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Two Open Document Standards Better Than One?
tsa writes "Microsoft says that the consumers should have the choice between multiple open standards for documents." From the article: "Microsoft's Yates said that OpenDocument and Open XML come from very different design points. 'In the future at some point there will be convergence,' he said. In the near term, the transition period from proprietary document formats to Open XML-based ones will be 'messy and complex,' he added. 'Competition between standards we believe is a very good thing.'"
I got a new laptop and it had MS works installed. I used Word until the trial period expired then when I could no longer open documents I downloaded OpenOffice. Lo and behold when I try to open an MS document now it does open using Word except it does ask me to license the product.
I get the impression that Word looks for OpenOffice and if it finds it decides to go ahead and open the document!!!!
IF, however, M$ can create a second "open" standard (one which presumably is not compatible with the existing open standard), end-users will be frustrated by what they perceive as a failure of the open document standard. I can see some poor cubicle inhabitant trying to open a M$ fnord OpenXML document in OpenOffice and not understanding why it doesn't work. At some point, the PHB's will conclude that "open" document formats aren't interoperable or don't work, making them more receptive to accepting the "lock-in" of proprietary formats because they "just work".
This is just another example of MacroHard trying to pollute the open-source stream. Nothing new under the sun here. Move along, people - move along.
The only competition was dos vs. Dr.Dos. And they had to cheat to win that.
It was PC vs. Apple, which means that Apple competed against all the PC manufacuers. As to the office stuff, MS gave away office forever until they had. It was all subsidized by MS's owning the DOS/Windows monopoly.
So, no, MS is not a competitive company.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
MS is competing. You're just upset because they're winning. Yes, they're software is garbage, but in our current marketplace, they are competing. You can scream "monopolist" from the tallest rooftop all you want, it doesn't matter. People have chosen to use MS software and they have chosen to give MS a majority market share. It could be argued that they chose wrong, but they still made the choice.
The question is why. The answers are pretty obvious to anyone who doesn't have their head buried in the collective sand of the open source software evangelization movement. But until the OSS zealots ask that question in a serious and honest manner, they're still going to be the scrappy upstarts and MS is still going to be the dominant force in the industry.
Stop scapegoating and start doing something useful, or else we'll never be rid of MS's garbage.
The last time I remember two standards really working out well was VHS and BetaMax... Oh wait, that didn't work out well did it.. We all ended up tossing our superior BetaMax decks for big, lower quality, VHS ones. Just think my pile of VHS tapes could have been so much smaller if Beta won... But I digress. Honestly, in the VHS vs BetaMax, they're both still in use (well, maybe not as wide spread as they were a few years ago), just some on the professional side of the fence and some on the home side. So is that going to happen for these two standards? I suppose time will tell.
-=JML=-
I have seen lots of posts saying it is some scheme for dividing and conquering, or creating more work for open source people, etc, but the real story is that the Office codebase is so convoluted and fragile that they need a document format that favorable to how Office works... friendly to its data structures and whatnot.
Basically the only innovation to Office in the last 4+ years has been in the UI, and I don't think that is an accident. An interface just issues commands to the document engine, so it's fairly simple to rework. But loading a new document format is much more closely tied to the actual engine. For example, if the structures are not defined the same way it may be necessary to create caches (hashtables say) of elements during loading. And also their code is designed around a format where a document is not written out completely, but is document with a set of changes (so that saves and timed backups are immediate without having to regen the whole doc).
So I think it is very likely that the real reason Microsoft is so adamant against the open formats is that they've talked to their engineers who have said it will take 5 years to fully support the new format (for ex, make backup saves happen in background so user isn't annoyed). Or they've got developers that have just said "f'that I'll f'ing leave before touching that crap".
Actually, this is pretty standard for Microsoft. They always say that choice is good when it allows someone to choose Microsoft (i.e., if there was no choice they wouldn't get business) and that choice is bad when it allows someone to choose someone other than Microsoft (i.e., Linux, OpenOffice where ODF isn't a big push). Microsoft is all about choice in the areas that it doesn't have a monopoly.
And while it's somewhat hypocrical, it does make sense from the "we want all the money" point of view.
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
Incidentally, I think the only time "content+presentation" paradigms work well is when you have lots of similar data to present in a standard manner. For instance, records in a forum. Here, the content and presentation are only loosely related. This is vastly different than, say, certain documents where the arrangement of the elements on the page actually uniquely defines the content. Consider as an example the Periodic Table of Elements - here the arrangement is content.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
The reason microsoft is evil competition in this case is because of motive. Microsoft's goal is to undermine the open process and any "open" proposals it puts forth will have been designed to ultimately allow microsoft to do so.
Perhaps they will leverage their monopoly to cause an inferior open format to win. It goes like this.
1. Government and some industry requires open format support in word processing application.
2. Microsoft proposes terrible open format that is vastly inferior to word doc.
3. Microsoft does not implement competiting formats, only its own inferior open format.
4. Government offices relicense office because it now complies with regulation.
5. Offices using inferior open format can not get all their work done using crippled format.
6. Ultimately regulations at offices are changed to allow them to use word docs again.
At no point here did the offices use anything but Microsoft's product and are right back to a proprietary format. Microsoft wins.
Microsoft does this crap consistantly, again and again. Never once have they claimed to participate in an open process with honorable intentions and ended up with an honorable open result. Why is it that every time Microsoft proposes something like this there is someone piping up and suggesting that Microsoft could have a legitimate involvement in ANY open process, format, or standard?
Multiple open standards are good as long as they're really open. That way, the market can sort out which one is really best, and it will end up as the reference standard. But Microsoft isn't really looking like they're making OpenXML truly open. And that's the worst of all worlds.
Hopefully one of the things that comes out of this is that large IT-consumers, like the State of Massachusetts, will learn how the process of developing and open standard really works, and what's open and what's not open. Hopefully this will obligate many or most vendors to support open standards.
Take for example Betamax vs VHS. That was very good thing. Oh wait, no, the other thing. A major catastorphy. It caused consumers tons of pain, cost everyone tons of money and set the industry back years.
Competition is good. Standards are good. Competition between standards: very bad.
"And we go round and round and round in the circle game."
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Try reading the same sentence again, and emphasizing a different portion of the sentence.
I try to open an MS document now it does open using Word except it does ask me to license the product.
When compared to the previous sentence:
I used Word until the trial period expired then when I could no longer open documents...
we see that the interesting part here was the change in behavior from not opening documents to opening documents. It does still ask him to license the product (which it probably did during the trial phase as well) but that is not really the interesting part- because we know it hasn't ever been registered, the fact that it would ask shouldn't be very surprising.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?