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Microsoft to Open up Office Formats
Been on TV writes to tell us that Microsoft is expected to announce on Tuesday the opening of their Office file formats, according to Financial Times. From the article: "Microsoft will submit its Office file formats to Ecma International, the standards body, which will develop the documentation and make it available to the industry. The move is being supported by a number of organizations including Apple Computer, Barclays Capital, BP, Intel and Toshiba."
And how much of your soul will you have to sign away in order to use this?
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
Call it what you want. But I imagine that open source definately has had a major effect on the industry over its lifetime. It has definately been worth all the effort. Despite what some may think.
From the customer line-up in the summary it looks like they had to listen to quite a few large customers.
I wonder what gave those customers the confidence and leverage to convince Microsoft.
Those who rate linux low must at least admit it keeps Microsoft honest.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
See Internet Explorer/HTML...
Sigs are for the weak.
Ogg Vorbis, Png, and Odt benefit everyone, even the people who have never used any of these three formats. Ogg Vorbis benefits everyone because it stops Thomson from taking any legal action against the free Lame mp3 encoder and XMMS mp3 playback library; Thomson knows that if they have their lawyers even look at the Lame web page, the entire Open Source community will perform a mass exodus to the Ogg format.
.doc file format.
The PNG format, in addition to being far superior to GIF, kept Unisys from taking too much legal action against GIF; the little legal action they took increased cross-browser PNG compatibility to the point that people can safely put non-transparent PNG images on their web pages today.
Odt will benefit everyone because this format gives Microsoft a clear message to open up their
I think Office is a fine product, but I always felt a little cheated that I couldn't read newer files on my older version.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
I would suspect that this move is in order to a) Halt Opendocument before it spreads too wide, thus bringing publicity to Microsofts stance, and b) secure a future for their Office product.
This seems like a great win for users everywhere in general and OSS in specific. The article is light on details - who exactly will have access to these open specs? How will licensing be applied? Is it patented - apparently you can patent everything these days.
I'll wait to see ALOT more details before becoming giddy with excitement...
Will this be a RAND deal where you can get the specs under a restrictive license after paying a "reasonable" fee, or will it be a true, open standard. From the ECMA website it says
To publish these Standards and Technical Reports in electronic and printed form; the publications can be freely copied by all interested parties without restrictions.
But I'm not sure that all the standards they adopt have to be so free. For instance MS can open up the spec, but outside of europe they might still be able to restrict access to Open Source projects based on software patents they hold. I really hope this means free, but somehow I'm not holding my breath.
P.S. There's also the issue that even Microsoft might not fully understand the Office file formats. I know that this is true with SMB, the Samba team members know more about the wire protocol then anyone currently working at MS.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
It certainly could change everything - or at least get the ball rolling. These latest developments stem from pressure exerted upon Microsoft from the open source community (and all of the open standards that come along with it) and, more importantly, from its success. Ultimately, we'll see software and computing industry shift into a business model based on service alone. This way, competition is no longer a race to market the latest and greatest features -- it becomes a competition based upon who best serves the customer. (Think RedHat and its booming support-based business). Governments, businesses, and private citizens will all benefit from this approach.
Are they also going to drop the patent encumbrances and change the license so it can be used by open source including GPL'd works?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
As far as I know, MS hasn't been in trouble over their office suite w/the ftc, why would they do this?
RTFA. They don't want to lose gov't business.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
My take on this is that they have caught a lot of flak for not supporting open document. This way, they don't have to make any changes, and they don't have to support open document, but they'll still be supporting a document format that is open.
Now, many of the reasons for switching to open document will be nullified, and if Microsoft's doc becomes the standard, the burden will be on the OSS community to make changes to their software rather than the other way around.
Basically, it's MS's way of waying, "You want openness? Fine, but if we're going to play, we're going to play with our ball."
I think it would be awesome to see MS support an open standard. This seems like kind of a petty way to go about it, but that's the Microsoft we all love to hate, right?
We'll have to see, but clearly MS is doing everything they can to avoid having to use the Open Document format. How they will continue to keep .DOC proprietary to some degree is a mystery to me...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
This is going expose only a way to write to these formats. It says absolutely nothing about how to read documents created by their proprietary packages. It's much easier to say "here's how to create a valid document" without giving away all of the keys to the kingdom than it is to explain fully "here's how to read any document created by our suite" (and you have to presume they'll intentionally leave out the good stuff).
As far as I can tell, this is a no-op.
It seems odd that it will take 18 months to develop documentation for the file formats. Sure, the formats must be complex, but it seems like maybe this documentation organization might not be a truly independent standards body.
It's worse than that. Like RTF, they will change the formats arbitrarily with every revision of office, and will then probably take 18 months to document each new version. And of course they will claim this is complete openness and interoperability, ignoring that they're keeping 3rd parties 18 months behind...
somebody strongarms microsoft into doing something they don't want to do. if it weren't for a certain government office saying they would switch to open office because of the open file format issue, this would never have happened. now if only we can get the officials to say they will only view porn in mpg or avi or whatever and get microsoft to open up its video codecs for all
They'd do this because Open Office may be legitimately scaring them.
/. about Paris accellerating their plans to test Open Source .
I'd like to say Massachusetts going OSS scared them more than they wanted to admit in public, but I think MA was merely the last straw. Various countries have been pushing OSS over the last few years.
There's another article on the front page of
Someone high up finally decided that file interoperability is critical if they don't want to lose their client base. Not only will this move placate antitrust authorities, but it'll allow corporate IT guys justify the vendor lock-in they have to accept in order to get deep discounts on corporate licenses.
Don't forget that Support is a big deal for companies. They like to have support contracts to fall back on.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
... Ultimately, we'll see software and computing industry shift into a business model based on service alone. This way, competition is no longer a race to market the latest and greatest features -- it becomes a competition based upon who best serves the customer ...
...
Thank you for restating the theory and hope behind OSS, now for reality
MS had previously published Word and Excel formats. They did so as they took over the market, as they destroyed the competition. The competitions support for Word and Excel formats further reinforced those proprams as the defacto standards.
It's not 18 months to develop documentation, it's 18 months to develop the standard. That's relatively quick. Bear in mind that whatever internal documentation Microsoft has may be relatively sparse, and will probably make a lot of assumptions about how things are handled that might not hold true for other implementations. It ends up being a lot of work to find all the little corner cases and assumptions which are only really codified in the source itself, and distill that into a readable description of what implementations should do.
I don't follow your logic. The process is slow, therefore ECMA is in Microsoft's back pocket? Why would the slowness of standardisation be evidence of ECMA bias?
ECMA is the organisation that standardised Javascript. And before all the snarky comments begin, it's worth pointing out that ECMA-262 (Javascript) implementations are remarkably consistent and interoperable; it's only the host objects that are inconsistent between browsers, and that's outside ECMA-262's scope (for that, you want to direct your attention towards the W3C DOM specifications).
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
That's a pretty mislead statement.
Microsoft is opening their file formats because interoperability is king, open-source or closed.
It will be interesting to see how "open" it really will be. The funny thing is I swear I've heard this before. Wasn't the big deal supposed to be how they were going to use XML and how this was going to allow them to place nicely with others?
I get the sense that Microsoft may take a security through obscurity approach with this. Make it a pain in the butt for somebody else to implement. Then keep adding new stuff to it so that there's always subtle incompatibilities with older software. A "open" format is of minimal value if third parties have to struggle to keep up with the standard.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Am I the only one who fears they will never implement OpenDocument support, but rather 'open' their proprietary formats?
Well of course not. The whole point of opening their own standards is to kill the OpenDocument standard.
It's a tactical move: of course they wouldn't have opened their document standard if they didn't think it would help them. The ideal end result for Microsoft would be the death of the OpenDocument standard because it's been made redundant; the world would still have the open standard it's been craving, but MS would still be hanging onto the reigns.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Interesting prognostication, but I totally fail to see how this "shift" follows from the opening of the document formats. Not all software is best done by a bunch of hackers working in their spare time, as just a casual look around SourceForge will demonstrate. With such a huge number of failed and abandoned projects, and only a relatively few high-profile success stories (LAMP), I don't believe the FOSS model is a poster child for the end-all and be-all of success.
IMHO, there's still plenty of room for dedicated teams of developers putting their jobs on the line to create great, commercial-grade software for (you can shudder now) profit.
And as far as models go, I can see an equally likely future based not solely on service and support, but subscriptions...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Lets put this PR spin through the reality filter.
1. Microsoft promising something 18 months down the road is meaningless. Hell, ANY tech company promising something 18 montsh out is meaningless.
2. This announcement is for Europe, without software patents.... for now. Of course if in 18 months there just HAPPEN to be software patents and said patents are licensed under their no-GNU terms... oh well, who wants to support smelly hippies anyway.
3. The only promised the ability to write, kida curious since most of the EU objections are about random folk being able to READ their government's output.
4. There is no committment to continue using this 'standardized' format in any future product. So there is nothing to provent them from releasing a future Office that uses an 'embraced and extended' version and either not documenting the changes at all or another 18 months after it ships.
Democrat delenda est
This surrender on such an essential MS competitive strategy, format lockin, shows how powerful governments can be when they "just say no". The Danes cracked the MS proprietary format policy first, though MS even played chicken with them by threatening to pull out. Now, faced with a united EU, states like Massachussetts, and other representatives of the people actually protecting the people's interests, MS will show that its customers are more important than its total dominance is. And MS will continue to profit and grow - though along with a more freely growing IT industry to serve people. These giant closed camps always look unbeatable right until the end, but people united are stronger than even the biggest software monopoly on the planet.
--
make install -not war
In 18 months, Vista will have shipped, most corporate desktops will be running it, and Office documents will be unreadable without the keys from the Microsoft Rights Management Server having been provided to the Fritz chip. The formats will be open, and it'll be a DMCA violation to read them.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
Is it just me, or does this sound like an underhanded attempt to try and make sure Massachusetts doesn't happen all over again? They might open the format, but that still doesn't mean people won't fork over the large sum of money for Office.
space is pretty cool.
Reading is the easy bit.
It's far simpler to reverse engineer a file format to get the information you want out of it - and leave the stuff that's irrelevant.
But trying to create a fragile binary file format full of stuff that's irrelevant to you, but required by other programs is very, very difficult. One bit wrong could create a document that causes other applications trying to read it to crash.
Don't mind that little patent attached. Just look somewhere else. See, no bother!
Red Leader Standing By!
However, they wouldn't be waking up to this were there not a healthy looking and viable alternative in the form of OpenOffice, which, as well as delivering true ownership of the files, also provides (most of) the convenience, bells and whistles of the m$ software stable. So in that sense, open source is a driver of this pressure.
That's why I think the half-assed, quasi-open strategies discussed in some posts here do not present a real long-term option for m$ - once people are fully awake to the fact they don't really own their own data, only real open formats will solve m$'s marketing problem, and we'll see a real shift in the file-format landscape, of which this latest thing may be an early sign.
.sigs: Just Say No!
All in all, it's probably just a ploy to soften up Massachusetts, claiming that their formats is as "open" as OpenDoc, while probably requiring license fees, or make alternative implementations very hard in one or another way.
Microsoft has historically "embraced" open industry standards by adding proprietary extensions, making its user's data worthless outside of the MS world.
In this case, I suspect they'll end up releasing, but still maintaining control over the office formats. If not there already, they'll make sure there's the ability to store proprietary objects (or meta-data, or whatever the current popular nomenclature is) in the now "open" format. They'll then simply move on to placing more and more document content in these proprietary closed objects, while claiming they're using an "open format."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Massachusetts did not go OSS. Massachussetts went open format (this also explains why PDF is an acceptable format too). The advantage is that vendors can compete with both closed and open solutions as long as the data they produce is in the open format.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
You can bet that Microsoft has a strong business plan for this back in Redmond to show this helps crush OpenOffice somehow. It would not surprise me if Microsoft filed for a slew of patents in the next 18 months. Or perhaps they're going to open up the Office 12 file format, but the earlier binary file format that probably 95% of customers are using will remain lock away to be reverse engineered.
That way when a government body wants to start using a "open" file format, Microsoft will happily sell them some software assurance program that gives them Office 12 at a good price, but locks them in for another 5 years or so.
Trust me, there is a good business plan back in Redmond on the table showing how this is going to work best for Microsoft in the long run.
The sad part is that, Microsoft owns the desktop for now. They could open source Office and Windows and they would STILL own the desktop.
IBM opened their 3270 gateway standards. I tried using a third party package to connect to an AS/400, using 3270 emulation. It turns out that the standards could be interpered several different ways, and of course Unisys did it wrong. The end result is that these "open standards" will be used against third party packages with Microsoft's FUD. IBM did it in the 80's. Nothing new here, move on.
Fortunately there is a fix available. What you do is start another open standard. Use your influence in the industry to promote this standard for all you are worth. Claim that you have seen the error of your ways. Get a bunch of pet suppliers and/or dominant players in related industries together and form a "Industry Association". Go to conferences. Give speeches. Actually support this new standard with your new products. Complete interoperability is just around the corner and you don't even have to switch suppliers if you don't want.
Inevitably the momentum will swing towards your open standard. Timing is critical here. You have to anticipate. Just as it seems clear to everyone which way to go suddenly back off on your support of your open standard. If it seems like you were a bit late simply start supporting and promoting the other open standard. The key here is balance. Keep both standards relevant for as long as it takes.
The effects on your customers will be grave. They will end up having to support 3 or more standards because they will still have a lot of the old stuff you made. Your customers deserve all this of course. They were disloyal. Eventually everyone will yearn for the old days of single source contracts. The open standards effort will eventually die on its own and the industry will have learned that open standards just don't work. There are just too many of them.
Repeat as needed and remember that this isn't just for things like the computer industry. It works for more traditional businesses as well. Microsoft didn't invent this stuff. They are just good at applying it
If you believe reading is the easy bit then look at Html. As "specified" as W3 has made Html no two browsers render many pieces of data the same way.
As I said before, it is interesting they are specifying how to write out proper Office Xml but it is somewhat meaningless for everyone but Office to understand how to read it properly. We can understand the heck out of how to write files and still end up with a lot of tinkering on how to read it in where two implementations interpt the format differently.
I am really uncomfortable in being put in a position of appearing to defend Microsoft. However, it occurs to me that some of the "secret extension" hackery you reference is, at least in part, a reflection of how hard it is to write open-ended, extensible file formats that work in a multitude of circumstances. On the flip side: when you're coding against a deadline set by marketing (we _need_ office 2007 _before_ 2008, guys!) a few corners gotta be cut. Hard to embed multimedia in a spreadsheet? Just hack together an ActiveX control to do it for you and stuff it in the file format. Oh, only works on Windows? Well that works for 95% of the population. Need to save a complex data relationship to disc? Why bother serializing? Just blop the object out of memory to disc wrapped in a tag. Don't you think defining and _adhering_ to a complex file format is one or two orders of magnitude harder that just getting something something put together that kinda works for us and the guys in the Poser Point group? Don't you think that the Office code base is a bit of a mess at this point in time?
Two non-Office examples:
1) It seems like its easier for someone to pull together some hackery-quackery using frontpage/VB or flash than to put together some custom cross-platform DHTML for a cool web effect. Is exclusion of browsers on minority platforms a primary goal, or only an unintended consequence?
2) In 1997 a lot of "open source" code wouldn't compile on a 64 bit linux machine (DEC Alpha). Were the 32-bit processor folks conspiring against the nascent 64 bit folks?
Malice? Not necessarily. The rhetoric will whip up the already-converted, but I think it will fall flat on the ears of the undecided. While I agree that it would seem that being opaque and/or incomprehensible has been a really strong aspect the Microsoft business strategy, I think we'll have a better chance of being taken seriously if we stick to technical considerations (including so-called "IP" entanglements).
Fermat's other theorem: "I have a simple proof, but I can't write it down as I fear it's a DMCA violation to discuss it"
If they start trying to support Open Document, it would be a huge pain for them, because they would have to adapt or change their document's structure and DOM, which would probably mean re-doing a good amount of their work on Office. So, instead, they just throw their "open" standard on the table and say "How about you support our format". All of this makes perfect sense in M$'s strategy because they still leverage their complete dominance in this market by forcing their competitors to re-build to their standards, instead of the other way around.
It is very unlikely that M$ will ever release their format in a way that is truly "open" (i.e. usable in open source software). The simple reason is that Microsoft consider's their documents to be their intellectual property. They will always seek some sort of royalties or benefits because they consider them part of their company's assets. The healthy number of patents they apply for each week (what is it, like 30, right?) supports the fact that IP is an emerging part of their business model.
The other downside to this whole thing is that M$ is the last company who should be defining implementations for the rest of the market. The protocols they define in house have always been a huge source of pain for anybody else trying to understand them. At times it almost seems like their protocol is simply defined by how the current version of their software decides to spit out bits. SMB is a good example, and there are probably others. This isn't even particularly bad behavior when you consider that these protocols/formats were never meant to work with anybody else's software; however, when M$ begins dictating that the rest of the world adopt their proprietary formats, you end up with a bunch of buggy software that works about 98% of the time. All the documentation in the world will never create a stable format which is well designed to work with a multitude of implementations. Sadly, this move will probably work well for M$, and we will end up with a situation similiar to SMB, except that it is even more difficult for business's to work around.
I'm not sure you understand what a "standard XML file" is; an XML file is just meaningless (but nicely organized) data if it doesn't have some kind of "schema" associated with it, telling what that data means. XML office formats use a schema that gives the data meaning in terms of word processing or spreadsheet documents. If you can't write files using that schema without violating a patent, and if you can't obtain a patent license for some reason, then you're pretty much stuck if you try to write out compatible files. There's no "standard" definition of XML for word processing or spreadsheet documents; there's OpenDocument and there are the MS Office formats.
It has crossed my mind a couple times recently why we haven't seen buffer overflow attacks against word an excel.
Many people know it crashes with large files, it can also probably be exploited as well.
Even a two pronged attack of a word file with pretty girls and a small image with a buffer overflow attack. That in addition to another attack in the word formatting itself. Many will forward it because of the girls and have no idea that they are spreading a virus.
Or even better, a web site that exploits IE, Word & Excel!
OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Thunderbird or be own3d!
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
The only software that implements OpenDocument right now happens to be FOSS, but it doesn't have to be: Microsoft, Apppe or anyone else can implement the format without having to publish their source code under the GPL or give it away freely.
This is all about interoperability. Software vendors can still sell licenses, but they will have to give people a good reason to buy them (and not just Microsoft locking people in to its proprietary file formats). OpenDocument will probably be good for software companies that aren't Microsoft, provided they're working on a niche type of document that isn't already covered by the standard (free or MS) office suite.
Duh? HTML isn't meant to be rendered the same everywhere. That's up to the browser. Deliberately.
Three words:
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
Too bad you guys put on AC mode..
One modded down post won't make your karma bad, in fact, if you only get good karma you have less of a chance to get mod points.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -