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Microsoft Blasts IBM Over XML Standards
carlmenezes writes "Ars Technica has up an article discussing Microsoft's latest salvo against IBM. Microsoft's open letter to IBM adds fresh ammunition to the battle of words between those who support Microsoft's Open XML and OpenOffice.org's OpenDocument file formats. Microsoft has strong words for IBM, which it accuses of deliberately trying to sabotage Microsoft's attempt to get Open XML certified as a standard by the ECMA. In the letter, general managers Tom Robertson and Jean Paol write: 'When ODF was under consideration, Microsoft made no effort to slow down the process because we recognized customers' interest in the standardization of document formats.' In contrast, the authors charge that IBM 'led a global campaign' urging that governments and other organizations demand that International Standards Organization (ISO) reject Open XML outright."
It does not take a rocket scientist with a good look at the spec to figure out it sucks. The fact that it sucks has little to do with IBM.
Got Code?
Perhaps IBM's actions are based on the format qualities, not on its favoritisms. About those, since when IBM was in bed with Sun any more than it was with Microsoft?
This "Open Letter" is nothing than another piece of FUD and whining.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Hmm. Assuming you have no budget and no alternative computing facilities..
Could the IBM product function without the MS one ? Yes, you could download an alternative OS for free.
Could the MS product function without the IBM one ? No.
Go with IBM, brother.
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Besides being an open standard, the standard needs to be usable by people other than Microsoft. Why would any document standard need specific tags for Windows 95? IBM lobbied against it because it was a bad standard, not because it was made by Microsoft.
'When ODF was under consideration, Microsoft made no effort to slow down the process because we recognized customers' interest in the standardization of document formats.'
Yeah... are we supposed to believe that? If anything creating there "open" format looks to me like a blatant attempt to prevent the one thing that open format people are trying to accomplish, namely having one open format that can be used by everyone and can't be arbitrarily obsoleted by any one company. Or maybe I missed something.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
Their heads are so far up their asses they cant even see that the problem with Open XML has less to do with Microsoft being the one who created it (which in MY mind is a problem in it's self) and a lot more to do with Open XML, which as a format, makes baby kittens cry.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
After all they had to create a 6000 page document without releasing any information on how to make their "open" standard work. There are so many statements like "functions as per Word 95" without explaining what that means. They must have worked long hours creating a specification that doesn't actually specify how to implement it.
IBM is being a big bully and not allowing Microsoft to screw the public and private companies of the world as Microsoft wants to.
Naughty Naughty Big Blue.
Microsoft's format in and of itself is an attempt to sabatoge OpenDocument. Their refusal to support it, despite having the most popular Office Suit is another clear sign of their contempt for it, and the customers they claim to care about now.
God forbid IBM promotes their own standard. Jeez, that's almost like having competition! We'de hate to have to make MS actually compete with anyone. On top of all that, why in the world would IBM trust MS not to tweak the standand and make it MS only? Why would anyone who actually cares about an open format trust MS to touch it?
After reading the Open letter, it's very clear that Microsoft claims IBM's want to stop Open XML stems from their ODF format making it through the standards group first and being adopted. MS claims that people should be able to choose their open standards...
Call me crazy but having two different standards doesn't really capture the idea of having Standards at all. I thought the point of standards was to make it so we (the developers) only have to implement one thing. I can fully understand IBM's reasoning here. The only thing it seems MS wants to do is create more vendor lock.
When a "standard" says
This element specifies that applications shall emulate the behavior of a previously existing word processing application (Microsoft Word 95) when determining the spacing between full-width East Asian characters in a document's content.
[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] What value has that standard. Instead of 6000 pages of "specification", they could have put the standard as "OOXML applications should render OOXML documents in the same way as MS-Office 2007 renders them".
It's shorter, more accurate, and only a little less helpful...
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Nevermind that customers are rejecting Microsoft Office because they are trying to get out of the lock-in of Microsoft's proprietary document format. Nevermind that Microsoft is into "Open" only to fudge the line between "Open standards that are documented and that anyone can implement and use" and "Proprietary with an open wrapper". Heh ... if I embed an MS-Word file into an XML document and compress the result using the Open Source program Gzip, does that make the resulting file "Open"? No? According to Microsoft's own logic, this would be the case.
And all this just to disguise the fact that their proposed "Open" standard allows them to put their their (totally proprietary) Office format into a document that follows the standard and then call it "Open". It's squarely aimed at fooling manager types into ticking a box labelled "Open Standards compliant" on their checklist.
Of course it's a fine example of complete intellectual dishonesty on Microsoft's part ... but whenever did Microsoft ever care about honesty? Intellectual or otherwise? Microsoft didn't become big by using such stupid tactics ...
Take that video demonstration for example. You know ... the one that showed Windows "crashing" when Explorer was removed. Any ordinary person would have gone to jail for perjury on that "testimony" ... but large companies are exempt it seems. "A regrettable communication error sir." Yeah, right.
As many people know ... Microsoft's OOXML is a blatant attempt to perpetuate Microsoft's proprietary standards through a selection of backdoors in a 6,000 page standard proposal that Microsoft is trying to rush through. Just see the "criticism" section in this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
The "space" is not that big of a concern, really. When LaTeX and GROFF were formulated, 640K was significant amounts of memory, and a 10MB hard disk was luxury. Space was important. Not so much anymore: 256-512MB RAM is standard, with 1-1.5GB not being unreasonable on a desktop, with 100's of GB of disk space. I know, "bandwidth" is still a somewhat limiting factor - but that's starting to die as a limitation, too. That all said, for the on-disk/transferable format, remember that at least the OO format is gzipped. Those repeating 16-character tags compress really nicely when gzipped.
However, I think this thread is really missing IBM's point. It's not that Microsoft's "standard" is horrible (which it is), it's that having competing "standards" will detract from the whole idea of having the standard: interoperability. Microsoft is attempting to subvert the standards process to be able to claim that MS Word complies with open standards while still making it nearly impossible for others to do so, which maintains Microsoft's lock on the word processor market. IBM is opposed to that as it will impede the ability for anyone relying on these open standards to reduce lock-in to actually meet their requirements. (Of course, it also impedes Lotus' ability to penetrate those markets, as well as OOo, AbiWord, KWord, and lots of others.)
You actually are mostly making my point for me. The "a", "b", and "g" and upcoming "n" suffixes denote ammendments to the same 802.11 IEEE standard. The reason they exist are to give additional functionality or updated performance, while ensuring adherance to the same standard. For example, it is because they are ammendments of the same standard that allow b and g to work with each other. The 802.11 standard is the poster child for creating a successful single standard that is widely adopted by countless (competing) vendors and continuously updated to reflect improvements in technology.
Choice is standards is a negative thing for consumers, which is also something you example with your reference to GSM vs. CDMA. While there are enough differences in the goals of GSM vs CDMA that might technically make a valid case for both standards existing, their wide adoption in different geographical areas represents something of a failure in the standards process to ensure interoperability for the consumer.
So, thank-you for making my point on why we do not want competing standards, only competing implementations.
I think you're missing the point. You don't replace Word with Lyx, you replace ODF with TeX. Then you would use Word to write TeX files.
It's not a bad idea on the surface; at the very least you would get a typographically powerful document format, instead of the nasty, ass-sucking typographic atrocities that the major office word processors currently produce.
I suspect it would be a nightmare to implement. TeX formats want you to define your document elements logically, ie. this line is a foo, this paragraph is a bar; the styles and rules for foos and bars are defined elsewhere. Although this is similar to HTML+CSS and is appropriate for anything being used systematically by designers, it really is not how people use wysiwyg, and is the opposite to how they've learned to use Word. With Word, very few people follow a methodical approach of predefining styles and using them consistently; instead they just randomly set fonts, sizes, colors, and line spacing until it looks right. Accidentally turned that list element into a giant heading? No problem. Just resize it back to 10pt, fix the line spacing, and turn off the bold. Now it looks just like the rest of the list elements. Nevermind that logically it's still a heading, which will screw up anything that is expecting the document's structure to be meaningful.
A second problem is that TeX and especially LaTeX depend heavily on style files to provide most of the document formatting definitions they use. The portability of a LaTeX document depends on having the prerequisite style files, and since different vendors and versions will have different style files in their distros, and will be tweaking and refining those like crazy to keep ahead of each other, it would lead to the LaTeX equivalent of DLL hell, and perhaps even to attemnpts to lock each other out by putting restrictive copyrights/licensing on the style files. You might get around that with a modified file format that incorporates the style files into the original document, but then you've just lost the proposed advantage of a lean and simple format.
It would be possible to come up with a powerful and easy to use wysiwyg interface for LaTeX (I think Pages could make a good example, since it emphasizes logical document structures) but the real problem we face is that the whole world has learned to create documents in the wrong way with Word, and there's no going back to a rational system.
Yeah.. because everyone knows today's multi-core processors really have to strain themselves to do a huffman-encoded dictionary translation.
Wake up and smell the 21st century. You burn more CPU cycles per byte encoding and decoding SSH traffic or passing data over a WEP-protected wireless network than you do packing and unpacking a zipfile. And let's not even talk about the processor intensity of JPEGs, PNGs (gotta love that alpha-channel compositing), or -- God forbid -- MP3s.
Besides, gzipping is only one way to compress ODF. The people who deal in high-volume data processing have done plenty of work on binary XML. The fact that ODF is an open standard makes it more or less trivial to write a program that translates tags to 16-bit tokens, which reduces markup overhead to a whopping two Unicode characters per tag, assuming you can devise a set of working conditions where the data overhead of human-readable tags and the processing overhead of gzip translation are both unacceptable.
Face it: storage costs less than a dollar per gigabyte these days, gigabit-per-second data transfer exists at consumer prices, and most people have more processing power on their desktop than existed in the first four generations of supercomputers. The value of bit-squinting has decreased exponentially since the 1950s, and these days it's vanishingly small except under very-high-load conditions.
And ODF's openness makes it friendly to people who find themselves working in very-high-load conditions.