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Office + OpenDocument, Never Say Never
barryfreed writes "There's a blog entry by Andy Updegrove at ConsortiumInfo.org that says Microsoft has officially stated to him that support of OpenDocument in MS Office could happen. Microsoft sent the statement in a response to an article Updegrove wrote called Massachusetts and OpenDocument: A Brave New World?"
Come on... this is ridiculous, MS would never support something that destroys lockin. If "maybe someday" constitutes a promise in anyone's mind... they should be shot.
Isn't "OpenDoc" a much older standard than OpenDocument that never quite caught on? I remember being so jazzed as an OS/2 user that OS/2 Warp 4 would support OpenDoc, then... well, we all know what happened to OS/2 after that.
In any case, blah blah open standards good blah blah down with proprietary crap.
For more information, click here.
Dont' call it OpenDoc...
sigh...
must... stay... awake...
I honestly believe that over the next 10 years Microsoft will embrace the open standard. They will find way to still make money off it however :P
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=OpenOffice?
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. - Mark Twain
MS likes to embrace and extend, remember? I do believe that MS could make OpenDocument useless by over-supporting it.
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Most likely, Office will support OpenDocument format, both reading and writing, but will continue to aggressively develop new features for their own proprietary format that OpenDocument does not provide. In other words, they'll deal with it much like OpenOffice deals with Word format: They will read it (and write it), but not necessarily perfectly, and it won't be their preferred format.
Microsoft has to know by now that basic word processing functionality is far too common and easy to copy to make it a cornerstone of your product line. Word itself is an important part of Office, but most of the "innovation" in Office in recent years has not been in the Word component, but rather in the other pieces, and more importantly in how the different pieces interoperate.
Yet, Microsoft must change; this old stance has not been working.
We expect the change; and there has been change.
First, the MS true type core fonts (that some think they later regretted)
the the WTL (template library) on source forge and their command line tools.
There may be something else.
MS are finding a new strategy that ensures financial success; Bill Gates is a businessman first.
This may be the next change coming up; finding that locked in=>locked out; and freedom=friends.
Sure MS office is good, but if its that good, why are they trying to MAKE you use it.
I understand your point but I think they will change and are changing.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
This would be very beneficial since every web page would look the *same* and act the same regardless of the browser use to view it.
What about that?
Even if Microsoft includes support for an OpenDocument format, the only thing it will do is enable MS Word users to read documents from other word processors such as OpenOffice or StarOffice. However, I'm sure MS will still have the default save setting be their proprietary .doc format, which Joe User will automatically choose when he saves his document which someone who only has OpenOffice will try to read. Sure, OpenOffice does its best to render .doc files, but sometimes it still looks disfigured. What MS really needs to do is open up its .doc format.
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I imagine Microsoft will refer to it, or want their users to refer to OpenDocument as OpenDoc, so most users think it's just a different version of their .doc format, and don't understand the difference.
Even if MS decided to realize what interoperability actually is, the only reason they would add OpenDoc support to Office is to grab back the millions of dollars they'd lose on MA not buying Office licenses. This is precisely why MA is switching, and whether or not MS can FUD them into going back to Office remains to be seen. I predict promises that will ultimately go unfulfilled.
un-officially won't.
Yes, I suppose so, and they could relicense MS Office under GPL too, but it doesn't seem likely unless 100's more government and business organizations do as Mass. did....
It will be good to see the bull with a ring in its nose for a change, so to speak, but the more relevant down line consequences don't seem to be jumping out at me. If MS goes with ODF, then we are all back in the same mess, more or less, aren't we?
I have faith in people, open-minded people, to see a product, and when the value of the product is comparable to any other product of similar purpose, then choose the cheapest one, or the one with the most compatibility with present relevant investments.
The trouble is, so far as I have seen or understood (I could be wrong), when the products are equal or close, MS uses those 'politicians' they paid for to ensure that only MS products get sold to all but the very edgy techno-geeks. That would leave us right where we started (more or less) in respect of MS's domination of the OS and software world.... that means very little competitive product in circulation by comparison.
So, what would make this more of a move to open and competitive markets?
I don't see the bright future in this.
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Hopefully any government bodies which adopt OpenDocument will thoroughly test any suites they do purchase for compatibility (so that they aren't stuck creating 'open' documents which are only able to be opened by products from one company).
However, given the corrupt and incompetent nature of governments, I'm very much not counting on it.
Its success also depends on 1. how good it is in terms of functionality and performance, 2. how easy to deploy and administer it is, 3. how easy to script/automate it is, 4. how good the marketing for it is. So, even when they give up the fight for forceful vendor-lock in, they can still fight on... here it comes... quality! The same thing that everybody else fights on.
Note to the zealots: you win a cookie if you manage to find a way for my post to somehow imply that the quality of MS Office is superior to that of its alternatives.
Global warming is a cube.
Say Hello to ActiveOpenDocument-X! It's just like OpenDocument only it's more fully featured!!!*
.Net for best results.
*New features require Microsoft Office Vista XP 2008 Professional and
They've already thought of that and included it in the requirements.
I think Microsoft could actually take OpenDocument support in one of two directions:
1. Basically, how you put it. They would only support it enough so that it would be that extra bullet point at the bottom of the feature list "(blah blah, marketing drivel)...now with OpenDocument support!"
2. (Please don't correct me with a torch, I'm not an expert on this topic) but I don't doubt that MS would find some tiny loophole to sneak their own proprietary crap into OpenDocument formatted Office files which would have an adverse effect upon openning in any non-office program. I just wouldn't be surprised when I've seen two identical machines with identical software on the same network transfer a Word file from one computer to come out garbled on the other end.
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Just like they support Posix -- just enough to be considered in bids by government organizations that mandate the format. There may be tools out there that do it better, but the "Supports Opendoc" checkbox on those contracts don't specify how well that support works, just that it's there. And although OpenOffice might be free, government IT bids will necessarily go through the 3 companies on the planet that feel it's profitable to do that work despite all the paperwork, and they prefer Microsoft products. Don't think to take your independent consulting firm into the bidding process either. You won't even get past the form WXD-423. Assuming you can even find one.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
FTA :
"and also to lessen the likelihood that public information will not become inaccessible in the future"
lessen the likelihood..... that public information... *will not become inaccessible*
-- 2010 --
User : "I can't access Files on the Server"
Admin: "Yeah thats just part of the IT Policy"
User : "WTF?!?"
Admin: "Yeah I know, it's fucked up but I didn't write it..."
Well yeah, but what does that have to do with anything? The term OpenDoc isn't mentioned in any of the articles. It also has nothing to do with OpenDocument and had a completely different goal. OpenDoc was a programming framework for object embedding and encapsulating, you can think of it as OLE on steriods. OpenDocument is a file format.
There's NOTHING stopping the OpenOffice crew from adding a little PRINT TO function (ala Adobe Acrobat) that will cause a document to print into an OpenDoc format. I don't understand why they just don't do this.
Problem solved.
More
Here's the abstract from the featured article:Maybe they meant: "and also to lessen the likelihood that public information will (remove: "not") become inaccessible in the future due to changes in proprietary software."
Maybe they need to worry less about the format being open and more about the text making sense
You mean like how Apple would NEVER go with x86 processors or how Intel would NEVER go with AMD's 64-bit extensions? Both of these were considered extremely unlikely in the past but are today's realities. These changes happened due to customer shifts, competition, and/or better technology. Believe me, if everyone starts eating MS for lunch because of this one sticking point, you can bet they'll support OpenDocument. In fact, much like Intel's 'skunk works' project with the 64-bit extensions, I'm certain they already have it working now.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
If M$ wants to continue to make money, what with torrents, napster, E-mule (however it's spelled nowadays) burning, ripping, mashing, and overall passing the info to and from one another, they're going to have to adopt open source policies soon and they know it.
Simply put, people aren't going to tolerate closed EULA's much longer. Average Joe's can't afford 500 bucks every two years to upgrade an OS, relearn, understand, then do it again. That's why people are pooling cash, buying one copy, waiting for someone to crack it, then make tons of copies and give them to friends. (In college the "Academic Version" of XP, and Office 2k3 sold about 3 copies yet everyone had it.)
This is one very tiny step in the process toward embracing open source, but babies never started their journey on two feet by running marathons either. I say mark this as a minor event, but don't pass it aside and keep watch over what M$ does from here on out. Maybe someday people like me will drop the $ and actually give them their letter back.
They will refuse to support OpenDocument just as long as there is a chance they can browbeat customers lime MA into sticking with Office. Then they will refuse to support it while they make all of their plans to switch to something else. Finally at the last minute they will offer to allow them to be a 'beta' site for their upcoming OpenDocument supporting version. Since the grunts at the keyboards hate change, tons of political pressure will be put on the people in charge to stick with MS, this offer will be accepted. Then after a couple of years of buggy and disfunctional betas we will get to the final decision. If others also demand OpenDocument it will finally go production. Otherwise they will just pull the plug on it, the current IT team in MA will have been quietly replaced by then and the whole thing will be forgotten.... except by anyone else who is thinking of taking a similar stand.
Democrat delenda est
Yeah, it is amazing how badly Microsoft Office is doing these days, they'd better start supporting the OpenOffice format so that they can get a chance at being mainstream too.
I never really understood this but how come in this day and age the default format for text isn't html? It's a standard that can be read on tons of devices, it can contain images or text or whatever, why not have word processors use it??
JUST DO IT. Go to http://www.openoffice.org/ and download it. It installs cleanly, uninstalls cleanly, and does not interfere at all with your current install of MS Office (just choose "NO" when asked if you want to link OpenOffice to MS Office file types).
Use it, and I bet most, if not all of you, will find yourself not needing MS Office.
Oh, and try that Save to PDF button. Yum.
Good night, and good luck!
Did anybody think it wouldn't happen? Really?? And you just arrived from what planet again???
Of course it will happen. It will happen the moment MS needs it to happen. They've successfully resisted as long as they can, and when it starts costing them sales rather than creating sales for them they flip a compiler option switch and it's included. Don't think for a moment that they haven't had this running in their development labs for years. They would have been fools not to have.
Doesn't mean the battle is over. MS will certainly try to find some essential feature that OD doesn't support to keep people on their own proprietary format. Fight this by using OD regardless. The only thing I don't understand is why RTF was never an acceptable open format. I know it was supported by other platforms, and appears to be all ascii tags and data.
Kudos to Massachusetts to standing up to the MS BS. It took someone big enough and brave enough to get their attention. Apparently even a small state is big enough to really scare them.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Sure it will happen. Otherwise they might not be able to sell their software to i.e. public services in the UK. The UK government requires that all data that is stored by software must be stored in an open format such that even in hundred years when the software does not exist anymore, the datafile can still be read.
What additional features, exactly?
Animated text? Inline URLs? Inserted images? Revision tracking?
I think they've pretty much hit the limit for "innovation" in a document format. All they can do now is change the format periodically to break compatibility with competing office suites.
Worse, they could support it, both reading and writing perfectly, and add new "features" to it which other suites can't read, therefore forcing people to use Office.
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I don't know why people are putting up with all these shenanigans from Microsoft. This should be an indicator to everyone that they're only out to hassle the community.
As such, any product organization should begin to switch to a system such as LaTeX for their document formatting needs. And for those who suggest that it is too complex for memos and other smaller documents, the perfect answer to that is to just stick with plain text files.
While the learning curve of something like LaTeX is a bit more than that of Word, it is far more powerful. Using a system such as LaTeX you can easily produce some very complex documents, and they look great. You don't have to worry about proprietary binary or XML formats, because LaTeX source files are plain text files. You can easily transmit them in source form, or you can create PDF documents when you need the presentation to be exact.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I can see it now, Office can open OpenDocuments but everytime you try to save, it will ask if you want to save to .doc to prevent losing formatting info. Users complain about this extra step. Or they just say yes and you get a mix of OpenDocument and .doc going around in MA. MS runs a FUD campaign about how much this is costing taxpayers and what a mess the whole OpenDoc conversion has been. MA gives up and back to MS it is.
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Wow, are you really that angry of a person? There is some very valid points for a government agency to move on an open standard. The least of which is government doesn't change that often, so when it does the changes are more painful, especially in IT. By working with an open format things get easier. That piece alone makes this article valuable, not an exercise in ignorance.
Had to respond to this post. I do see a LOT of geeky BS on slashdot, but the pure anger over something so simple as this article is amazing. Chill out, go outside for a bit. Ignore your computer for a day or something. geez:-)
You're welcome.
Microsoft can stammer about all it wants with respect to OpenDocument, but what's interesting is that new features WON'T MATTER, if they can't be translated from/to the open format. One thing I think Bill & Co. tend to forget, which is something that Massachusetts insightfully realized, is that a government record should be no LESS open than the openness provided by traditional media - typically paper. Once you start using proprietary formats, you've closed pretty much imposed restricted access.
I would like to officially state that it is possible that pigs will fly, that the sun will rise in the west, and that all males between the ages of 34 and 37 inclusive will develop a small blue spot under their left arms at 4:03am tomorrow morning.
...Ok, maybe that last is a bit out of the realm of possibility.
Furthermore, it is my official position that it is possible that we will have a global renewal of peace and brotherhood, starting in the middle east; that demands on oil will suddenly drop out to nothing due to the invention of cheap, clean cold fusion; that Santa Claus will descend from Heaven with Jimmy Hoffa, Elvis, and the Loch Ness Monster to tell us once and for all how we can get those tough wine stains out of our silk blouses, and that one day we will discover an honest lawyer or an unbiased slashdot story.
This flies in the face of science.
OpenDocument support by government makes perfect sense to me. Government doesn't need to create barriers for dealing with it by using expensive proprietary software products when there are affordable (free) alternatives. I get that. What I was railing and ranting against (I'll admit it was rant) was the immediate attack of Microsoft for simply saying they may at some point support OpenDocument, but not right now. They made a move from "we will never support OpenDocument" (which they may or may not have said), to "we MAY support it" and the response is not "Massachussets has made an impact" or "MS is responding ot market pressures" but ranting and raving about how MS will corrupt OpenDocument and "embrace and extend" it and how evil it is that MS has taken a position on OpenDocument. But hey... I said "crackpot" so it's flamebait.
Boy, that's as much a sure thing as when Owl says to Pooh, floating in the floody 100 Acre Wood, "A rescue is being thought of"
More than likely, it will be provided as an import/export format. I haven't viewed either schema, but seeing as Microsoft typically releases next-version converters (including the next XML format) for current version software, another format should be easily done.
After all, wouldn't they rather have Word, Excel, etc. be the default app that opens those docs?
Design for Use, not Construction!
2. (Please don't correct me with a torch, I'm not an expert on this topic) but I don't doubt that MS would find some tiny loophole to sneak their own proprietary crap into OpenDocument formatted Office files which would have an adverse effect upon openning in any non-office program.
All they have to do is put the little balloon that says that "saving to OpenDocument may cause loss of formatting", which will cause 95% of the people out there to save to the proprietary file type.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
You must be new here.
Support for reading, but only incomplete support for writing seems the most probable action for two reasons. First, it resembles how Microsoft beat other word processing competitors, Wordperfect in particular. Second, because there is no real competitor for MS Office, and Microsoft adds features based on customer demand. Supporting OpenDocument as an external, but less featured, format would be consistent with adding it as a customer demanded feature, but not letting the OpenDocument format guide the other features of MS Office.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
Embedded (virus) scripts
Alas, I am not new here. If I was new I would have said, "Slashdot is a honeypot for Microsoft hating crackpot". My id was created 34582 accounts before yours... so I must be slow or maybe just tired of all of the mindless rhetoric.
I found it hard to believe that the creators of OpenDocument would not be reading this article and even clearing this up for some of us. For what it's worth, I cannot ever see this happening.
Microsoft will fully support OpenDocument. That is to say, it will open them and save them. The formatting will be completely messed up. Graphics and logos will mysteriously disapear or end up on the wrong side of page breaks. Tables will get eaten and the text will end up outside the table, and the table will follow, empty.
Microsoft will support OpenDocument to the extent that they have to to get whatever wonk working for the government to rubber stamp the official document certifying that it is supported. Expect it to be unusable for any document that has any sort of formatting at all beyond flat text.
In the end they will both support it and try to ruin it as a standard which permits cross platform collaboration of any kind, see Java.
Microsoft knows that the SECOND that you don't HAVE to use windows in an office environment, the migration will start. First a few offices will switch. Then a few more. Then things will settle down for awhile, a few major corporations will go "all X" where X!=Windows (linux or OS X or flavor-of-month) to save money. This will signal to the market that there is actually a demand for NON-MS office software, and people are willing to pay money for it. Next the market will be flooded with 10,000 software products, open-office ad-ons, etc, 99% will be crap. A few major competitors will emerge, with products which are competitive with MS's and which are cross-platform. About a year later MS will start supporting other OS's by creating a toolkit to port MS Windows software. This will be a ploy, as the much hyped toolkit will be intentionally impossible to use in the end to produce usable software. Many companies will waste a lot of time and resources attempting to port their windows code using MS's toolkit and API. The strategy by MS will be to delay as much software as possible from being ported for at least one development cycle, hoping to starve their competitors while they maneuver their Next Big Thing (TM) into position. In the end Microsoft would like to cause any company that switched huge costs when they can no longer get support (the stick), meanwhile reaching out to them to switch back with initial price cuts (the carrot). (see also "The Economic Theory of Crack Dealing")
Having a lot of IT friends in Europe and Asia, I know that a LOT of organizations are now using open office as a document standard. Since OO doesn't work 100% well with MS formats, allowing MS Office to be 100% compatable with OO will make the US companies (who are still obsessed with MS Office) more easily work with their OO businesses. If MS didn't support it, then the US companies will begin to use both MS Office and OO - which will start the push for US companies to use OO.
It's a win for MS to do this. They've done this with Java in the past and it proved damaging to the Java world.
I suspect that MS support will be like that in Excel with CSV files. I choose "Save As", hit the drop down, scroll through the list for .csv, select that, hit save.
.csv file, change one value and resave it...not using any fancy features.
I then get a dialog box saying something like "This file may contain features that cannot be saved if you continue to save in this format. Are you sure you want to save in this format?" Well, yes. I scrolled through the list and picked that format.
This behavior occurs even if you open a
Kind thoughts do not change the world
Be carefull of MS could support statements when they did this with POSIX they did not go to the actual lciense holder of the IP of POSIX, Novell, but went to TSCO... to be fair to MS was it not the saem excuse SUn gave when gving money to TSCo that they neded to make sure POSIX was supproted?
Fred Grott(aka shareme) http://mobilebytes.wordpress.com
What was that?
Blinking 'eck, it was flock of flying pigs.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Microsoft realizes as much as anybody that the days of desktop-bound apps are swiftly coming to a close. They realize that XML is "the" way that data is shared between applications, a trend that will likely continue for many, many years to come. The realize that being able to easily inject Office-authored content into enterprise-wide, services oriented architectures is critical to their very future.
... the whole Office suite. The Open Document format goes far, far beyond being able to encapsulate word processing documents. Open Document puts the entire office data model into one, clean spec. Open Document is HTML, XML, SMIL, and XForms, all rolled up into one. This is heady stuff. Read it for yourself at as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument .
I think people should be paying more attention to where MS has been heading lately. They are aggresively pursuing a platform of loosely-coupled, network-delivered services, just like everyone else. They have a complete software stack of everything needed from the back office to the mobile desktop. Very few companies have anything close to their breadth and depth in application coverage.
Key to this whole enterprise is a data model that can capture everything people do in the business environment. Well, it just so happens that we have a suite of products that shows us what kinds of data models we need: WYSIWYG text, spreadsheets, databases, presentations, drawing, messenging, calendar
Microsoft gains absolutely nothing by not being able to participate with other services in this larger, connected world. Of course they will always have their own specialized content, and even their own specialized XML version of what Open Document provides. But if the customer base needs compatibility with another XML schema, of course MS will participate. To participate is to make money, and that is something that MS is very, very good at.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
HTML is of course HyperText Markup Language (emphasis mine). It was designed for inserting links and other nifty widgets like forms into hypertext. Of course, over time some basic formatting tags snuck in (bold, italics, paragraphs, etc), but those don't come close to dealing with the advanced formatting available in most word processing or desktop publishing packages. One of the reasons even older versions of Word et al produce such nasty HTML is due to them trying to as faithfully as possible replicate their formatting to HTML, which before CSS was no easy task.
So yeah. I'd much rather have an open binary format than HTML. I honestly don't care if my documents are human readable in their raw format - if I want that I'll use a text file. As long as it's an open, well documented format, I could care less.
"My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with a girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night."
I'll believe it when I see it. Otherwise, we're all just Rooney's in training.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
This will more than likely become another (quarter-heartedly) Embrace and Extend instance.
S
I don't think he's saying that it wasn't on their radar screens, as in, "We've never heard of Open Document". Instead, he's saying, "It wasn't on our radar as a feature to implement right now." And, pre-Massachusetts, it probably wasn't.
Variation on a theme? :D
"3. how easy to script/automate it is"
This is what got them into trouble in the first place. Is there really anyone other than script kiddies who write macroviruses that use this "feature"? Give me a break. Hell, in one of their Office updates the default is OFF for macros...
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
...is like them officially stating they will start cooperating with other businesses?
For those who like text only format, you can go to the Oxford Text Archive for all of your ASCII & html fun...
http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/ (browse by title)
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
MS Office isn't slipping at all. Maybe a little bit here and a little bit there, but it's still the big dog by a long shot.
The reason they try to "make" you use it is not because it sucks (although that could be argued), it's because it costs over $400 a license and new, virtually featureless versions come out every two years or less. It's a major cash cow and they're going to milk it for all its worth.
Personally I don't feel that any "standard" software package should cost half of what you paid for your computer. Software just goes obsolete too quickly. I often wonder what would happen if some of the big application packages were priced so that individuals could easily buy them (e.g. sub $100). Certainly they would sell considerably more units at first, but would it make up the difference? This is why I'm not a businessman.
The bloody article is flamebait.
From the Slashdot cookie-cutter: Some blog says Microsoft might plan to support X
Along with: Google have registered the domain gX.com
And: AJAX is teh l337
And: Which is the best programming language?
you assert two things:
1: there are "good enough" alternatives
2: the existence of "good enough" alternatives destroys MS Office
I assert: MS Office is still the king of the hill. Unless you want to say that something like OpenOffice has even noticeable market-share, at least one of your premises are wrong.
MS Office has been making a bit less money than usual lately. Not because of competitors, but because fewer people see the need to upgrade to the newer version every 2 years.
Now, on the Mac side, yes, MS is losing marketshare... but not to OpenOffice...
You are an ass.
Name one technology they didn't "embrace and extend" when dealing with software?
Just one.
bork bork bork!
I'm surprised there aren't more people outraged at the thought of someone telling someone else what to call it. After all the lame arguments favoring calling "Linux" an operating system when it always was just a part of an operating system called a kernel. Or the arguments claiming that "open source" and "free software" are the same thing despite their different starting dates, different philosophies, and different progenitors. Why let a little thing like technical correctness and respect for what someone calls their work get in the way of what you call something?
This is a rhetorical question.
Digital Citizen
Are you implying that scripting/automating is bad? Last time I checked lots of good stuff could be done via scripts. Anyway, yes, there are lots of people other than script kiddies who write macros. You've probably used a macro-ed spreadsheet yourself, sooner or later, and ask anyone who works a lot with Word whether they automate any of their actions. I, for one, certainly do. It makes sense to do it in Photoshop, in Word, in CAD, in OO Writer and in lots of other programs. MOST server administration is done via scripts. Scripts take up your Linux box. And they take it down, too.
Global warming is a cube.
When i read this kind of oversimplifications, i wish i could go to a bookstore and find the FUD genre....a collection of MS sponsored books and magazines.
For example, those that wish to create open source software for release under any of the licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative could not permit usage of many of the licensing terms that would be required (and considered to be unobjectionable) by the companies involved in creating many types of standards today, or by the standards organizations within which such standards are being developed.
The state of Mass.'s move has ripple effects. All organizations that work with or for the state government will also have to run software that not only can read/view OpenDocument files, but also write them, as well.
most people who use Word, could easily replace it with wordpad. Personaly for most of what I do the MySQL-Perl-LaTeX chain works much better than any integrated office application.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
If you open a .doc file, you get the same kind of message when you save. I want to keep a certain document in .doc format for my co-workers, but I only want to use OOo. So they penalize me with this stupid form that you can't turn off.
But, you know, they could claim that there's some obscure language setting embedded in the document, and without that, new versions of Word won't do spell-checking or word count, and fonts will randomly switch to other fonts. Like I said, it doesn't have to make any sense. They just have to do it, and absorb any lawsuit settlements as "cost of doing business".
I'll get modded to hell and back for this, so let me make this clear. I agree. /. is full of MS hating crackpots.
However, lest we forget, MS is a business. Which has historically liked to monopolise markets. Why on Earth would they implement OpenDocument in a reasonably sensible fashion unless they had literally no choice? (ie. enough invitations to tender were coming out which said "Must support OpenDocument").
Next the market will be flooded with 10,000 software products, open-office ad-ons, etc, 99% will be crap. A few major competitors will emerge, with products which are competitive with MS's
Sounds rather like the computer world circa 1987-1992.
From the fine article:
Why do we care about formats? Electronic file formats sit at the core of concern about future access to today's public records. Simply put, the question is whether, when we look back a hundred years from now, we will be able to read the records of what we did today. It should be reasonably obvious for a lay person who reflects on the concept of public records that the government must keep them independent and free forever. It is an overriding imperative of the American democratic system that we cannot have our public documents locked up in some kind of proprietary format, perhaps unreadable in the future, or subject to a proprietary system license that restricts access.
Understand it now? Twenty years from now, there's a good chance no one will have a way to read Word DOC97. Public documents saved in that format, even if they are preserved, can be difficult, impossible or illegal to read without paying a third party a fat fee. They will have become inaccessible.
You stay stuck on little words, Massachusetts is moving to save what counts. There's already a pile of M$ shit that's hard to read and even harder to print out. Already Microsoft's poorly planned document formatting tools have shown their age and old documents have to be reworked before they can be printed. The longer they wait to move to free document standards, the bigger the pile of lost material grows.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Just one.
ASCII, Unicode, TCP/IP, XML.
Furthermore most vendors embrace a standard and then extend it by adding additional functionality on top of that as their customers demand it. MS made a big mistake by taking that model to the web because the popularity of their browser created an interoperability nightmare... but the embrace and extend model is not MS specific nor is it a bad thing if you can preserver interoperability with apps that don't support your enhancements (something MS did a poor job of with HTML/CSS).
JPEG
I assert: MS Office is still the king of the hill.
Your assertion that Office currently remains King of the Hill does not refute mine that "good enough" alternatives will chip away at Office's marketshare if more of the compatibility issues become non-issues (e.g. via a complete implementation of OpenDocument by MicroSoft).
The second part of your assertion contains faulty logic:
I assert: ... Unless you want to say that something like OpenOffice has even noticeable market-share, at least one of your premises are wrong.
Current marketshare levels of the alternatives do not do not refute either of my premises; if marketshare levels of the alternatives were falling, you'd have a point. I do not believe that fewer people are installing and using OpenOffice, StarOffice, KOffice, etc. now than they were last year, for example. More people seem to be discovering they can get the majority of their work done sans the King of the Hill.
As more users explore alternatives, and if MicroSoft fully adopts open standards to improve compatibility with these alternatives, these alternatives would be more attractive to more people. This was the point in my original response to the question "if Office is so superior, why does MS need to lock users in?"
They already do have "features" specific to their format.
Read "Microsoft's Approach to Disclosures of XML File Formats for Word 2003 and Excel 2003" available here (pdf warning) or you can view the Google "CCIA-XML" html version.
USA could go metric.
Sig Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
The OpenDocument format is based on OpenOffice's XML format.
No need to "Print to..."
You're right. They probably could. They were told how during the MA discussions. See: Microsoft: We were railroaded in Massachusetts on ODF
However, they probably won't, see previous post.
While the learning curve of something like LaTeX is a bit more than that of Word
Alert! Alert! Understatement! The learning curve of LaTeX and LyX is so high that when I suggested LyX to Caspian, (s)he replied, "are you [expletive] kidding me?"
As with many of their products, Microsoft usually puts "Easter Eggs" in the programs, hidden gems that allow you to do unusual things with the program. So what if they made an easter egg with the extension? Let's say if saved a file in .docx format, then renamed it to .docxxx. You open the file and Clippy comes out wearing a teddy...
Ok, I'll stop right there and take my meds again, I promise.
It doesn't have to be any "feature" or additional formatting option.
Office documents, even in XML derivatives are produced in a mostly WYSIWYG interface by people who dread interacting with the PC.
All MS has to do is "misread" the standard. So that when you select 8 point, bold and italic for a line of text it inserts a different set of formatting information to produce that result on MS products than is used on "standard" products.
The end result will be that MSOffice documents look strange in KOffice and vise versa.
People will complain bitterly about them not actually implementing the standard and they will respond by claiming 99.5% compliance etc...
It will go on for years and get nasty. maybe even in court.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
ODx is a zipfile containing the xml data in OD format. If there are images included, they are linked precisely how html links images, and are included in the zipfile. They could have used HTML instead of inventing a new format.
I'm just nitpicking, however, as I do not believe HTML would make a great general format. The reason why is not because of images.
So the parent poster's point stands. The XML gives you the content, the styles are locked away with a binary key you need Microsoft products to read.
Does anyone not consider a documents visual presentation part of the document?
So MS wants everyone to switch file formats yet again. The plan is obviously to force people to upgrade: If a few of your contacts start sending you .docx files, you'll have to replace your existing copy of MS Word with Office 12.
.doc has, so MS might inadvertently help OO.org and other alternatives.
But if you're being forced to upgrade anyway, why not check out the competition? The new format will be reverse-engineered, just as
That doesn't mean they qualify as an open standard! If the implementation is encumbered by patents, and it produces undocumented behavior that MS apps can use but other vendors cannot reliably depend on, then it isn't open.
Ask the WINE project how open MS "standards" are. Ask the Mono folks how they feel about being a relatively popular subject, yet repeatedly wiped from official existence at MS and INETA functions. And then there are MS threats against Samba in Europe. This is not the profile of a standard-bearer for interoperability.
Docx is nothing but a hypocritical ploy, presented suddenly after-the-fact that the OASIS standard MS played a part in creating was unexpectedly taken seriously by government and a strong FOSS implementation. Why anyone with half a brain esp. on Slashdot would fall yet again for this monopolist trickery is beyond me. It definately reeks of shill.
If you're talking about the GNU operating system combined with the Linux kernel, then yes, you're quite right (and thanks for giving GNU a share of the credit). If you're talking about the Linux kernel alone, it's fine to say "Linux". If you're talking about the GNU operating system with some other kernel (there are at least two others to choose from now), it makes sense to mention that other kernel (or kernel replacement) instead of the Linux kernel. "GNU" alone means the GNU operating system with its official kernel replacement—the HURD.
/. posters, other than you, apparently are).
What you call it depends on what meaning you intending to convey; different words mean different things. But it is hypocritical to to be so sensitive to the differences in naming on one technical issue and dismissive of another (as so many
Digital Citizen
...the way they have supported HTML.
most people who use Word, could easily replace it with wordpad.
Can wordpad make tables? What about bulleted lists?
Personaly for most of what I do the MySQL-Perl-LaTeX chain works much better than any integrated office application.
Tell that to your average secreta^W administrative assistant.
In MS Office, yes I am implying that scripting is bad. Even Microsoft is implying that with the default being set to OFF now. As for using a spreadsheet with macros in it I can safaly say I have never used one with them. This goes for any of the Office crap. Why? Because I have it turned off and won't allow any to run.
Is all scripting bad? I never said it was. Scripting that you have no clue it is running is bad and that is what happens in Office scripting.
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Wait, do you hear that crackling sound? That is hell freezing over.
80 CC D8 AF AE D3 AB 54 B7 2E CE 67 C7
RFPs with exacting specification of standards compliance for browsers would be an excellent idea for the same reason that standards compliance for any application, such as word processors, is a good idea.
Practically, though, it would meet resistance since the largest provider of such applications wouldn't meet the specification. There'd be consternation from colleagues, users and management as they wondered how MS got booted out from on a standards clause while, simultaneously, MS is what everyone uses! How can this be?!? As a result, at the end of the day, there would be pressure to relax the specification requiring full and exacting compliance with free, open published standards.
And why not? IT decision makers get evaluated based on costs and benefits that are heavily weighted to here, now and 6 months out. Not 5 years and 10 years out. And that's the cost of not enforcing standards -- 10 years out being locked into a vendor's Solution and being slowly bled through incremental upgrades. It's like agreeing to buy a house mortgage with a pre-payment penalty and an upwardly adjustable interest rate because, well, the paper work is short, the biggest bank in town offers it, it's easier to do than the alternatives, and "everyone else has one".
There's a reassurance associated with being in the same boat with lots of other people.
There are more reasons...Requirement for standards compliance just don't look sexy: it seems to say that you want to use established technology, yesterday's technology, that you are opposed to Innovation®.
While, in fact, insisting on standards compliance gives you reliability and a path forward towards commoditized applications (exactly what the application vendors don't want) where the price will spiral down fast.
The most successful parasitic organisms don't bleed their victims too fast and kill off their source of livelihood. And, they inject an anasthetic to dull the pain by muttering soothing words that distract, boost your ego, etc.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Office is now a System, more than Office as in word processing + spreadsheet + presentation. M$ is turning Office into collaboration software to compete with Lotus Notes.
.doc, .xls, and .ppt".
So, if they support ODF, they will say, "hey, ODF can't do your collaboration needs. Stay with
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.