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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."
Help! I just bought a ThinkPad (yes, IBM, not Lenovo). I run Windows on it. Which side should I take?!
c++;
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.
This might be true, but when Massachusetts decided to adopt this standard they raised holy hell, and used every trick in the book to make Massachusetts take it back.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
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.
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
'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
And it performs brilliantly with any product you want: MS Office Ultimate 2007, MS Office Professional 2007, MS Office Enterprise 2007, MS Office Standard 2007, or MS Office Small Business 2007.
Details here.
This little blurb just kills me...
"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."
Yep you bet no effort to slow down the standardization process because they refused to be involved. However they have made every effort possible and will continue to do so in the future to slow
the adoption and deployment of this standard by any means necessary.
Got Code?
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."
I thought the main objection to OpenXML was that it fails to define a number of things, essentially saying "render like WordPerfect 1.0", making it an incomplete standard. Making it not impossible but very difficult for anyone other than Microsoft to implement it so it's fully compatible with the MS version.
Hey Microsoft! We don't just hate you: fact is, your OpenXML spec is an appalling dump heap overflowing with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable rubbish imaginable, mangled up in tangled up knots! I mean, we at IBM know a brain-damaged document format when we see one (heck, we invented plenty of them ourselves) and trust us, this one takes the cake. Ratification of this garbage could set the word processing industry back about twenty years. So don't give us the "customer's interest" line. We know what this is all about: this is about YOU.
Disclaimer: I don't work for IBM (anymore|yet) and these ain't IBM opinions. Well, not official opinions, anyway. ^^
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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.
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.
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I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
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?
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
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
This emphasis on ODF is to strengthen the parent post's claim on the importance of ODF being unencumbered.
Think global, act loco
Wow, it's almost as if we need some form of compression that would find often repeated strings and replace them with short strings. Let's invent it and write a program called gzip!
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.
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.)
Well, sir, do I have good news for you.
There is a new viewer/editor program for OpenOffice.org files called, wait for it, "OpenOffice.org."
After installing the new OpenOffice.org file viewer/editor program, you will have the ability to open, view, edit and close ODF files without needing a separate compression utility.
It's like MAGIC!
(uh, let's do that again, this time with Extrans)
...
n dThisIsTheVeryLongChildElementTagName>n dThisIsTheVeryLongChildElementTagName> ...
Wow, insightful indeed. To add some metrics to the rebuttals in this thread: create two files with some bogus XML, one with very short tag names, the other with long ones. Then compare their uncompressed versus zipped sizes:
File 1:
<r>
<c>Value</c>
<c>Value</c>
</r>
(1000 total copies of the <c> element)
Uncompressed: 16,009 bytes
Compressed: 190 bytes
File 2:
<thisIsTheVeryLongRootElementTagName>
<andThisIsTheVeryLongChildElementTagName>Value</a
<andThisIsTheVeryLongChildElementTagName>Value</a
</thisIsTheVeryLongRootElementTagName>
(1000 total copies of the <andThisIsTheVeryLongChildElementTagName> element)
Uncompressed: 92,079 bytes
Compressed: 525 bytes
So yeah, let's create really obscure and non-intuitive file formats to save ourselves the wasteful redundancy of XML.
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.