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Dark Corners of the OpenXML Standard
Standard Disclaimer writes "Most here on Slashdot know that Microsoft released its OpenXML specification to counter ODF and to help preserve its market position, but most people probably aren't aware of all the interesting legacy code the OpenXML specification has brought to light. This article by Rob Weir details many of the crazy legacy features in the dark corners of OpenXML. As it concludes after analyzing specification requirements like suppressTopSpacingWP, 'so not only must an interoperable OOXML implementation first acquire and reverse-engineer a 14-year old version of Microsoft Word, it must also do the same thing with a 16-year old version of WordPerfect.'"
Until it supports WordStar documents.
The crazy amount of backwards compatibility is what allowed Microsoft to rise to the position it holds today...
I don't know why anyone would complain, the spec is only 6,000 pages long.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
This is why the Microsoft Office XML (let's not kid ourself, this is far from "open") format should not become an ISO standard.
Care about privacy? Read this!
The power of legacy systems is at once both Microsoft's greatest strength and greatest weakness. Nobody in OSS is going to have the patience to rebuild the same level of backwards compatibility needed to displace them but the code must be an absolute tarpit of accumulated cruft and security holes that's incredibly difficult for them to keep going.
Sweet! I actually have copies of those somewhere. The reverse engineering process will begin immediately. Now where did I put my 286....
"You need a license to buy a gun, but they'll sell anyone a stamp." - Red Green
ODF is the former SXW format that was taken and transformed into a standard by a committee comprising several Office software makers. It's suppose to describe the normal features that anyone should expect from any Word processing application, be it OpenOffice.org, KWord, AbiWord, Corel Word Perfect, etc. all this in a perfectly neutral way. It was designed with a function in mind (storing word processing documents in an open and interoperable way). Its benefits are comparable to the standardisation of HTML.
OpenXML is Microsoft trying to translate its proprietary DOC file inside a XML container (because it's a big buzzword) and propose it as a standart to ECMA (because everyone is speaking about ODF being an ISO standard). It describes not only what is to be expected from a word processor, but also all MS-Word specific microsoftism. It was designed with a specific software in mind (and partly derives from the internal functionning of MS-Word). It's only a small improvement over the previous MS XML format (which had a lot of informations hidden in a binary blob).
The good thing for Microsoft, is that they can pretend this limitation is "Not-a-bug-but-a-feature", and brag around that there are a lot of stuffs that MS-Word couldn't store inside an ODF and only OpenXML can carry.
Microsoft's plan :
1. Embrace
2. Extend <- They are here
3. Extinguish
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The crazy amount of backwards compatibility is what allowed Microsoft to rise to the position it holds today...
Or maybe it was their illegal business tactics?
It would be pretty easy for me to run a successful business too if I could break federal law with impunity.
Life is too short to proofread.
Things that are illegal for a monopoly are perfectly legit for a non-monopoly. It's a crazy law, but that's how it works. Microsoft broke no federal laws to *gain* their monopoly.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Is it the only solution to all this to attack key Microsoft executives while they are sleeping?
So what can you do?
The solution is simple. Create a job description that is written specifically to your friend's background and skills. The more specific and longer you make the job description, the fewer candidates will be eligible. Ideally you would write a job description that no one else in the world except Guillaume could possibly match. Don't describe the job requirements. Describe the person you want. That's the trick.
So you end up with something like this:
* 5 years experience with Java, J2EE and web development, PHP, XSLT
* Fluency in French and Corsican
* Experience with the Llama farming industry
* Mole on left shoulder
* Sister named Bridgette
Although this technique may be familiar, in practice it is usually not taken this extreme. Corporate policies, employment law and common sense usually prevent one from making entirely irrational hiring decisions or discriminating against other applicants for things unrelated to the legitimate requirements of the job.
But evidently in the realm of standards there are no practical limits to the application of the above technique. It is quite possible to write a standard that allows only a single implementation. By focusing entirely on the capabilities of a single application and documenting it in infuriatingly useless detail, you can easily create a "Standard of One".
Of course, this begs the question of what is essential and what is not. This really needs to be determined by domain analysis, requirements gathering and consensus building. Let's just say that anyone who says that a single existing implementation is all one needs to look at is missing the point. The art of specification is to generalize and simplify. Generalizing allows you to do more with less, meeting more needs with few constraints.
Let's take a simplified example. You are writing a specification for a file format for a very simple drawing program, ShapeMaster 2007. It can draw circles and squares, and they can have solid or dashed lines. That's all it does. Let's consider two different ways of specifying a file format for ShapeMaster.
In the first case, we'll simply dump out what ShapeMaster does in the most literal way possible. Since it allows only two possible shapes and only two possible line styles, and we're not considering any other use, the file format will look like this:
Although this format is very specific and very accurate, it lacks generality, extensibility and flexibility. Although it may be useful for ShapeMaster 2007, it will hardly be useful for anyone else, unless they merely want to create data for ShapeMaster 2007. It is not a portable, cross-application, open format. It is a narrowly-defined, single application format. It may be in XML. It may be reviewed by a standards committee. But it is by its nature, closed and inflexible.
How could this have been done in a way which works for ShapeMaster 2007 but also is more flexible, extensible and considerate of the needs of different applications? One possibility is to generalize and simplify:
Does this mean the big E won't work on my windows 97 anymore?
I thought most people considered themselves lucky if there documents could open in successive versions of Office. Why would anyone want to implement support for really old versions if Microsoft does not do it themselves?
:(){
"It would be pretty easy for me to run a successful business too if I could break federal law with impunity."
What's insightful about pretending that federal laws are the only ones a company has to deal with? And when you go international...
I don't know why anyone would complain, the spec is only 6,000 pages long.
And the best part is, these are the pages it uses... (I mean, why else do those specs cost so much?)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
ODF spec page count: 722.
OpenXML spec page count: 6000 !!
But they broke plenty of laws to keep their monopoly :) And while their actions during their rise to the top may not have been illegal, they could easily be called 'strong-armed'.
Space for rent, inquire within
If you get to the point where you build up a company that can even consider garnering the term "monopoly", then get back to us. Until then, you have no idea what you're talking about, especially when quoting arbitrary and esoteric "federal laws". Call me nuts, but if you ever got to that point, you'd might even get a crazy idea in your head that those "federal laws" that you are so damned proud of, are about as fair and just as our drug laws. At that point, maybe, just maybe, you may come to thinking that you you earned what you got, and the government has no right to tell you how to run your business that you started in your teens, and proceeded to build to make it one of the most successful companies in the history of capitalism.
Until you get to that point, I suggest that you those "federal laws" out your ass, Mr. Ashcroft.
A) Desire to convert an old Word 5/95/WordPerfect 6 document to OOXML.
B) Have the original document actually use one of the undocumented legacy features
C) After converting the file actually experience a problem in formatting
First of all, the number of people who fall into category A is going to be small to begin with, same with category B. Although Microsoft is not providing the documentation like they should be, category C would be up to Corel, Sun, and other producers of future OOXML compatible word processors to implement. They're going to implement OOXML, so they're going to be encountering these issues as they program anyway. I trust they can figure out a way to display "full-width East Asian characters" and other such issues that are not fully documented in the standard.
I think we need to do some sort of "Trading Places"-esque scheme, where all the Microsoft board members go to sleep one night as usual, but wake up the next morning working in Bangalore at an outsourced call center for OEM tech support.
At the same time we'll let the tech support drones have their way with the Microsoft campus, which I suspect will involve setting it on fire.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Take a economics course before you shovel anarchic crap down our throats.
This is not a specification; this is a DNA sequence.Outrageously funny and to the point.
The strings command supports all legacy document formats! What more could you possibly need? Besides, formatting is overrated anyway...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
you fools thought that ODF would be the end of MS Office because, while MS destroys you in functionality, you'd get everyone to forgoe functionality for an open format. And you'd also immediately render billions of existing MSO documents obsolete if you could get govt to mandate ODF exclusively. And the bonus is that such govt mandate would render any and all features not supported by ODF (i.e. not supported by OO.o) irrelevant. But MS opened their own format, thus leveling the playing field so that you must again compete on features (rather than merely having an OAISIS format that was rubberstamped by ISO (please, you don't even have spreadsheet formulas spec'ed, and yet ISO ratified it? What do you call that, if not "rubberstamping"?). your plan failed, so now you resort to FUD.
Facts:
OOXML is being implemented by:
MS Office
Corel Wordperefect Office
Apple iWork 2007
OO.o (via Novel)
And is being implemented on multiple OSes: Windows, Linux, Mac.
OOXML is just as open as ODF, does more than ODF, is faster to load than ODF, and has smaller file size than ODF. You lost, both on technical merits and in the marketplace.
It must sting like a bitch that your grand strategy to marginalize MS Office blew up in your faces!!
No, actually, I think you'd find it takes the skill of many people, good timing, and luck to be successful in business, even if you could break very many laws. Creating and sustaining a business for many years is hard. Not very many businesses make it.
Or maybe I, too, can post unprovable, untestable anti-Microsoft conjecture to slashdot and get modded up?
The Online Slang Dictionary
Are you kidding? This is not a format specification. And it reflects badly on Microsoft and the engineers that authored this document: either they are too stupid to know that this is not a specification, or they are taking everybody else to be fools.
I wonder how many people were like me and actually checked to see if the GP had that in it? Troll credit for making me look twice!
It's a crazy law, but that's how it works. Microsoft broke no federal laws to *gain* their monopoly.
But they almost certainly broke many fair business practices laws.
But you're quite subtle indeed... those are state laws. You aren't by any chance working for Microsoft?
OpenXML is Microsoft trying to translate its proprietary DOC file inside a XML container .... The good thing for Microsoft, is that they can pretend this limitation is "Not-a-bug-but-a-feature", and brag around that there are a lot of stuffs that MS-Word couldn't store inside an ODF and only OpenXML can carry.
Pretend is the operative word. Translation is supposed to happen when you import the crufty old crap. M$ may have an advantage there, but you won't find that ability in the 6000 pages of their spec. The only place you will really find 20 year binary history of M$ Word is in M$'s source code, which itself must be contradictory and crazy because it's not really compatible with itself and has never been a portable typesetting system. Basically, the extra material in M$XML is noise and stuff they will never use. That and stuff you use that's not described is exactly what you want to make sure no one else can implement it.
The real bragging rights go to those who manage to open those nasty old documents without all of the bloat. KWord will happily import most Word Perfect documents and save them as ODF. Open Office as good a job as Word does with the crazy formats. M$XML is yet another waste of time from DoS central.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Because there's an opportunity for the format to not be ugly, so that the engineers can get as much done with less work and spend the rest of the time doing something that's really useful instead of duplicating their futile efforts. Or they might just kick off early and sip margaritas on the beach for all I care.
It's appropriate to note that the 6000 pages will only fit the DNA of a few pathogens:
Other parts of the article about genetic disorders, witches and demonic possesion are also appropriate when talking about M$.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
companies make it their policy to only purchase software which uses truly open standards to store their data.
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
...14- and 16-year-olds is illegal.
The behavior of years-old proprietary word processing software is included by reference into OOXML. How is any spec that includes by reference the behavior of proprietary software exactly "open"? True, implementors could produce a partial implementation of the spec that degrades away the legacy baggage (more or less) gracefully, but some standards' patent licensors forbid implementors to publish a partial implementation. I don't know if this applies to OOXML's license.
I thought ODF was an updated version of the venerable OpenDoc standard pioneered by IBM, Apple, and others. Doesn't it mean "Open Doc Format"?
If so, it was a defacto industry standard long, long, long before OpenOffice existed.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
What you don't seem to realize is that your list of people "effected" by this is irrelevant. There's exactly one category that matters:
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
What they got in trouble for was actually using their monopoly to get into other markets - i.e. bundling IE with the OS meant that they used their OS monopoly to get into the browser market. There was also doing things like offering Office at a discount if vendors bought Windows. This is the kind of thing that everybody does (think of all the apps that Apple includes) and doesn't become a problem until you have a monopoly.
In terms of 'strong-armed' tactics, I don't think the Simpsons were being literal with Bill Gates breaking pencils and messing the place up when 'buying him out' :)
Once it is ratified as an ISO Standard, the standard is locked up and anyone that does want to a copy has to buy it from ISO. These are copyrighted. They're not cheap; thousands of dollars. Out of the reach of the average hobbyist, and not listed anywhere on the Internet. That 6,000 page draft will vanish into the mists of time.
Larger Companies can afford this, but garage companies and hobbyists definitely can't. So what's the chance of an open source or even small upstart challenging Microsoft's Documentonopoly? Zero.
Want another example? ISO country codes. The country codes (e.g. .us, .jp) are actually ISO, and ISO ended up backing off on a demand for royalties for this(!) But if you want state codes (e.g. California, Kantou), well, forget it unless you want to buy them off ISO. http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/ietf-languages/ 2003-September/001472.html
ISO aren't the only ones guility of doing this. IEEE do it as well. Want the latest simulation standard? Then get out your checkbook: http://standards.ieee.org/catalog/olis/compsim.htm l
ISO and the IEEE are enemies of openness. Microsoft is taking a page out of their gamebook.
ISO or IEEE certification is a *bad* thing.
Their "open" XML format for office docs is a prime example of this.
I think Steve Jobs was the one who first said "Microsoft just doesn't get it". Microsoft was probably the very first third-party software developer for the Mac and this was Jobs' reaction to Microsoft's first Mac applications (I think a port of Multiplan--which was re-incarnated into Excel IIRC, and MSBasic). They really WERE "tasteless", ugly and took almost no advantage of the revolutionary GUI interface--their DOSness really showed through--I think in the case of Multiplan the mouse could be used only to jump the cursor to a certain cell and that was it--the rest was all like in DOS.
MS Windows is another example--Microsoft didn't "get it" well enough until the third major release. Now MS is SLOWLY "getting it" with the beneficial characteristics of XML standards. Microsoft's early XML efforts are like Windows 1.0--there is some very rudmentary understanding of the mechanics but not the philosophy of XML, and I wonder if this is why SOAP ended up NOT so simple (given Microsofties were involved in its creation and seemed to be trying to make it a DCOM-in-XML-but-dumber thing). Microsoft's "Version1" XML might look like this: "See? We're using XML and SOAP! We're hip! We're cooool! You can't say we don't play by the rules now!"
Of course, this is an obtuse, opaque and obsfucated way to use XML andtotally NOT in the spirit of interoperability and openness. I won't even go into the nifty XML tools MS has made...nifty to use but they've done a lot to obliterate the S out of SOAP in their crazy output.
OOXML (Opaque and Obsfucated XML) standard is "version 2.0"--they're doing their best to eliminate ambiguity but now we've gone over to hyper-specificity, and the standard is being shared a bit better...problem is that they don't fully describe the interpretation of the standard elements so as to keep its advantage. All they've done is taken every formatting option and mapped it to an XML element--it is monolithic and completely non-extensible. But hey, at least its publicly available and doesn't involve weirdness like encoded-binary-blobs.
In a few years MS will reach version 3.0 of "getting" XML...
Microsoft broke no laws getting DOS onto every PC. They happened to be in the right place at the right time, and the market fell onto them. But from there, Microsoft bended and broke the law every chance they got to ensure that there never was any competition.
Also don't forget that although MS's purchase of DOS was perfectly legal, it was ethically horrible. They arrived at a handshake agreement to license the code from Seattle Computer Company. While the MS paperwork was being finalized by the lawyers, SCC then made arrangements to finance other business ventures using the MS money. MS then presented them a contract to buy the code rather than license it, and told SCC to take it or leave it. As SCC had already committed to the other deals, they had no choice but to take MS's offer. Sure, no one held a gun to the head of the SCC executives forcing them to take the deal, however, they didn't have any other reasonable alternatives. MS's behavior was legal, but certainly not ethical.
This spec sounds like a bloated monster, but the criticism the FA is making is entirely unfair. If OOXML is going to be a useful one-size-fits-all document format, it'll need to be a superset of all existing things word processors can do, even the weird old bits that don't make much sense. There's two ways to do this: Either spec out the broken behavior into the already-bloated specification, or add a flag that says "old broken spacing" and let implementors decide how faithfully to represent it.
If they take the first option, then writing a tool that converted to and from OOXML would be a nightmare, you'd have to work out all those broken options into something that looked right, even if the end application supported it natively, since the converter app would be the last chance to attempt this obscure conversion. Making the old format->OOXML->old format loop actually end with a document that rendered anything like the starting document would be pretty much impossible.
The way they did it, a converter app that reads in those standards can just set the appropriate flag, and let the downstream renderer deal with it. If the user actually needs these crazy old features they can go get a patch to their wordprocessor to support it; or they can find a special-purpose converter that modifys the document to not need the flag anymore; or they can convert the doc back to the original obsolete format and open it in the ancient app itself. If the document had already been mangled by a half-baked conversion/export tool, the user couldn't have done any of these.
Tools that don't care about legacy support are unaffected by this; they can just pick the closest modern option to whatever the legacy flag calls for on input, and not output documents that use them.
Yeah. Because the person best suited to decide what a company should or should not be allowed to do are the people who own the company. Of course you're going to want to be completely unrestricted to mow down your competitors using whatever advantages you have if you are in a position to do so. What you're missing is that no one should be allowed to use unfair practices to do it. Some people think we should idolize the free market as some sort of religion. We don't like free market economy because it was given to us by the gods. We like it because it tends to result in better products and lower prices. That ceases to be true when you have a monopoly in the mix.
That being said, I'm not really informed about any Microsoft specifics, so I'm not going to argue in favor or against any "federal laws" as it applies to them (or failed to apply to them). However, suggesting that only people who have built a company that holds a monopoly should be able to decide what is fair regulation isn't rational. It may even be that the current federal laws regarding monopolies may be unfair and in need of reform, but the fact remains that the existence of a set of laws to regulate businesses is necessary.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Saying 'If X, then imitate the behavior of some other application in a way we're not specifying exactly', is not a specification, you idiot.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Unfortunately, you are wrong on almost all counts:
The real problem, however, with the Sherman Act is that, in general, it can only be prosecuted by the Federal Trade Commission, and that is under the direct control of the executive power. Ever since the Regan administration, there has been little or no desire on the part of the FTC to persue anti-trust litigation.
* Courts have generally used the rule that anyone with more that 70% market share obviously has monopoly power, and anyone with less than 20% obviously lacks it, but that between 20% and 70% requires and examination of facts and circumstances before declaring that someone has monopoly power.
just a ghost in the machine.
This was a worrying, but good, article. I'm sure MS is a bit in a thight spot as well, if they really desire backwards compatibility (which is what they survive on in a way). But it would make more sence to make supporting legacy documents more optional.
.doc format, it warns me that "minor loss of fidelty" may happen. Similarly, when opening a document, supporting waybackthen formats could be optional/plug-based, and the app rather warning that "minor loss of fidelity" may happen since the document was converted from an old source.
When I save a Word 2007 document to the old
Forcing every new app ever written to this standard to support diffuse behaviours from the good ol'days is just ridiculus. Besides, most of it appears to apply just to apperance.
Documents are worth far more than software, and they outlive the applications used to create them. See the comment to the original article - reading documents after 5, 20, 30, 100 years or more is not optional. You can pay the price of developing an independent format now, or you can pay the price of reverse engineering over and over again every time you change your internal representation.
Repeated implementation limits future change and innovation. It's expensive: it likely costs more even for Microsoft. But they can afford it; their competitors may not be able to. Plus, Microsoft already has their first implementation.
Perhaps so. But compare that cost to the cost I've just outlined. It is in the best interest of users and software developers (maybe even of Microsoft) to bite the bullet now, do the conversion once, and develop a clean format for the future.
Maybe you have in mind an argument you're not making, but I don't see any sufficient basis for your broad contention that using a file format based on an internal representation is a "darn good idea". In specific cases, yes (e.g. where the cost of development time or effort are the most important factors). In general, I very much doubt it. That successful applications in the past have taken that approach is weak evidence. They were developed when the up-front cost of development in a time of rapid innovation, the loss of customer lock-in, and a lack of open-format competition where good business reasons for making such a choice - even if it was inferior technically, increased cost in the long term, and was bad for consumers. In today's climate of slower innovation, competition from open formats, and customers who are running into their own long-term interests, the situation is different.
Which is not to say Microsoft's apparent attempt to set the rules of the game and throw sand in the gears of change is not in their interests, or that it will be unsuccessful.
Both "effect" and "affect" can be used as both verb and noun.
Understanding their proper usage is a lot harder than saying "effect is a doing word!".
"Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
Until you get to that point, I suggest that you those "federal laws" out your ass, Mr. Ashcroft. I agree 100% with you. However, for fairness' sake, we should then abolish all those unjust business-hampering federal laws, including copyright and patent law.
Oh, and also those so-called "computer misuse" laws. Indeed, if I want to set up a consultancy where I propose to convert customers ASP scripts to PHP I should be allowed to demo to my prospective customers in great graphical detail why ASP is so insecure, even if I don't yet have an existing business relationship. Why should I tolerate that the government tells me how I may and may not recruit new customers?
Anything less would be one-sided and unfair.
You can view all the atrocities of OpenXML that he's blogged about here. Highlights include dumping bitmasks into XML as hexadecimal on a byte-by-byte basis, and an XML element for specifying whether the dates in the workbook start in 1904.
I'm can't believe this became a ratified standard.
"Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for the number is that of a standard; and its number is three hundred and seventy-six." Common-freaking-sense 13:16-18
- shadowmatter
The hitch here is that *not* having them means tons and tons of reverse engineering, and that's only after tracking down every release of every version of every MS Office ever.
The real hitch, as the article hints, is that the releases are contradictory. For instance, the Mac version of small caps is different from others. This is part of the reason Word is so bloated and does not preserve printing type setting from one machine to the next.
Ten years ago, a state agency I was working for was forced to move from Word Perfect to Word. Hundreds, if not thousands, of documents were painstakingly converted from one format to the other. The typesetting, which they had never had a problem with previously, was easily broken by moves from one machine to the other or by changing printers. That is the kind of thing that no program can account for - it was broken from then and can not be created correctly today. It's also probably the reason for all of the nebulous "guidance" sections that don't tell you anything other than to look at, and presumably measure, old printed examples. Not even M$ knows what it was really doing in the field. As I saw at the time, no two were alike.
Of course, the time to get things right is not in your XML it's when you import the document. The author tells us this in so many words. The XML should be general enough to encompass any kind of typesetting. It is the importing program's task to figure out what the old format wanted things to look like. As the author points out, the spec does not do anything other create something impossible to follow. It's not going to magically make things look right no matter how hard they wish it would.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Has anyone investigated whether it would be possible to improve existing doc/xls support in OOo etc by using the details exposed in the OpenXML spec?
Ever heard of the saying "good programmers are lazy programmers"?
Yes, we could all duplicate the significant effort of reverse engineering the missing parts of the standard (you still have a working copy of WP5 around somewhere?). Or we could just save everybody a lot of time and money in the future by making a one-time small investment of fixing the standard now.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
OOo did the same, but with greater elegance and less haste because they were ahead of the field. Corel screwed it up with WordPerfect by keeping their stylesheet format proprietary so that transfer between WP document code and XML was made as hard as possible (a Class A blunder, given that their XML editor is actually quite good). AbiWord makes a good job of saving DocBook XML, but it's not trying to pretend it's reimportable; it screws up LaTeX formidably, though, by trying to pretend that it absolutely has to preserve line-length and font-size, which is evidence of the same neurotic attitude as Microsoft.
The problem in all cases is not that the assorted authors and coders don't understand XML (although some of them clearly failed that test too), but that they don't understand documents. This is particularly true at Microsoft, where leaders such as Jean Paoli have been proselytizing XML for years. They still think a document is a jumble of letters; they have no idea of structure, and the DOM is simply laughable as a non-model of a document. Microsoft's particular problem with XML is that they came to it too late, and viewed it as a way of storing data, not text...indeed to this day many XML users, trained with Microsoft blinkers on, are unaware that XML can be used for normal text documents.
With this level of ignorance surrounding Microsoft, it's hardly unexpected that they should blunder so badly.
ROTFL!!!
Eh? Isn't that why M$ made this supposedly "open" format? Because governments were tired of paying through the nose for secret formats that broke between versions? The purpose of an archive is to read it later. Governments and companies have already moved to pdf for archives. They are going to move their working documents to reasonable formats next.
But MS opened their own format, thus leveling the playing field so that you must again compete on features ...
You must not have read the 6000 page spec, which includes lots of sections like this:
That's neither open, nor a standard.
Microsoft is hoping people believe what you say, but everyone knows better. Shit like OOXML this only proves that they have not changed. It's just another, more elaborate and more expensive lie. Even the name, by using "OO" is intentionally confusing. The New Office is everything the old Office was and always will be. Vista and Office 2007 are non starters.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Where is the problem in doing the conversion (for the legacy features) in the converter, so that the new format is free from this bloat? OK, its harder to write the converter (which has to implement this old behaviors), but its Microsoft who wants to have the backward compatibility. So it only needs to be done once.
As often, purism is the enemy of progress here. Whilst it'd be great to be able to render, faithfully, every detail of any legacy document - it's an unnecessary and unrealistic constraint. One day, Microsoft themselves will choose to drop support for WPx or WW8 etc. They will. Really, they will. For owners of documents whose only record is held in proprietary formats - that will happen one day. Might as well happen with the adoption of a standard which prevents it happening again. Let's face it - PC's no longer ship with 5.25 inch floppies. Try opening an EBCDIC WordStar document in anything now; or a Tasword III document. Legal documents usually specify in the preamble that the layout is purely for ease of reading and of no legal significance. Even old photocopies and faxes are usually mashed in some way. To be honest - the inability of many earlier versions of Word to render correctly on different printers (even making it dificult to use A4 in the UK when Word insists on US Letter) was much more of an issue for many of us than the lack of WP support. At the end of the day, if the document retains the right characters and numbers in the right order, it meets the real needs of users. Let's make it easier to open up the document market by being realistic; not close it down through artificial maintenance of unnecessary standards.
Either
a) They have it so why not let you see what you're supposed to be working to - doesn't cost them anything
or
b) They don't have it and so how will they know that you've followed it or not?
My mind must be failing. I seem to recall that a free market is based on fairly competing businesses, hence no monopoly can be tolerated. We allow monopolies to form and exist as long as competitors have a chance to emerge.
Yes, they got into trouble for bundling but it misses the point every time. The secret sauce that Microsoft uses is to strong-arm the OEMs into bundling windows with PCs, espeicially for consumers. I'm also thinking that the Windows Tax is levied even if you buy Linux on a Dell. This is the lynch-pin of Microsoft domination, without it all their other strategies whither on the vine. Without bundling of windows with new pcs, the bundling of IE (and all the other sofware), the resistance against inter-operability, the mysterious file formats etc wither on the vine. I've been disappointed that *none of the investigations I've read about have gone after the OEM-Microsoft link. Break that, and you'll have a free-market again.
I think the Office XML format style is a play straight out of IBM's hand-book: make the standard complex and incomprehensible, and the little players - that's you - will find it hard to compete. In a way, that's a good sign: Microsoft is now lumbering into middle-age, hoist on their own evermore complex petard.
The other thing about middle-age is that every little technological step away from their established base-line is treated as a revolution. In reality, it's no such thing, just a small stepping stone to shouting "pesky kids. Get off my lawn." Or maybe they've reached that stage already.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
isn't that like saying binary binary large object?
bit like pin number - personal identification number number
sorry just bugs me
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome
we are all cosmic nuclear waste
If you were faced with output from a 15 year old program, what would you do? 15 years? In software, that's an eternity. These tags are essentially saying "here is where this old crap used to be". How many people are actually using these programs? Maintaining documents in the old format? I defy any of you out there in Linux-land to say you wouldn't take the same approach under the same set of circumstances. Actually, Linux people would probably just say "it may not open old documents properly, but that's OK because you have the source". Really not much better.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Or maybe I, too, can post unprovable, untestable anti-Microsoft conjecture to slashdot and get modded up?
Mircosoft has been convicted TWICE and has yet to face significant penalties. This is a statement of FACT.
Life is too short to proofread.
If it isn't specified, how can the format be a specification?
To normal non-nerd users and most nerds as well, a document is a jumble of letters.
I highlight text. I click the "B" button to make my text bold. I don't screw with styles.
Sorry to burst your bubble, dear Holy Priest Of The Most Highest XML.
Let's compare it to an all time favorite: Guns.
You don't have to break a law to get a gun. But as soon as you start using it you'd better be very carefull. Except for a few very well defined cases (sport, hunting, self-defense), using your gun is illegal.
Even in the cases named above, using your gun in the wrong way will send you to jail.
Things that are illegal for a monopoly are perfectly legit for a non-monopoly. It's a crazy law, but that's how it works. Microsoft broke no federal laws to *gain* their monopoly.
I don't know when their monopoly officially started, but they stole technology from STAC pretty early ('91-'92). As we all know, IP law applies to just fine to non-monopolies, and Microsoft certainly broke those laws. Last time I checked, patent law was federal law. So in short, history says you are incorrect.
If so, I must be a fucking programming whizz, as I can't ever be bothered to do more than a quick "Hello World" before I claim full knowledge of that language on my CV, then go and get drunk on meths for a week.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I don't know how many of you noticed: The fictional name "Guillaume Portes" is actually a literal translation of "Bill Gates" in French ...
OOXML includes data elements that should be part of internal import routines rather than being enshrined in the document format, and it includes elements that are not specified except by reference to applications for which no public specs exist. This is the problem, not the fact that OOXML is derived from MS Office file formats.
Well, I was a big fan of RTF at one time. But a few years back I found that documents with any kind of formatting more complex than paragraph+justification+font just wasn't working between MS Office and back. I don't know if this was because the format couldn't cope, or because of faulty implementations. In either case, it led me to give up on RTF.In any event, to be a replacement, RTF would need to work for spreadsheets and presentations at a minimum - something I don't think there's a lot of support for in the current RTF specification. We'd also lose the benefits of an XML based format, which given the amount of work on the seamless integration of XML documents into databases, web services and other data management applications means losing a lot of functionality.
Interoperability is only part of the problem. We also want a spec that can be fully and freely implemented by anyone, which isn't under the control of any single vendor.We want a format to which we can entrust documents, knowing that in twenty years time there will be an application capable of reading them. I don't know what you mean by native in this case, but the repurposing of OOXML isn't the problem. It's one of size and obfuscation, and as TFA points out specification by reference to closed formats and the behaviour of extinct proprietary software. These are non trivial problems with OOXML which are not (to the best of knowledge) found in ODF.There's nothing wrong with ODF. Re-creating it based on the non-XML RTF would be a waste of time and effort.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Things that are illegal for a monopoly are perfectly legit for a non-monopoly. It's a crazy law, but that's how it works.
I think your logic is more than a little broken. Monopolies have a great deal of power that other's don't have. They can undermine capitalism in a market and destroy innovation in entire industries. They can spread causing that damage to other markets. Think of it like this, people piloting airplanes aren't allowed to drink or step outside for a cigar, while those behaviors are perfectly legal for people who aren't piloting planes. Isn't that crazy?
They did. It was "resolved" by being disallowed. There is no per machine "MS tax" anymore. That fell victim in teh IBM suit, I believe. (So many suits, so long ago, so many beers.... ahh - that explains it!)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You forgot those crazy laws that grant human rights to corporations in the first place.
I'm pretty sure you're being sarcastic, but just to be safe:
If all dogs are animals, are all animals dogs?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
XML element for specifying whether the dates in the workbook start in 1904.
I know that one. I mucked around in the excel 97 format for a while. Its for mac excel, not sure what the version was. I don't know why it was 1904, instead of 1900 like the Windows version. The windows version counts Feb 29, 1900 as a real day (to maintian compatibility with Lotus 123 who apparently screwed it up), so maybe they purposely set the date forward with the mac version to avoid the issue.
The great misconception is that OpenXML is actually Open. I great ploy by MS. The fact is if Microsoft wanted a open standard they would have supported ODF. But they dont, they want to be able to control it and be able to re-define it at will without any outside consensus. Microsoft's OpenXML license is incompatible with any open source license and does not allow everyone equal access like ODF.
The use of the term Open is misleading, OpenXML is just another propriatry format of Microsoft. So what is Open about OpenXML?
> [Job requirements like]
> * 5 years experience with Java, J2EE and web development, PHP, XSLT
> * Fluency in French and Corsican
> * Experience with the Llama farming industry
> * Mole on left shoulder
> * Sister named Bridgette
That's me! Except that:
* I drink Java for 10 years, experiemented the drugs PHP, XSLT, J2EE, and collect spiders for 20 years so I'm very good at web development.
* am fluent in elivish and Klingon (close enough)
* my experience tells me that something called Llama farming industry exists
* I was a mole for my company and I constantly looked over people's left shoulder
* Went to Sister Bridgette Grade School
So expect for these minor variations, I'm perfect for the job.
Where can I sign up?
Named styles is the answer. If a paragraph is body text, call it that. If it's an inset quote, call it a quote. If a term is in italics, label it as italicized style not Times Italic 12 point. But don't get all hung up in the distinctions between Times Roman and Times New Roman. The purpose of XML is to define what something is. Not what someone thought it ought to look like on Tuesday three weeks ago.
Ditto transfers between applications. Why is there so much effort devoted to importing every little odd quirk of Word into InDesign as if the quirk mattered. Bring in the text tagged with what it is and let InDesign determine what it looks like. InDesign is far more powerful and predictable than Word anyway.
It is, of course, the Microsoft's advantage for everyone to define RTF and now OpenXML as the "standard" and obsess over the sort of things described above. But there's no sane reason for this obsession to exist. If you want a text to always look the same, use PDF. If you want a document to look good, make it look good in the application you're using. Don't try to make that application retain the 'sorta-looks-ok" feel of another application. That's too much work for too little result. It's why all too many ordinary users shrug their hands and buy Word rather than hassle with import quirkiness.
...you would indeed need to support everything that is covered by the specification, duh, right? Well, how likely is anyone to even want to support OOXML fully except for Microsoft?
If I want to write a plugin for an open source text editor so that people can exchange word 2000 and later documents with my own editor I would certainly concern myself with supporting the aspects of OOXML which denote Word 95 emulation.
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That was just one of the things they were doing. The big thing was threatening OEMs with higher Windows license fees or even license revocation if they shipped competing products on their computers. Without Windows, these companies would die, so they were forced to help Microsoft keep its products front and center in spite of superior competitors. One could argue Microsoft actually held back computing by several years because better alternatives weren't allowed to compete in the marketplace, forever altering the course of computing history for the worse.
"Sufferin' succotash."
The Wheel of Time turns and Jordan cranks out another book in the series. Like the conflict in the Wheel of Time, it'll never end...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Right, and you also can't criticize movies until you've made your own Lord of the Rings trilogy, you bastards!
Meanwhile, Microsoft FUCKED over OEMs by forcing them to drop competing products over threats of raising Windows licensing fees or outright revocation. Microsoft succeeded in keeping competitors from ever competing on the market, holding back computing by several years.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I had to quit at trying to read the second. The first book in the series was okay- decent enough to rate me being
interested in seeing where he was going to take the arc in the second book. He kind of lost and bored me in the
second book- so I gave up on it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I think you guys are taking a very narrow view of what a specification is because were talking about MS.
Sorry, but slashdot cult hero Judge Jackson determined in his infallible Findings of Fact that MS didn't violate antitrust laws to gain a monopoly.
Also, since Apple controls over 70% of the (legal) online music biz, and have made agreements with certain content providers to *exclusively* provide certain content only through iTMS, is not Apple restraining trade, and thus in violation of antitrust law? Even if there's some techincality that makes Apple's dealings legal (of course, we don't know if they're legal or not; any judge can rule anything), the spirit is the same. The point being, MS is no more evil than Apple or anyone else. Other companies in the same position as MS would have done the same or worse (Apple almost certainly would have been much more draconian).
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
I doubt the spec was written specifically to make rendering the xml difficult, but rather to make creating it easy. They probably don't know how to explain the behavior of these old word processors because they were buggy and inconsistent. So rather than have to figure out how small Word 5.0 would render small caps in a given situation, they can just tack on a "do it like Word 5.0" attribute. Much simpler!
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
"I think your logic is more than a little broken. Monopolies have a great deal of power that other's don't have. They can undermine capitalism in a market and destroy innovation in entire industries. They can spread causing that damage to other markets. Think of it like this, people piloting airplanes aren't allowed to drink or step outside for a cigar, while those behaviors are perfectly legal for people who aren't piloting planes. Isn't that crazy?"
A pilot knows that he's drinking at the time that he's doing it, and knows that it's against the law to do so while flying.
But a company doesn't know that it has a monopoly until some judge declares so. So while a company is engaging in normal business activity, some judge years later can rule that the company had a monopoly years ago, and rule that those normal business activies were therefore illegal. So, in order for a company to be sure to not run afoul of antitrust law, the company has to second guess every thing it does on the off-chance that at some point in the future, a judge *might* rule that the company had a monopoly at some point in the past. Well, you cannot run a company that way. It's best to engage in normal business practice, and if some judge rules in the future that it was illegal because he declares that you had a monopoly at the time, then deal with it at that point. And doing that would not be "evil". Second guessing whether you can engage in normal business practice or not in order to avoid what a judge might say in the future is not prudent.
Taking MS, specifically, at what point, what day and date, did they knowingly acheive monopoly status in the "desktop OSes for intel CPU" market? IBM was selling and heavily advertising OS/2 throughout the 90's. So when should MS have thought to itself, "OK, now I have a monopoly, so I'll no longer offer OEM discounts"? Even when OS/2 faltered, MS subsidized Apple, and many said that part of the motivation was to ensure that MS did NOT have a monopoly (everyone (certainly Mac advocates) assumed that Mac OS and Windows were competitors; MS didn't imagine that a judge would rule that Mac OS isn't even in the same market). So it would seem that MS never thought they had a monopoly, and even took steps to keep it that way.
Take Apple or Google, for other examples. Is it really so unimaginable that a judge could rule in the future that Apple or Google have monopolies *today* in mp3 players or online music (in the case of Apple) or web search advertising (in the case of Google)? In which case the same judge could rule that things Apple and Google are doing today are illegal? In such a case, would you demonize Apple or Google as "evil"? Should Apple and Google curtail their normal business activity because a judge in the future *might* rule this way? Do you see what I'm getting at?
BTW, this is why antitrust law is so screwed up. IMO, you should be able to engage in normal business activity until a judge officially rules you have a monopoly. Once that happens, then you can alter your business activities accordingly. But you should not be punished for things you did before you were officially declared to enjoy monopoly status in a particular market, nor should you be demonized for it. This is much cleaner since everyone would know upfront what standard they're being judged against. No second guessing what would be normal business practice, no subsidizing competitors to make sure they stay in business so that you don't get a monopoly, etc.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
No the OEM agreements were NOT disallowed. That, to me, was such an easy thing to do to curb their monopoly that didn't happen. Goto Dell and order an OS-less PC. I'll wait...
2.15.3.78 providePonyUponWish (Emulate Word 5.x for the Macintosh Pony Provision)
This element specifies that applications shall emulate the behavior of a previously existing word processing application (WordPerfect 5.x) when providing a pony upon a user wishing it, using the userWish element (2.3.1.82). This emulation typically results in a pony which is reduced from its normal size and suffers from chronic diarrhea.
[Guidance: To faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of that application, which involves many possible behaviors and cannot be faithfully placed into narrative for this Office Open XML Standard. If applications wish to match this behavior, they must utilize and duplicate the output of those applications. It is recommended that applications not intentionally replicate this behavior as it was deprecated due to issues with its output, and is maintained only for compatibility with existing documents from that application. end guidance]
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Wow, two FUD posts in a row.
...", ect. Again, phrases used to intentionally spread FUD without making explicit assertions. Classic.
First, the GP says, "some standards' patent licensors forbid implementors to publish a partial implementation. I don't know if this applies to OOXML's license." A classic FUD tactic is to speculate about something "bad" then say, "I don't know if it applies here." Yeah, you don't know if it applies in this case, but that didn't stop you from putting forth the "Fear" and "Uncertainty" that it might. Classic.
Then, the parent post uses pharses like, "My understanding is...", "It seems that if
BTW, there is NO "Full implementation requirement" for OpenXML. None.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
I say keep it real, Yo! ASCII FOREVER!
What we have here is the counterpart to a similar problem in image formats and other media.
The problem is how to create a specification for documents that will not obsolete after five or ten years. You see the issue brilliantly with the old NASA video and data tapes that no longer have appropriate reader equipment to access the data, meaning that the information is potentially lost to our posterity.
Now we have it regular documents, with the very real possibility that in the event of a technology disaster, the formats used with not be accessible. Data Encryption to protect copyright holders will prevent easy access to data vital for a rebuild.
On a tangent, so far the best storage solution I can come up with is the HD-Rosetta Stone project which only requires an optical microscope.
But this does not address the issue of obsolete file formats. There is the chance that that the most durable and accessible will be the most simple. Not Frontpage HTML or some similar monstrousity. In this case, simple IS good.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Well, typically the mechanism is that monopolies are allowed to continue to exist when they compete fairly. Sometimes economies of scale produce natural monopolies, where the most efficient form of the market is a single, large, monopoly producer. Others are not able to compete simply due to the nature of the market. Operating system software MAY even be an industry like this. The problem is that Microsoft forced their competitors out of the market with unfair business practices, and unfair business practices are what should not be tolerated.
A pilot knows that he's drinking at the time that he's doing it, and knows that it's against the law to do so while flying.
And so you think MS, after having been convicted of it multiple, and with more lawyers than god on retainer don't know when they're illegally leveraging their monopoly. For $10K a year they can e-mail me and I'll let them know. It isn't rocket science. It is naive to think MS is ignorant. They know exactly what they're doing and have built their business model upon the assumption that it will be more profitable to break the law and pay fines and settlements and bribes to politicians, than it is is to not break the law in the first place. So far, they've been completely right.
So while a company is engaging in normal business activity, some judge years later can rule that the company had a monopoly years ago, and rule that those normal business activies were therefore illegal.
In the US and EU 70% of a market is the point at which the courts first look. If you have 70% of a market, you just ask your lawyer. It is pretty obvious by your influence on the market if you have a monopoly. Further, the courts basically did nothing to MS the first time they were convicted. So what is their excuse for all the new and continuing violations since then? Did they forget they were a monopoly?
's best to engage in normal business practice, and if some judge rules in the future that it was illegal because he declares that you had a monopoly at the time, then deal with it at that point. And doing that would not be "evil".
Hey guess what, monopolies are rarely punished for antitrust violations except for practices after they have been found by the courts to be a monopoly. I have no problem with a company saying, "hey we didn't know" and then changing their business practices the first time. After that however, they have no excuse. MS has a monopoly and since they were declared to have one they have not stopped bundling and tying to other markets. That is knowingly breaking the law for profit. I have zero sympathy.
IBM was selling and heavily advertising OS/2 throughout the 90's.
And their market share among OEMs was what again? Oh, less than 1%. Nice try, but no dice.
MS subsidized Apple, and many said that part of the motivation was to ensure that MS did NOT have a monopoly
Umm, MS lost a patent violation lawsuit. They bought some shares of Apple as part of the settlement, but the money was less than 1% of the liquid assets Apple had on hand. If you consider that "bailing them out" you're on crack.
If the economists, lawyers, and financial advisors working for MS thought that I hope they were all fired. You're only a competitor if you sell to the same people. MS sold to computer vendors. Apple sold to retailers and individuals who were buying computers. Anyone who thinks Sony and Ford are in the same market because Sony sells car radios to car manufacturers, needs to go back to school.
MS didn't imagine that a judge would rule that Mac OS isn't even in the same market
Are you kidding? They were IBM partners and the talk of the 80s was IBM's antitrust issues. Your belief in MS's ignorance is a big stretch, and irrelevant.
Take Apple or Google, for other examples. Is it really so unimaginable that a judge could rule in the future that Apple or Google have monopolies *today* in mp3 players or online music (in the case of Apple) or web search advertising (in the case of Google)?
In the case of Apple, no they are being investigated right now, as I'm sure Apple expected they would be. Depending upon quite how much influence they have in that market, they may well be forbidden from tying iTunes, ITMS, and iPods. They play by the same rules. Google has way to small of a chunk of the search market to be declared a monopoly, something like 40
From a technical perspective, using the internal structure as the file format is the stupidest thing you can do. There is *no* good technical reason to ever do so.
Well, there is one reason. Speed.
Imagine you have an application which needs storing several megs of structured data routinely. You can
(a) write a specialized format parser (it's hard, and there may be bugs);
(b) use standard (e.g. XML) parsers (it would be dog slow in most cases);
(c) write the damned objects/structs to disk.
The (c) is the way to go when you need to get the product out of the door, yesterday. Which seems to have been the case for MS.
Yes, this will get you in trouble, quickly. But the alternative is having trouble now.
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
That was his point..
No. Binary blob in lowercase. (Not the initialism)
It's more like a binary blob-that-ate-everyone.
Or a binary poring.
Or a binary jelly.
Or pick your own duscusting sticky goo-like from your favorite RPG.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Not for saving a file that should be stored on a disk for later retrival (at a future time when the specific version of the software maybe won't exist anymore) or that should be sent in an e-mail (to someone who may use a different software).
Also Microsoft choose the worst way to implement such internals and retro-compatibility.
Different versions of word interpret layout parameters in different way.
The correct way to implement should be either :
- convert the parameters into the new standart (for exemple : if older implementation didn't count border in width, add them to the width while saving).
- extend the standard so one may specify which behaviour to follow in a generic way (like giving the scale or the units used if two different version doesn't interpret "points" of the same size : create a new parameter that helps specifiying the size of a "point" in cm, so that any software could do the math and convert to what it needs)
What microsoft did instead :
- They extended the standart with stupid paramater like " isCalculatedUsingFormulaFromWord9x="{yes|no}" " which doesn't add anything useful to a standart except support for specific legacy software from microsoft.
- Worse they even only say that those parameters are deprecated and shouldn't be used in new documents and failed to specify what those actually mean in the standard. (There for Word 2007 is the only software that could correctly open XML documents using legacy parameters)
In short, where they should have put " spacingIs="{int}cm" " they put " spacingIsLikeWordForDos="{bool}".
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
OMGzorz!!! How teh 3vil M$ iz!!!
How evil of them, wanting to maintain backwards compatibility with old documents!
And not only that, but they evilly slipped in Word Perfect, so it would extend backward compatibility of another product. Isn't it perfectly obvious how evil they are being? It's all part of their plan to... ummm... uh... spread their evil!!!
Lunix Zealots of these internets, unite!!
> Things that are illegal for a monopoly are perfectly legit for a non-monopoly. It's a crazy law, but that's how it works. Microsoft broke no federal laws to *gain* their monopoly.
I don't know of them doing anything criminal, but I DO know that they ran plenty of folks out of business using tactics they had to pay millions upon millions in civil legal damages for, and I don't mean just monopoly abuse, I also mean the things they did to get there. It's not done until Lotus won't run, etc.
Microsoft isn't the only one with OEM bundle deals. Before the "monopoly", I remember being in a store and seeing a choice between a i386 with Windows and a i386 with DRDOS/GeoWorks.
My point still stands. Acts that are illegal for a monopoly can be perfectly legal, ethical and moral for a non-monopoly. It was perfectly legitmate for non-monopoly Microsoft to bundle Windows with OEM systems.
Microsoft's unforgivable sin was being successful. It's a lesson all aspiring companies should take to heart.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Oh, MS is a monopoly all right. It's written there in Judge Jackson's statement; something that's *never been overturned. Ever tried to buy a bare PC? Seems you can't. It's Windoze or Nodoze. So, pre-loaded it is and not a choice in sight.
... when have Americans started liking monopolies? I thought that was an anathema to the free-market. But, hey, it's your market. I just wish the Imperialists wouldn't thrust their idea of a "free market" onto the rest of us.
As in "too successful"
I take the opposing view. The markets are moral, and we have regulators to make sure the markets behave themselves within limits. Microsoft is an object lesson for regulators, o'wise they'll find some shit monopoly clogging up the pathways of business, demanding tax from all and sundry, holding back the reins of what America wants to be. *AA and Microsoft, they're made from the same cloth.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
I'll disagree, try any of their servers. Their consumer desktop machines suck eggs anyways.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
"Dark Corners"? Those corners aren't just dark, they're full of grues. And they're not just corners, they're entire dungeons. All dark, and full of enormous, very hungry grues ...
(The Linux machines are slightly more expensive than an equivalent with Windows preinstalled, but that's probably more because they get paid to dump a whole pile of shovelware on Windows PCs than because Microsoft is forcing them to make Linux an undesirable option. Also, Red Hat is hardly known for being a cheap option.)
(In case you were about to bring up the old chestnut about Windows 3.0 not working on DR-DOS, please don't bother: that was only true of early beta versions of Windows 3.0, probably for perfectly valid reasons, and every public release worked just fine on DR-DOS.)
The reason Microsoft ended up with a monopoly on PC operating systems wasn't because it broke any laws. It's because Windows 95 blew away the competition - OS/2 had concentrated too hard on being compatible with earlier versions of Windows to have any killer apps of its own, while the various other alternatives were still just fairly basic shells on top of DOS. I'll repeat that: Microsoft gained its current monopoly by having the best product on the market, period. The only serious alternative would have been MacOS, and Apple never unbundled that from their hardware for long enough to have any mass-market impact. So everyone switched to Windows 95, which while deeply flawed was the best thing they could get, and Windows 95's applications were so far ahead of anything the competition could run that nobody ever caught up.
Today, viable competition exists in the form of OS X (market share growing rapidly now that Apple hardware is no longer extortionately priced) and GNU/Linux (now that WINE is mature enough to provide adequate Windows compatibility), and this is reflected in the fact that mainstream PC manufacturers such as Dell now offer GNU/Linux as an alternative to Windows. (Which they couldn't do if Microsoft was breaking the law by making the kind of lockout deals that conspiracy theorists claim they make...)
Note that Microsoft's total domination of the market exactly matches the period during which Microsoft's products offered the best price/performance deal. Before that was the case, competition flourished; now that viable alternatives have begun to appear, Microsoft's monopoly is beginning to falter. There is no need to make up implausible conspiracy theories or to spread anti-Microsoft FUD about illegal tactics. Microsoft simply had the best mousetrap, and now that other people have made even better mousetraps, lo! the world beats a path to other doors. It's just the way capitalism is supposed to work.
(Would OS X have been half as good as it is if Microsoft hadn't had a monopoly? Looking at how unutterably crap MacOS 9 was on a technical level, I think not. That's competition for you, and the consumer has certainly benefited.)
That rather depends on whether Microsoft was aware that SCC had already spent the money before the deal was finalised. If Microsoft knew that, then there is a very tenuous case to be made that they acted unethically; if, as seems rather more likely, Microsoft did not have inside information on the stupidity of the SCC executives, then they were behaving perfectly ethically, and the SCC executives have only themselves to blame for being incompetent enough to paint themselves into a corner by committing to a deal before the terms were finalised.
I think this is a good point, particularly relevant both for existing applications and for areas of rapid innovation where it's not yet clear what should be in the app or the format. I consider myself corrected (and am somewhat embarrassed to have overlooked this in my previous post). I am not convinced it is the best case for word processing though, so I'm curious if you have any specific insights there.
Social constructivist theories of technological development describe the stabilization of the technology, at which point differing interpretations - often corresponding to different technical designs - converge on a single understanding of the technology. Word processing in particular is an established class of application for which consensus has been reached regarding its role and feature set[1]. According to this reasoning, as innovation slows, the benefits of custom formats would evaporate while the merits of standardization increase. I would therefore expect gravitation towards using open formats by default, with custom formats reserved for niche uses in need of application-specific features.
Significant innovation, I suspect, would tend to be understood not in terms of "word processing", but would be differentiated into new classes of application, which at a later date might (or might not) get folded back into word processing proper. HTML and blog post authoring strike me as two current examples of this.
None of what I say, however, is a result of direct experience in consumer application development, so your experience may point to other outcomes.
[1] Modulo a few exceptions; I'm sure this represents the vast majority of people - far more than Joel's 80% (though I think Joel overrates convergence - witness the iPod, game machines, portable DVD players, and the proliferation of other single-task technologies).
"Ever tried to buy a bare PC? Seems you can't."
Bullshit.
A story about HP machines in France is not support for your sweeping comment.
Just a few months back I helped my mother-in-law pick out a no-OS PC and the list of choices I showed here included machines from such major retailers as Wal-Mart, CompUSA, and Circuit City. Christ, the cretins of Wal-Mart will even sell you a Linspire PC with Linux pre-installed if that's your thing.
I'm no fan of monopolies, and Microsoft has pissed me off quite a bit in the past (though I'm no foaming-at-the-mouth MS-hater, either), but the point is, your statement is dead wrong in the US at least, and I would suspect outside the US as well.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
"You forgot those crazy laws that grant human rights to corporations in the first place."
And the laws that create corporations in the 1st place.