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

[Finallyjoined!!!]

It's no problem de-bunking the report, Burton are obviously in the pay of the monopoly. /. readers know this. The real problem is that corporate high fliers will read it & take it for a "reasoned & studied, impartial report"

monopoly money well spent.

Re:must not have been a hard job

[jorghis]

> "OpenOffice is more expensive" (free? wtf?),

License fees dont begin to cover the real cost of software. You need to have an IT department to support it, you have to train users on it, etc. A $100 dollar license fee seems negligable pretty fast when contrasted with the IT budget for a company and any productivity gains/losses that result from using different software.

This is often referred to as TCO (Total Cost of Operating) and salesmen love it cause they can always put up graphs that indicate that their product is clearly the best from that perspective. A lot of people roll their eyes when they hear this term because they dont think much of the aforementioned salesmen's BS. But it really is foolish to factor licensing fees into your decision about what software to use from a cost perspective unless those fees are truly exorbitant.

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

[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

[Psych0_Jack]

Sun has an ODF plug-in for MS Office 2000-2007. It's not like using ODF means you are forced to use OpenOffice.org. Isn't that the point of an open format, no vendor lock-in?

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

[ozmanjusri]

It's no problem de-bunking the report, Burton are obviously in the pay of the monopoly.

Burton are Microsoft boosters from way back.

They did a hatchet jobon Google for MS not so long ago, and when they're not slandering Microsoft competitors, they're out flogging Sharepoint Services.

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"?

Durr

[Smackheid]

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.

Money, hookers or blow. Probably a combo of all three. Just a guess.

Re:Durr

[Anonymous Coward]

Peter O'Kelly is a friend of mine, and I could not pick a guy whose intellect or integrity I respect more, so I am just blown away by this. Do I believe he really believes what he's writing? Yes. Could a 12 year old find all the holes in this? Yes. I can't figure out the angle. Saying that people have to work with legacy files out there and OOXML does it better than ODF, so that's your answer... it's like saying, the guy already raped you so you might as well marry him. Posting anonymously for obvious reasons. I do not believe anyone bought Pete but damn....

Re:Durr

[Stephen Samuel]

Well, burton wasn't paid for the report, but Groklaw reports that "However, Burton analyst Peter O'Kelly, one of the report's co-authors, is scheduled to make a presentation at an Open XML press briefing that Microsoft plans to hold in the Seattle area on Wednesday."

I'm betting that he's getting paid really, really well for (ahem) "the presentation" that he was, apparently scheduled to give even before he released his "independent" report.

Perhaps he was so excited about getting the Microsoft gig, that he 'forgot to check his facts and logic' before he released his report.

Why

[Ryukotsusei]

Why is this topic still going on? I would think that everyone agrees that pdf is the better standard.

Re:Why

[Anonymous Coward]

Comments like this one make me wish there was a (+1, Troll) moderation option.

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.

"OOXML improved many problems of DOC."

[maxwell demon]

I personally prefer problems to be solved instead of improved. But obviously the Burton Group actually likes problems, but doesn't consider the problems of .DOC as good enough, so they are glad that OOXML contains them in an improved form.

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.

Knee-jerk reactions

[PCM2]

I know everybody wants to immediately jump to the conclusion that the Burton Group is in Microsoft's pocket, etc., etc., but while it is perfectly appropriate to question the methodologies and motivations of analysts' research, in my experience the Burton Group is as much of a "good guy" as an analyst firm gets. If you've ever been to one of their conferences, they are packed to the gills with useful information, and their analysts generally come off as being genuinely knowledgeable.

That said, I'd love to see the Burton Group get rid of the registration requirement on this PDF so I can see what they actually say. TFA is mostly paraphrasing, and I'm not certain they are taking every comment in context.

Some folks on here seem to be taking issue with the statement that ODF is "indirectly controlled" by Sun. But, as far as I understand it, that's pretty much the case. Last I heard, the vast majority of work on OpenOffice.org is done by Sun employees. The codebase is just too complex for amateurs to get their heads around. You could argue (and many do) that OOXML is directly controlled by Microsoft ... but for all I know, not having read the paper, the Burton Group never disputes that. Maybe they're just saying that anybody who insists on using ODF because Microsoft has a disproportionate influence over OOXML is fooling themselves, because the same can be said (to an extent) of ODF.

The Burton Group's greater concern seems to be that Sun has a conflict of interest here. 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? If the latter, does it make sense for a corporation to support it on that basis? Maybe you'd argue that it does make sense. Me, I'm not so sure.

As far as ODF "only supporting a fraction of what enterprises need," well, that's probably true. I doubt that ODF was ever designed to define a standard for everything that enterprise customers do with their office suites. Be that as it may, if an ODF application suite does not support all of the features that an enterprise might want, does it make sense to conduct a mass migration to a new office suite on the basis that the new suite uses document formats that are "open"? In other words, the Burton Group seems to be making the age-old case for sticking with the status quo, even given the understanding that it represents a capitulation to "vendor lock-in." Many customers may decided that open file formats just aren't worth the trade-off.

You can call it cynical, or self-interested, or just plain lazy, but given the opportunity to participate in a revolution, there will always be some people who will say, "No thanks." Some of them might be deluded. And others may merely be acting in their own self-interest. If they are deluded, however -- and sticking with the status quo really means trading long-term best interests for short-term interests -- then isn't it up to us to convince them of their mistake? Calling them "shills," claiming that they were paid off in "hookers and blow," and all the other stuff I see in this thread, doesn't strike me as a very effective way of making the counter-argument.

Nor, in fact, does the Ars article. It doesn't seem like a "thorough debunking" to me; more like a fairly well-reasoned opinion piece/editorial/blog.

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

[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.

...controlled indirectly by Sun...

[dotancohen]

"ODF is controlled indirectly by Sun,"

Oh, and who controls OOXML? Someone you trust more than Sun?

Re:Paid by Microsoft

[Grishnakh]

Not necessarily. There's a lot of companies out there, including Burton, who are MS "partners", and earn all their income by pushing and supporting MS products. They don't need to be explicitly paid off to spout pro-MS FUD; they stand to profit through increased use of MS software, so they're happy to spout FUD for free.

For instance, if McAfee published a report that said that Linux and MacOSX are highly susceptible to viruses, and that virus infestations of such machines are common, it'd be pretty obvious that they didn't need to be paid off by MS to say these lies. Their entire reason for existence is the poor security and virus susceptibility of the Windows platform, so it's in their best interest to make people believe Windows is the best platform, and that every computer should have anti-virus software installed.

giggle:

[Stephen Samuel]

TFA read:

Open XML is "more complex than ODF, but it's not unnecessarily complex for the contexts it was designed to address," Not unnecessarily complex?!!? freaks! The recent Errata for OOXML is almost six times the size of the full ODF documentation -- and, even then, OOXML docs are missing critical parts!

I'm surprised that the authors don't expect to get laughed out of the hall when they present this report -- even if it is on Microsoft soil.

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.