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What Does the Microsoft ODF Converter Mean?
Andy Updegrove writes "It's been a week now since Microsoft announced its ODF/Office open source converter project - time enough for 183 on-line stories to be written, as well as hundreds of blog entries (one expects) and untold numbers of appended comments. Lest all that virtual ink fade silently into obscurity, it seems like a good time to look back and try to figure out what it all means. In this entry, I report on a long chat with Microsoft's Director of Standards Affairs Jason Matusow, and match up his responses with the official messaging in the converter press release. The result is a picture of a continuing, if slow and jerky, evolution within Microsoft as those that recognize market demands for more openness debate those that want to follow the old way. This internal divide means that the proponents of change need to point to real market threats in order to justify incremental changes. This adaptation by reaction process leaves Microsoft still lagging the market, but has allowed those that favor a more open approach to gradually turn the battle ship a few degrees at a time."
Embrace, extend, extinguish? At least that is what everyone here is going to say, so I don't even see why the editors bothered to post this story. It's slashdot, we always have the same response to news about microsoft.
Philosophy.
"...183 on-line stories to be written, as well as hundreds of blog entries (one expects) and untold numbers of appended comments"
While I'm sure they will come out with a useful tool of some sort, the bottom line is free marketing (IMHO).
Write your C.V. in HTML and hand out the URL. Much more fun and saves on the bandwidth.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
It means: there will be yet another way for desk potatos to potentially send me emails that aren't loaded up with some bell or whistle or whatnot that breaks them under anything other than the very newest version of MS Office.
Along with text, RTF, and older MS formatting.
And just like all those other options, they won't use it.
Someone had to do it.
I write my resume in LaTeX. It allows me to have one source and offer formats in html and pdf automatically.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
turn the battle ship
And that's the problem. The public perception is still Microsoft as a weapon of war. And it's the perception because that's still how Microsoft operates. Going beyond the open/closed debate they need to stop treating IT as a battleground. As soon as they switch from a war mentality to a peace and cooperation mentality things will go a lot smoother. For as long as they make a fight out of things there will be trouble. Maybe one day they'll learn there's actually money to be made while at peace with others.
Developers: We can use your help.
Although the capabilities of Latex are nice I do have one beef with it: it's still eassier to use the equation editor that comes with Word (in the windows version of office). The Word equation editor lets you select formatting options from a list, each of which is accompanies by a visual representation, and you can see the results immediately. With Latex you have to remember all the formatting commands you want, and you have to wait until the very end, when you compile your document, to see what you have actually created. More frustrating is that with the version of Latex I am using when you use a command improperly you simply get an error message, leaving the user to find what was wrong by themselves, in contrast with the Word equation editor where errors are impossible. In summary I'll take usability over power anyday, because I simply want to get the job done; it doesn't matter how pretty the math is, it simply needs to be readable.
Philosophy.
I don't need people modifying my CV so I send it out in PDF and have never heard one complaint about the file format.
This is typical anti-OSS flamebait but I'll respond anyways.
.doc files straight for the submitters.
TeX is a 30 yr old system still used today for a reason. Not saying the commercial side is bad but if you're working on a budget and need precision nothing beats TeX. Not only that but TeX is CVS friendly which comes in handy if you work in a team.
Besides, academia is moving towards Word for the very reason I cited. "oh it can do anything". Look at the recent LLNCS call for papers. They used to only accept photo-ready postscripts. Now they accept
And to add to that, writing a book in Word is cruel. You never get to see the final product and the flow/layout is just awful. When I was working on my first book I could easily make a modification then see what the final product would look like. Regenerating the entire 320 page book takes a mere minute [less really]. As an author it's encouraging to know what your presentation will look like as you work on it.
With my second book I will know what my pages look like a mere week or two before it hits the printers. That gives me very little time to review the layout and submit feedback. So I may get stuck with a book that really doesn't reflect what I wanted to accomplish.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Depending on how Microsoft chooses to implement it, it can be a Good Thing or a Distracting Thing. For example:
- They can throw up dialogs like "If you save in this format your document may look like crap later" (sort of what they do now)
If they stick to previous behavior, the converter will work, but it will be annoying enough to implement that a lot of people and organizations won't bother with it.I'm currently working in an office environment. Personally, I haven't used MS Word here yet - for every document I've created I've either used LaTeX (great for citations, macros, and breaking things into chapters) or Pagemaker (great when you want to do layout by hand.)
Everyone else in this building, however, uses MS Word as their Blunt Instrument to do whatever task they have to get done. They use Word primarily because it's what they know, it works (albeit poorly) and in the end, they're uncomfortable with computers. To a lot of the general population, even an office population, computers are still magic black boxes. I'm not sure if there's a way to combat that fear. How many people can change their own oil? Fix their own TV?
We're geeks. We learn the most efficient way to do things because that is in our nature. Most people won't bother. They just want to get the damn job done, even if they end up wasting more time in the long run.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
I don't think it's funny at all. Look, for lots of everyday uses, Microsoft Word isn't a bad program. Outlook, Excel, Powerpoint-- these all have their valid uses, and they all do a pretty decent job.
Is it good enough that I'd want to spend hundreds of dollars for it when there are free alternatives? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on what I'm doing and what I want, but I've spend money on Photoshop and Acrobat, and those also have free alternatives. I could imagine Microsoft Office remaining successfull if Microsoft starts selling it based on its own merits.
However, as someone running an IT department, I'm trying to migrate to OpenOffice where ever I can. It's not so that I can save a couple hundred dollars here and there, but I'm just entirely sick of the abuse Microsoft heaps on its own customers. All the vendor lock-in, piracy checks, and all the rest-- it hurts my company's flexibility. It worries me that my company might find itself in a position where it can't access its own data. I'm annoyed by the idea that Microsoft's default format isn't real XML, which would be easier for our databases to generate/process.
So what I'm saying is, yes, I'd like Microsoft to use/support real open standards. I'd like their systems to play well with others. I'd like to see a better version of Office for the Mac, and a version for Linux-- there have been times when I would have bought Office for Linux, even though Evolution/OpenOffice is working well enough.
I'd like Microsoft to do those things specifically because I kind of like Microsoft Office, and I'd like to keep using it. However, I can't, in good conscience, put my company's future at Microsoft's mercy because some executive in Microsoft is a childish prick who insists on leveraging their monopoly to the point of hurting their own customers. It's unacceptable.
"We're geeks. We learn the most efficient way to do things because that is in our nature. Most people won't bother. They just want to get the damn job done, even if they end up wasting more time in the long run."
I've spent a good deal of time in both Word and LaTeX and hear this all the time from geeks who still use LaTeX for everything.
It's worth pointing out that LaTeX is not the most efficient way of doing most documents. It is very good at handling citations, but that's it. For everything else, it is inefficient compared to a word processor. And, word processors could have excellent support for citations, if there was a market for it (a few thousand acadmics who expect all software to be free is not a market).
To back up that statement a bit, consider the process of createing a document in LaTeX. Usually, you open up a text editor, write your document using LaTeX's markup language and 'compile' the document. Once its compiled, you look at it in xpdf, find the layout/grammar bugs, and repeat. At some point, you start breaking the document out into sub-files that contain sections or complex equations, and it's not uncommon to have a main.tex file that builds the final document, usually with the aid of a makefile.
Given that workflow, can you see any reason LaTeX would appeal to geeks? Think about it. It's exactly the same way we learned to develop code in school! Edit, compile, run, subroutines, makefile. It _appears_ to be the most efficient way because it maps nicely to something we do on a regular basis. But, most people stopped using text editors and makefiles when IDEs matured. Here's the secret: Word processors are the IDEs of layout.
Let's look a little deeper. To do any basic formating in LaTeX, you have to surround your text with markup. That's extra typing, which is not terribly efficient. And, when you're reading heavily marked up text, you have to filter out the markup to make sense of things. To catch any layout errors, you rely on a viewer for feedback, which adds a roundtrip between the viewer-editor-web. I threw Web in there, because if you've ever tried to do any _real_ layout in LaTeX, you'll need to hunt down the secret incantation that solves your problem. Then there's spell checking. Sure, FlySpell is nice in Emacs, but it's hardly state of the art. Grammar checking? Don't even thing about it (yeah, I know this is of limited usefulness, but it helps sometimes).
Now, go back to a word processor. There's no extra markup to type, layout problems can usually be resolved by tweaking a few settings available from the context (right-click) menu, there's no compile-debug cycle. Styles (even in Word) can be defined to change the look of a document instantly (as long as you know how to use them, but the same is true for LaTeX). For complicated documents, word processors do start to show their rough edges. But, LaTeX doesn't scale that well, either. And, that's a customer issue, most people just don't do enough complicated layout for it to matter. Output formats? "Save as..." (and don't try the human readable claim - how often do you really go back and edit things outside the program you created them in? Be honest.)
So, next time you find yourself claiming that LaTeX is the best way to do everything, take a step back and make an honest evaluation of your workflow.
-Chris
(i.e. more compliant to the spec, as opposed to just trying to mimic whatever OO.o does)
You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Seriously, it has almost never been in MS best interest to adhere to standards and MS has a long history of bastardizing standards. While I fully expect them to "extend" functionality in the specification, I am pretty sure that will not be "compliant" with the specification.
does Internet Explorer follow it?
I can assure you that while OpenOffice will extend the ODF format in a documented way, with an eye on interoperability and trying to add the extensions into the next version of the standard, If MS does it, it will be in a undocumented way, with the spirit of breaking interoperability and make it windows/office centric.
Don't you remember java?
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
The "existence" of the ODF plugin might really mean the exact opposite of what everyone would like it to be. In fact, it might mean the same thing as "Posix compatibility" or "Kerberos" did.
In other words, big migrations never happen overnight. Let's say that an executive has made a commitment to move his organization over to ODF. If Microsoft were to continue stiffing ODF acceptance, the first action would be to start rolling out and training an alternative tool, like OpenOffice. On the other hand, if Microsoft has announced an ODF plugin is coming, the first action is to stand pat, and wait for it. At this point, 3 things may happen:
1: Microsoft delivers an ODF plugin, and the migration moves onward.
2: The executive moves onward to a new position, and the ODF migration can be safely ignored and/or rescinded.
3: Things continue as-is until the deadline approaches and there's still no ODF plugin. At this point the business can either go into some sort of panic mode or make the first, perhaps of many, perhaps indefinite, ODF migration deadline postponements.
Note that all it takes is the promise of an ODF plugin to defer the whole "ODF threat". It's easy to add "schedule slips" and other such to slow the entire migration plan to a crawl, possibly even to increase its cost until everyone cries "Uncle" and decides that Office licenses until Doomsday are cheaper.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I can assure you that OpenOffice does extend the ODF format, and in a way that is not documented. For example, the ODF spec doesn't have the syntax for spreadsheet formulas. Obviously OOo stores formulas for spreadsheets, so where's the documentation for its format? Well, it's a mix of "see Excel" and "read the source". I'm sure that this is something important enough to add to the spec in the next version of the standard, but why wasn't it added initially? Was it just so they could get their standard out there ahead of MS and "win" the race?
.Net, while Java is stuck on the server. Some of those features that MS was planning to add have only recently appeared in Java, and only because C# already had them.
To use a more obscure example, look at how OOo handles non-Latin list numbering. Not only does the standard not specify how to do it, but OOo seems to implement it in a way that is at odds with the spec.
For an example of where Office documents might need to extend the spec, consider highlighting. It is a way of specifying a background color for text that covers the other background color. That way you could highlight search terms without having to permanently change the way the document prints. ODF has no support for this. Should the MS converter not implement highlighting, should it implement it as a background color (thus not letting you turn it off), or should it implement it as an extension? Keep in mind that ODF doesn't provide a standard way of implementing extensions.
However the MS ODF converter implements it will be documented, though, because it's an opensource project. Feel free to read the source to see how it works, or change it if you want. You can even fork it if your changes aren't acceptable to the maintainers.
I don't know what your beef with Java was all about. Java was supposed to take the market by storm, and in a few years every new app was going to be in Java. MS recognized that Java was missing some key features that would be required to make GUI apps just as easily as you could with VB, so they added them. Sun could have licensed the changes back, but instead chose to sue and have them removed from the market. So now all kinds of new desktop apps are written for
dom
You're right. That's why I started using LyX.
Right here, right now: Let us forever more call what Microsoft refers to as "Open XML" as "MS XML."
It's the sensible thing to do.
Insert witty sig here.