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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.'"
We might not be able to beat one good format, but we can easily defeat two.
"standards are great, everyone should have one."
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If there are two standards, how can they be called standards?
Isn't that like having competing monopolies?
Regardless, competetion in standards is only good for a short period of time, after that there is a waste of man hours on one project to the detriment of whatever the standard is for.
Since they haven't done that yet, the rest is just speculation. It looks like legal issues will be keeping the Free world on OpenDocument for the foreseeable future.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
so up yours.
Laws are for people with no friends.
If Microsoft had to actually compete, they would cease to exist.
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"Competition between two standards we believe is a very good thing"
From past experience, Microsoft only believes this when the leading standard is someone elses. Once Microsoft's standard holds the most mindshare/marketshare, then they don't like competition anymore.
Just what I've observed
Using plain ol' text since 1968
Competition between standards we believe is a very good thing
Yeah, for microsoft.
You can expect this kind of horse shit from MS because they are on the weak end of the document format wars. Allow me to explain:
Competition between programs is a very good thing. No arguments. Standards are just that, standards. There has already been a shake down period, and people have agreed this is an agreed set of rules. Hence, "standard". By instigating a whole new standards "war", they hope to create confusion and chaos. And those of you who work with PHB already know the next bit: They panic and go with the safe option.
Fuck 'em. I hope against logic that they get eaten alive on this one.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
It's just marketing BS. Bleh!
The process was, this is the standard.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Open doesn't mean what it should anymore.
Like in this article for example.
QUOTE:
Thanks to Microsoft, users will face the "unsavory prospect of two supposed standards. The truth is that only one of them is free of intellectual property encumbrances. Only one reflects multivendor support, and only one reflects openness. That standard is OpenDocument Format,"
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
Let's see, embrace, extend, extinguish.
Embrace: Do a complete reversal; say that open standards are a great idea, far better than our own proprietary asshattery.
Extend: So yeah, we're all about open standards now and look we've got our own version OpenXML. It's obviously better (or at least that's what people will believe thanks to our unstoppable marketing department) so we'll add extra tags and change the format of existing ones. Oh by the way, this means that only Microsoft products will create this and only Microsoft products will understand this but that's not our fault, honestly.
Extinguish: Well everyone seems to be using our version of the open document format since 90% of all computer users use our software so only masochists use that 'other' standard. We'll repeatedly change the standard by making each version of our software understand only a new version of it. After everyone is frustrated by the lack of stability in a so called standard, we'll do another 180 and point out how much better and stable closed source/standards are and move everyone back to safe, trustworthy Microsoft standards that Just Works(tm).
Thanks for playing!
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.
Multiple, competing open standards are fine, and being open it is usually not too difficult to translate between them. Unfortunately MS's "Open XML" standard is not open, so they are not really giving us the choice they are claiming. Open XML is format that is patented and that is licensed with a variety of important restrictions. For example, only the current version is covered by the license, it expires immediately should a new version come out. According to the letter of the license this means the benefits of backwards compatibility and even the ability to distribute a program from one day to the next are subject to MS's whim. Should MS release a new version that is intentionally broken, they could legally restrict competitors from continuing to sell or even give away a word processor.
Redistribution is completely forbidden by the licensing, leading many to believe that it was specifically designed to exclude GNU licensed applications, like Open Office, their primary competitor. How can anyone call "Open XML" and open format when the license under which that format is offered means it can't be implemented by OpenOffice?
All of this is MS marketing FUD. Closed is open. Bad is good. Ha ha we made it really hard for you to explain shit to your managers by naming our product the opposite of what it is. This is like GM calling the next iteration of their traditional cargo van "Hybrid Luxury Mobile" despite it not having a hybrid engine or any luxury features. Don't fall for their crap.
We do...
Have you ever saved a word document as an html document in Microsoft Word?
I call that output mshtml!!!
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.
If you are Microsoft, what you have at stake are billions of dollars and your monopoly. Therefore Microsoft will do absolutely anything to protect both. They are a monopoly and this is what monopolies do.
I guess all the rest of us can do is plot our course - in this case OpenDocument - and stick to it through thick and thin.
Microsoft will contine to wriggle and bluster around this for months and months. It's part of the game. There's no point wasting any more energy on the subject. Microsoft would like nothing more than to exhaust people they will always regard as competition.
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offtopic? I guess some people need things spelled out for them. The above was a reference to Microsoft's blatent disregard of html standards. In effect, when we've got more than one standard out there, the above is the result.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
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=-
It's obvious, isn't it? Microsoft has exclusive control over the ECMA standard. Only Microsoft can release another OpenXML standard and the "standard" states that clearly. On the other hand, anyone from the ODF group could update the Open Document format, and release a new standard through the normal OASIS procedures. If Sun became disinterested in maintaining the standard, the remaining members could. If Microsoft becomes disinterested in maintaining OpenXML (say, for example, they successfully killed the ODF threat), that would simply be the end of OpenXML. We're exchanging one de facto standard for another de facto standard, and calling it open to keep lawmakers happy. It's all about control.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Most MS critics are not upset because MS is winning, but because MS is using unfair and illegal means in order to win.
People have chosen to use MS software and they have chosen to give MS a majority market share.
You mean: PC manufacturers have chosen to bundle Windows and Office on every system they sell, not giving a rebate to consumers who want a new PC without Windows+Office. Having Windows+Office preinstalled on every new system gave MS a majority market share.
Joe Average will reason that, having already paid for the pre-installed software, he is going to use that software instead of buying and installing alternative software - after all, the only software Joe Average installs on his PC is the software that get's automatically installed when you surf to the wrong websites with IE as your browser.
Please stop parroting the MS marketing speak; MS Office isn't running on most PC's because the consumers chose to use it, but because the PC manufactures preinstalled it.
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".
Groklaw has a good article http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200512150 14700305 on this story including the transcript of Alan Yates.
That is because in a lot of organizations the Legal and HR departmets are idiots who don't know anything about technology and won't listen to the people who do. You cannot guaranteee proper formatting with HTML, even with mshtml. If proper formatting is actually important to you you won't use HTML for that - you'll publish your documents as PDFs or similiar instead. People who write documents in Word, save them as HTML, and consider that "saving the formatting" because it looks right in IE don't actually care about saving formatting - they use it as an excuse for not doing things the right way.
One only has to look at NASA to see just how bad using two standards can be. NASA used two standards of measurement (english and metric), the result is a pile of parts strewn across the red planet.
Got Code?
How do you preclude an XSLT to un-frobnicate documents bearing the Redmond taint?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Maybe I can spell it out using nice, short little sentences for you.
See, the interesting part comes from the change in Word's behaviour upon installing OpenOffice. That wasn't so hard, was it?
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."
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"Competition between two standards we believe is a very good thing"
What a ridiculous statement.
If there are multiple standards then there is no standard by definition.
Competition between products using a common standard is a good thing.
Microsoft "opening" their XML format has an unintended side effect. Sure, they may end up winning the purchasing agreement for office software for the Massachussetts state government ... but by opening the format, they've also opened the door to allowing the OpenOffice.org software to read/write Microsoft's format -- legally. This will allow the free world to continue using OpenOffice.org in a Microsoft-centric world.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Yes it is. They all have agreements with Microsoft which means they lose discounts if they sell systems without Windows on.
You would not believe how hard it is these days to get a laptop without an operating system preinstalled. There are precisely two companies doing this in the whole of the UK, compared to several hundred (rough estimate) laptop+windows vendors/resellers.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
This still leaves open the question of why PC makers preinstall their software and none others. Clue: it's not because the MS Mafia forced them to.
O rly? I've read tales of OEMs getting deep discounts if they install only Windows but having to pay nearly full retail if they partition the hard drive and install Windows and GNU/Linux. This would seem to become even more important as the cost of PC hardware falls and the Windows license becomes a greater proportion of the cost of goods.
Sir, offering discounts to manufacturers who install Windows exclusively is emphatically not mafia-like activity.
Nope, it's a normal business practice.
However, monopolists are barred from many normal business practices, for good reason. This is one that Microsoft should not be allowed.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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?