, in part due to its responsibility to stockholders, must have planned obsolescence. MS documents from the 80s are difficult to open and read, even in MS products. An open standard ensures that my documents are available to me, through many companies, for a very long time. Governments need this and are now getting smart enough about technology to understand and demand it. And while no one can imagine MS being gone, the same was said of dozens of top 20 companies over the past 20 years.
As for the comment about the learning curve between open office and MS Office, we can now thank MS. With office 12, they cannot claim an easy transition, the product takes a new direction and whether it is better or not, is irrelevant. The learning curve of going to 12 will be greater than moving to Open Office which retains the current MS office look and feel for the vast majority of users.
Outlining that works. Save to PDF. The ability to hand a CD to a friend who needs an office application. LaTeX. The ability to tell the BSA to go to hell when they knock open your door at 4AM. Not having to deal with "You can run this program 50 times until you prove you aren't a thief" popups. Being able to wipe the hard disk and reinstall without being told "you can run this program 50 times until you prove you aren't a thief", again. Being able to add hard drives and RAM and upgrade to your hearts content and never hearing, "This is not the computer I was installed in, you are a thief". The ability to install the software on my other machine without worrying that wiping the first doesn't quite cover the license to install on one machine only.