Study Touting OOXML Over ODF Is Debunked

The Burton Group, an IT research company, published a study urging that enterprise organizations adapt OOXML rather than ODF. Their reasons include things like "ODF is controlled indirectly by Sun," "MS Office is cheaper than OpenOffice.org," and "OOXML improved many problems of DOC." The Burton Group also claims that although ODF is well-designed, OOXML is better suited for the specific needs of enterprise organizations. The study claims to be impartial in that Microsoft didn't pay for it. Ars Technica now has up a pretty thorough debunking of the Burton study. Ars wonders how the Burton authors can so blithely overlook Microsoft's vote-buying in Sweden, while wielding unfounded accusations of chicanery in Sun's direction.

Comments

must not have been a hard job

[moderatorrater]

With claims such as "Sun indirectly controlling ODF" (as opposed to Microsoft directly controlling it) and "OpenOffice is more expensive" (free? wtf?), it doesn't sound like Ars Technica had too difficult of a job.

Re:must not have been a hard job

[MightyMartian]

I can guarantee right now that, from a training perspective, for anyone familiar with Office 97 through Office 2003, OO.org is going to be a helluva lot cheaper than Office 2007.

Re:must not have been a hard job

[jorghis]

> yes about that, do you have any examples where the license cost justifies staying with MS?

Like I was saying in my original post any salesman can make it sound one that one is better than the other. If you go to MS's website you can find case studies where it was cheaper. If you go to Sun's website you can find case studies where their stuff is cheaper. Both have som basis in fact and both are going to be slanted slightly to favor their respective authors. If you really want examples just look at those two web sites.

> if you're going to count support and training into the equation you can't just ignore liscense fees now can you?

License fees are tiny next to the cost of operating an IT department and any productivity gains/losses. A handful of guys working in IT will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Even if you have a lopsided ratio and a few IT guys are supporting hundreds of people that is still a one time cost of a few tens of thousands of dollars versus hundreds of thousands a year.

> As for training, you're reasoning seems to be that if it isn't exactly the same as MS it will cost boatloads more and that's a load of ****.

It is generally true. Most job applicants out there are familiar with MS software and have used it extensively in the past. Ergo, the software learning curve for a new employee is generally lower.

Re:must not have been a hard job

[neil-ngc]

As you probably know, total cost of ownership, while real, is pretty hard to predict in advance. Anyone telling you otherwise is probably selling something.

It is generally true. Most job applicants out there are familiar with MS software and have used it extensively in the past. Ergo, the software learning curve for a new employee is generally lower.

At this point, I think it's a fair argument that the cost of retraining to use OO.o is probably much smaller than the cost of retraining to use Office 2007. Just because a job applicant is familiar with MS hardly means they're familiar with the latest version, which has fewer similarities to Office 2003 than OO.o does.

License fees are tiny next to the cost of operating an IT department and any productivity gains/losses. A handful of guys working in IT will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Even if you have a lopsided ratio and a few IT guys are supporting hundreds of people that is still a one time cost of a few tens of thousands of dollars versus hundreds of thousands a year.

While this is a fair argument, I'd be interested to see some evidence that there's a difference in IT costs between the different suites, and, if there is, is it greater than the total licensing costs. I'm not pathologically anti-MS. I continue to use Windows and Office because it's convenient and makes it easier to switch between work and home, not to mention it allows me to run my games without fussing endlessly with wine. On top of that, I have one Mac on the network, and OOo's lack of a decent Mac version (X term or a very resource intensive Java hack don't count) has left Office as the better option.

Re:must not have been a hard job

[filbranden]

The real problem is that corporate high fliers will read it & take it for a "reasoned & studied, impartial report"

I don't think so. Recently with Office 2007 and specially Vista I've seen that companies are really trying to avoid the upgrades as much as possible. Maybe it's the recession, but the thing is that right now companies are really considering not giving Microsoft a load of money for upgrades that bring few worthy features many new problems, and are considering alternatives instead.

Nowadays companies are not blindly eating whatever Gartner et al. feed them anymore.

Re:must not have been a hard job

[TENTH SHOW JAM]

Correct. There isn't a lot to learn. Having said that, I used IE7 for 5 minutes and was uncomfortable with the layout. I returned to a browser that had a similar layout to the original browser I "Learned" (in this instance "Netscape navigator Version 2 I think) And once I was back with firefox I was happy again.

The same can be said of Office. What I want in an office product is features to be layed out in the same way so when I reach out for the "Make this line a header" tool, I'm grabbing the right tool first time. Now I am not a power user by any stretch, but if I spend more time "Learning" where they hid the (up the font size by 2, make bold and underline) key then I am not spending that time writing the paragraph below which contains job related information.

In short make your interface intuitive or if you can't manage that, make it the same as the last one. Office 2K7 managed to break both these rules. Open Office 2 has a very similar interface to all the office products before it.

Re:must not have been a hard job

[rubah]

Yeah, but how many people had to support office 2007, learn how to use office 2007, etc etc etc? From what I've heard it's a little bit different, similar to the way that OO is a little bit different, and the lecturers in class still walked both sets of office users through the differences. What's the difference?

Re:must not have been a hard job

[ragefan]

That is true, no doubt. But it still isnt very cut and dry. What happens 4+ years from now when everyone and their cat knows Office 2007 (not an unlikely scenario) and every new employee needs to be retrained on OO.org? Then it becomes more expensive. No more expensive than when MS replaces ribbons for the next big thing in UI and then having to retrain everyone again. Or if they decide to stop backward compatibility of older file formats again.

Re:must not have been a hard job

[Bert64]

But if a lot of companies move to OOo now while there's a compelling argument, 4 years down the line there will be a supply of OOo experienced staff and demand for more, causing people to learn it on their own time prior to applying for work...

Re:must not have been a hard job

[jimicus]

The real problem is that corporate high fliers will read it & take it for a "reasoned & studied, impartial report"

Perhaps I've had a very sheltered life, but how in God's name does someone become a corporate high flyer without knowing that there's no such thing as a "reasoned & studied, impartial report"?

Indirectly *could* be a problem...

[ricebowl]

"ODF is controlled indirectly by Sun,"

While I can't agree with this being a problem due to Sun's having influence over the development, I could perhaps understand it to be potentially a problem due to the indirect nature, in that there is no central guidance. Whereas with MS software there is, potentially, a focused development path (I'm not trying to be modded funny, honest).

"MS Office is cheaper than OpenOffice.org,"

Ummm...no. I...no. The costs involved in OO.o are only, I think, due to the training issues for staff familiarised with MS Office. And I don't think that the cost of training each user, with group seminars, would be more expensive than the per-user license for using MS Office in a corporate environment.

Ah, corporate shills. They're funny guys...

Not aimed at us...

[tech10171968]

At first blush I wondered how Burton could get away with such absolutely ridiculous claims (OOo costs more than MS Word?!?! WTF??!!). But then I realized: the target of this report isn't going to be Slashdot readers, experienced sysadmins, or anyone similar - our collective knowledge can see the BS from a mile away, and some Slashdotters I know actually know enough of what they're talking about to debunk the report all by themselves. No, the intended audience is going to be those folks who may lack the IT knowledge but still control the purse strings (CEO, COO, CFO, et al). They don't know any better so it's going to be easy to fill their heads with FUD and have them take it as gospel. The data may be incorrect but, by the time anyone else find that out, the damage will have already been done.

The study is informative

[initialE]

It informs me to add "The Burton Group" to the list of bullshit propaganda organizations. Seriously, who are these guys?

What about training users for new office version?

[walterbyrd]

As I understand it, going from office-2003, to office-2007, requires more training than moving to OpenOffice.

BTW: I've worked in IT for 28 years. I never remember any company, spending any money, to train anybody, to learn any office product. I thought you supposed to pick that up by yourself.

Re:What about training users for new office versio

[jorghis]

Thats true, you do generally have to pick it up yourself. The cost comes in the form of lost productivity from all the time you spend trying to figure out how to do new stuff or why something doesnt work the way you think it should.

They are *not* both open standards

[walterbyrd]

The OOXML specification refers to other specifications which are closed - i.e. "do this the same way it's done in Windows-95." Also, OOXML standard is to be controlled by a msft proxie group - ECMA.

Re:Meh....

[grcumb]

I'm tired of the whole OOXML/ODF pissing match. Who cares? I mean, really, they both do almost exactly the same thing, in almost exactly the same way.

Absolutely, one of them strives to provide a format useful and usable by any maker of office software, the other strives to provide a format useful and usable by any maker of office software, so long as it's Microsoft.

Almost exactly the same.

The only real difference is the XML schema, and do I really, either as a consumer or as a programmer, care about that?

Agree 1000%. It's just a schema! I mean who cares what it does or where it comes from. I say the same about books, too. My literature prof wanted to fail me because I read Mein Kampf instead of War and Peace, but I was all like, dude, what's the problem? They're both books!

They're both open standards which any party can use. Well, open enough -- do I really care who who controls modifications to it?

Word! How come we keep getting our shorts in a knot about who controls our information? Next thing you know, some shirty, smelly little ACLU pinko is going to come along and start complaining about access to information and whining about data interchange and what will our grand-children say about us when they see the mess we made of everything just so we could keep some corporate fat cat in his limo for another few years!

Who needs this Open shit, anyways, huh? Sharing? Highly over-rated.

Re:Knee-jerk reactions

[walterbyrd]

Let's suppose that ODF is indirectly controlled by Sun, and OOXML is directly controlled by msft. Why is it that the indirect control by Sun is cause for alarm, but the direct contol by msft is not cause for alarm?

Why is it relevant that Burton never disputed msft's direct control? Does that make msft's direct control of a supposed open standard all right?

> What is the purpose of ODF? Is it to empower users? Or is a means for Sun to erode the profitability of core Microsoft products?

Why not both? Is google trying to erode msft's marketshare by financial supporting mozilla/firefox? Should I reject firefox on that basis?

ODF is open, OOXML is not. By using ODF, I can insure my documents will always be readable, and avoid vender lock-in. If that's helpful to Sun, so what?

Don't forget, ODF can be used with msft products. And if msft chose to do so, msft could support ODF just as much as Sun. Msft is also free to contribute to the ODF standard. Therefore ODF does not give Sun any competitive advantage.

Re:Knee-jerk reactions

[Omnifarious]

Wow, a well reasoned comment that for the side I'm not on! :-)

I am not intimately familiar with either ODF or OOXML. I am passingly familiar with both. I also have an understanding of the culture of the communities they come out of.

As for ODF, I know Open Source. And I know the proprietary Unix world before it. And while Open Office is mind numbingly complex, the source is out there and I consider the source the ultimate arbiter of any protocol or file format. Standards documents are merely high quality documentation and not definitive. Additionally there are various other implementations that interoperate with Open Office via ODF to a greater or lesser extent, and I know there will be a lot of pressure to make that support more complete as time goes on.

And while Sun might be the major contributor to Open Office, they don't have the same kind of control that Microsoft has over Microsoft Word. And the existence of other interoperable implementations decreases the effect their influence on Open Office has on the ODF document format.

I also know the culture that OOXML comes out, though not as well. It's clear that Microsoft bought ISO votes, and this behavior is not unusual for them. It's clear from even a casual reading of the standard that it will be impossible to create an interoperable program without access to proprietary Microsoft source code. It's even clear that Microsoft themselves couldn't create an interoperable version without using their own source code. For example I doubt anybody knows how Word 97 formatting works in detail except to know that a particular block of Microsoft proprietary code implements it. Microsoft also has a strong history of having 'standards' they claim are open, but actually require Microsoft proprietary technology in some way to implement.

So this mysterious report by this well-respected group is interesting to me as they seem to be telling me that everything experience has taught me is all wrong. The kind of broad sweeping changes in both cultures required for my experience to be rendered obsolete surely couldn't happen without my notice. My first impulse is to figure out if they were paid to do it. My next impulse is to figure out if they have a strongly self-interested reason to do it. The latter appears to be the case. No matter how respected they might be, their bread and butter is threatened if Microsoft Office significantly diminishes in importance. I would expect the legion of string theory theorists to (initially at least, until the more intellectually honest ones among them really took the time to understand things) call anybody who questioned string theory a crackpot regardless of whether or not they were right, and I would also expect a company who makes the majority of it's money from the existence of the Microsoft Office ecosystem to react similarly, no matter how respected they are.

So until they can produce this mysterious report for public perusal, comment and dissection, I think that believing it to be total hogwash is completely justified by past experience and knowledge of the players involved.

Re:What about training users for new office versio

[mortonda]

Thats true, you do generally have to pick it up yourself. The cost comes in the form of lost productivity from all the time you spend trying to figure out how to do new stuff or why something doesnt work the way you think it should. Which is quite a high TCO for MS Office, IMHO. Getting Word or Access to do what I want is like witchcraft sometimes. ;)

Is this specific enough for you?

[walterbyrd]

1) OOXML is not open, ODF is open. OOXML specs refer to other closed specs.

2) ODF is controlled by ISO, OOXML is controlled by msft, and msft *now* claims that msft will never give ISO control. Rather msft wants to give control to the ECMA - a group controlled by msft. This directly contradicts what msft first promised.

3) ODF is used by several different organizations. Anybody is welcome to freely use ODF. OOXML is used by msft, and novell - due to a very sneaky and secretive document.

4) OOXML is only being considered for an ISO standard because of msft bribing and ballot stuffing.

Debunked?

[Anonymous MadCoe]

In my book debunking means looking at someone's statement. And then methodically showing that it's not true. This can be done by showing the truth is different, or showing that the reasoning is flawed.

This article IMHO just stated that things are different, but does not provide a better founded truth, nor does it show the flaws in the original reasoning in a methodical way (again it's just stating the opposite).

I would not call this debunking, I would call it disputing.

My 2 cents...