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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."
Is it really an open standard if they are the only ones that developed it? It reminds me of a quote which I will paraphrase:
Reusable code is not truly reusable until it has been used more than once.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
While it is clear the so-called Open XML is owned, controlled, and licensed by MS, is ODF actually owned by OO.org. And, if so, will OO.org use it to limit users ability to migrate data? The reason why so many people are against any MS format is that MS will actively limit the ability for the user to use the data. For instance, it could be that a user that does not license a copy of MS Word does not have the right to use a particular format.
In fact the ODF format appears free of any such encumbrance, and SUN, which contributed much of it, has pledged it to remain unencumbered. Therefore, this seems like simple marketplace economics. If one has two products, and one is somewhat better but has a high real cost of acquisition, and the other is slightly worse but has a significantly less real cost of acquisition, the the market will choose the later. MS understands this, as cheap products is why people bought MS instead of IBM, and why MS continues to pay huge sums of money to create favorable TCO reports. There, this MS rant is simply an attempt to distract technical staff from the real issue, which is that future growth will be limited for benefits that are not always clear.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Microsoft seems to have it backwards. When it comes to standards, they advocate choice. When it comes to software, they advocate monoculture.
The questions I ask are rhetorical - I know the answer, and so should most people. The open source community (among others) have blasted Microsoft for years for trampling choice in software. Now they are seeing that open source (and competition in general) has a real chance of making significant headway with a well documented, open standard that anyone can implement, that will interoperate, and isn't controlled by themselves, so now they use the community's arguments, but in an area where it's not appropriate. They use the words the community has used to attack their software monoculture to attack a standards monoculture. It's calculated, and a smart move on their part. Utterly contemptuous and underhanded, but very very smart.
Here's what I wrote :o)
of the 21 members, IBM's was the sole dissenting vote. IBM again was the lone dissenter when Ecma also agreed to submit Open XML as a standard so long as you don't count the twenty assorted countries that registered comments and objections to our fast-tracking proposal.
When ODF was under consideration, Microsoft made no effort to slow down the process because we were too busy trying to kill it completely.
This campaign to stop even the consideration of Open XML in ISO/IEC JTC1 is a blatant attempt to use the standards process to limit choice in the marketplace for ulterior commercial motives and is in no way whatsoever similar to our own campaign to stop the consideration of ODF in Massachusetts for our own commercial interest.
It is not a coincidence that IBM's Lotus Notes product, which IBM is actively promoting in the marketplace, fails to support the Open XML international standard in the same way as all other office software (other than our own) does, because we deliberately designed it so nobody but us could use it.
If successful, the campaign to block consideration of Open XML could create a dynamic where the first technology to the standards body, regardless of technical merit, gets to preclude other related ones from being considered and that's one of our tactics, dammit! Or do you actually think all those people out there using Internet Explorer do so because they tried out Opera and Firefox too, but decided IE was the best browser going? No, they use it because it was the first browser they ever used.
The IBM driven effort to force ODF on users through public procurement mandates is a further attempt to stop us forcing Open XML on them instead through our usual blatant monopoly abuse.
XML-based file formats, which can easily interoperate through translators can easily allow Open XML documents to be imported into Lotus Notes, and there are two such translators currently in existence - one of which we ourselves initiated - so we're being blatantly two-faced here by saying that Lotus Notes not supporting Open XML will be a significant barrier to people using Open XML for their documents.
This campaign to limit choice and force their single standard on consumers should be resisted so that we can limit choice and force our single standard onto consumers. Don't you know how important lock-in is to us??
We have listened to our customers. They want choice. They want interoperability. They want innovation. But we don't have to give it to them, because we're Microsoft! Bwahahahahah! Give us money or you'll wither and fade into the limbo of incompatibility.
What do you mean, that tactic doesn't work any more? It's got to, our whole business depends on it!
Damnit. . . hand me another chair. . .
So.. it has come to this
And thank god for them.
When you're a windows user, you really need those two keys in order to use windows's keyboard shortcuts - which you want to.
When you're a linux/bsd/whatever user, you've got yourself a nice set of "Meta" keys.
There are so many statements like "functions as per Word 95" without explaining what that means.
Exactly. More about this here - how to hire Guillaume Portes.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Some randomly selected points from TFA.
True but irrelevant since the others are rarely used and everyone (but especially Microsoft) knows it is the default format that matters.
Billions? Maybe that is technically true but Microsoft's record on backwards compatibility isn't great even within their own product suites. I'm pretty dubious that with OpenXML all my old Word documents will convert with perfect formatting. I'm even more dubious that OpenXML will be be read/write with perfect formatting in other applications. It's a 6000 page specification after all and I'm quite sure there is plenty of ambiguity even if the attempt to specify everything was a good faith effort. And with only 30 days to review all 6000 pages I'm not confident it will be evaluated with a satisfactory level of scrutiny.
OK. Let's assume that IBM is being a bad guy here. It's possible. Wouldn't be the first time. Is there something about ECMA International" that prohibits competing standards? Honest question, I don't really know. If not Microsoft is entitled to complain. But on the other hand the process is moving forward and there is little doubt it will be approved in due time. So I'm at a bit of a loss as to why I should care if IBM was obstructive, even assuming they were? IBM is one of the few companies that really isn't especially beholden to Microsoft's monopoly power so I'd expect them to be a bit more prickly. Let me be clear, for me to trust Microsoft I will need to see a lot more than a format approved by a standards body to believe they are going to compete openly and fairly in the marketplace. This is a company convicted in a court of law of abusing their monopoly power to the detriment of consumers. Implicitly trusting them is foolish.
ODF already exists as an ISO standard. Why is Microsoft pushing so hard for its own ISO standard rather than just writing an import/export module for its Office suite to support the ODF standard?
The answer (obviously) is: Microsoft sees an advantage to supporting their own "open" standard versus anyone else's. I put open in quotes because my guess is, based on past observances of Microsoft's behavior in very other case where they supposedly supported an existing standard, that it will quickly become a standard that nobody but Microsoft can support.
If IBM is indeed blockintg acceptance of a Microsoft standard then perhaps it is because they have looked at the same history I have and drawn the same conclusions I did. Microsoft has no right to be indignant about it; they brought it on themselves with their own past behavior.
"The "space" is not that big of a concern, really. "
I'd like to work where you do. Document size is always a concern in my department when we are dealing with 5,000,000+ page runs.
What the heck kind of open document format requires a rocket scientist to figure out it sucks? Most rocket scientists know more about you know... rockets and stuff.
True, and you could probably earn a PhD in ME from a good university before you could finish reading all 6,000 pages of M$ spec. So there, as the OP stated anyone can tell you which is better. Confronted with a 700 page volume or three feet of shelf space that do exactly the same things, most people would go with ODF. As is the usual case, the only person who will ever read M$'s soon to sink standard are it's authors. Something makes me think a majority of the spec was written by scripts, so that no human being will ever have read it.
All of the human being who have read parts of the M$ "standard" have quickly found out it's not a standard at all. It's incomplete and contradictory. The would be implementor is left to find ancient implementation details from older secret formats. Those details were different from version to version and even on different "platforms" within the same version. "Make it look just like the Apple Version of M$ Word from 1995" is hardly a specification and the M$ proposal says things just like that, though you might think that they could fit exact measurements into 6,000 pages. That kind of bullshit has little to do with a formatting implementation, and properly belongs to the exporter that M$ themselves should author because they are the only party with knowledge of all the previous versions. Mostly, their so called "standard" is an admission of past non portability.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Your example is completely flawed just because it's so repetitive. Of course the data you propose will compress so well: there's virtally no randomness with it. On the other hand, real documents are nowhere near as repetitive, and far more random. Thus even quite good compression algorithms will get nowhere near the savings you found with your shitty, unrealistic example here.
Even using your flawed data, we see that there is quite a bit of waste. The file with the larger element names is still about 3 times as large as that with short names. Yeah, when you're dealing with 1 KB it isn't much. But when you're dealing with the 15+ MB documents that law firms and other businesses face on a daily basis, you're talking a difference of 50 MB! Now, that doesn't sound like a lot with the 1 TB drives we have available today. But it becomes a real problem when you're working at a law firm with 50 to 60 partners, each producing between 10 and 12 multi-megabyte documents per day. Soon you're needing hundreds of 1 TB of disks to store this data. 100 TB is a lot cheaper than 300 TB, I hope you realize.