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IBM Slams Microsoft, Calls OOXML "Inferior"
cristarol sends word that Microsoft's accusation, that IBM has sabotaged Redmond's attempts to have the Office OpenXML format approved by the ISO, has drawn a heated response from IBM. Ars Technica has the story. "'IBM believes that there is a revolution occurring in the IT industry, and that smart people around the world are demanding truly open standards developed in a collaborative, democratic way for the betterment of all,' IBM VP of standards and OSS Bob Sutor told Ars. 'If "business as usual" means trying to foist a rushed, technically inferior and product-specific piece of work like OOXML on the IT industry, we're proud to stand with the tens of countries and thousands of individuals who are willing to fight against such bad behavior.'"
One big corporation bashing another... Get your popcorns and watch the show. Personally, I prefer Godzilla... yyyyyiii... *sound of Godzilla*
I'm not really much for liking megacorps, but it's good to see one -- IBM in this case, for the moment -- that's on the right side.
totally with IBM
When a company that used to be a monopolist is now one of the staunchest defenders of openness, I really do hope there is no hidden agenda here.
IBM used to make overpriced hardware sold at tremendous profit until that little upstart microsoft came along and elegantly used their own weight against them in a classic game of corporate judo. It may just be that IBM still smarts from that or it may be that they've really 'seen the light'. This is good news, personally I'd like to see the transparency of these committees and their members go up a notch or two, too much potential for procedural trickery still exists.
MP3 Search Engine
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
Has anyone else wondered? is it oh-oh-ecks-emm-ell? Or Uxamul (rhymes with "sucks a mule")?
If X is the new Y, and Y is "X is the new Y", solve for X.
I think IBM are absolutely right when they say that the customers prefer to have documented open standards which can be supported by a variety of different applications from different vendors.
I can see no case at all to support Microsofts point of view that it's better to use a document format which is supported by only one company that can only be guaranteed to work with their products and where this guarantee is not set in stone and could be subject to change at the whim of the company.
From a business point of view anything which maintains the lock in to Microsofts Office products is good for Microsoft and anything which is truly open benefits IBM and as I said above I think what the customer wants in this case is also the same thing IBM want which means IBM are going to be getting a lot of goodwill for pushing their point of view.
It will be interesting to see just how far MS are willing to go to defend their office lock in and whether they will see sense, give in and rely on Office ( which is a good product IMHO ) to compete on a level playing field with it's competitors.
If only Microsoft concentrated so much on fixing their software as they do in trying to force standards (or with the web - break standards).
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I suppose that sooner is as good as later for Microsoft to crush itself under the weight of its incompetence. They simply cannot ignore that there is real competition around the corner. If they wait until it is viable (No Linux desktop for you yet, not yours) it will be too late.
Someday, I will turn in my MCSE/MCDBA and make my fortune elsewhere. This could be the turning point.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
Is that Microsoft Office blows OO.org away. Completely. Microsoft could go with ODF and still compete very well against OO.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
'If "business as usual" means trying to foist a rushed, technically inferior and product-specific piece of work like DOS on the IT industry, we're proud to stand with the tens of countries and thousands of individuals who are willing to fight against such bad behavior.'"
"Oh wait, maybe we're not. Not yet. Give us a couple of decades or so..."
IBM has gotten its act together, or at least its rhetoric. When will Microsoft join the rest of us in the 21st century and stop foisting rushed, technically inferior and product-specific work? What will it take, Microsoft's version of the Microchannel?
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
No, tell us how you really feel.
Our management forced us from subversion to clearcase. I am not impressed. Most painful was the loss of the goal stat-scm in subversion that allowed me to (with a few keystrokes) weekly publish the results and standings of all the classes, members and files in the projects. We're talking heat maps, personal performance, unit test case coverage and just about anything--ANYTHING--you could ask for in metrics. And the amount of work I did to achieve that functionality was negligible. On clearcase, I can't even get a lines of code count. Nothing.
So off I went looking for ways to interface with the clearcase VOB to poll this data from the server. Wouldn't you know it, I came up empty handed. I called up my toolsmith and he told me I was trying to "make ClearCase something it's not." It was clear then, I was working for the tool, the tool wasn't working for me. If you are the 'staunchest defender of openness' don't you think you'd publish specs on how to communicate and gather meaningful data from the ClearCase server & VOB for your users? If they do, I haven't found it. Don't even get me started about ClearCase having a dying embrace on my piece of crap Windows work box's kernel land. Why that needs to be modify kernel files (for some reason it shows up in my control panel) to be installed, I'll never know.
Don't get me wrong, you're right in that they've come a long way. Hell, look at how they defined UML 1.0 and opened that up. But there are some types of files in Rational Rose that I still can't figure out how to write or produce in a reporting manner.
So until they open their file formats and communications protocols (I really hope it's just a matter of not having it adequately documented), please don't go around titling them among the 'staunchest defenders of openness.' They may have that title commercially but I could list a number of individuals in the open source world that would easily win that title.
I support the software as a service model and believe that all our tools should be shared and open source. IBM promotes that in certain areas as best I can tell but there is definitely room for improvement.
My work here is dung.
Micro$oft pretends to want an open format but really wants an 'open but biased' format they can contrive to make Word the best implementation of. The don't care about being 'open' except when it may benefit their bottom line.
IBM pretends to like Open Source, but really makes an enormous percentage of their income from services directly related to such endeavors. They only like Open Source because they benefit financially from it, no other reason. The don't care about being 'open' except when it may benefit their bottom line.
Now, IBM's greed benefits more people than Micro$oft's currently.
Loading...
( ROF, LMFAO ). The show is on the other foot. IBM used to be legendary for its proprietary solutions. and the PC took off like wild fire, in part because of open standards.
...and more.
well, what goes around, comes around.
one of the things to look at though is that not only do documents need to be portable from one environment to another across current platforms but also across time: we need to be able to read documents made 5 years ago, and 10 years ago, 20, 50,
Microsoft appears to have a core philosophy that all things in the computer should be mushed together. Every application and device driver should be allowed (and indeed encouraged) to share their innermost secrets with any process that asks. This is the reason for all of Windows' and Office's vulnerabilities. Notice the utter chaos that has ensued when Vista tightened up a few of those "I'm-ok-you're-ok" sharing paths.
One of the problems I have with the whole MS Office file design is that it includes both data and executables in the same file. There is no way to separate the two. Now, I suppose I'm out of step with the rest of the world, but those should be in separate files. As long as the data is fully documented, and has all the appropriate pieces for the purpose (style definitions, mathematical formulae), any program should be able to operate on it. IMHO, we should not be encouraging the mixture of (for example) a spreadsheet document that contains the calculations for a company's PL statement with the code (e.g., VBA) used to control data entry into that document. Simply loading the document should not put someone at risk for malware infection, because it should contain no programs in the first place. I like having powerful macros as much as the next guy, but I believe it has gone too far.If you need that much control, then write a separate program that operates on the data, and keep the data separate.
Here's a wild idea: Replace all the data files (and only data files -- no macros or exe's) on a computer with entries in a SQL database (with appropriate security, of course, to restrict sharing), so any application, from any vendor, can easily read and write it. As Microsoft proved when it tried to put SQL into the OS, this isn't as easy as I made it sound. But this may have more to do with their inability to add the old vulnerabilities into the scheme than making the whole thing work right.
Microsoft wishes to enshrine all of its past mistakes in the new format, and continue its malware-friendly development philosophy. That is wrong, and the Office 2007 file format is too flawed to be seriously considered as a universal standard (intellectual property issues aside). It's good to see a company the size of IBM fight against its acceptance.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
I'm definitely liking the stance IBM is taking here. OOXML clearly has some serious problems and its a relief to see that regardless of Micrsoft's perceived power, they can't muscle their way into ISO standards. However, I'm still eagerly awaiting IBM to fully embrace this open ideal they're talking about.
Free the OS/2 codebase.
OpenOffice is good enough for most tasks and the cool charge you have to pay for each bum on a set using MS Office begins to look more an more like waste, specially with a recession being talked up by the media.
If there is a real crunch a lot of people will question why they should continue to use MS office if there are plenty of options out there cheaper or free.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Godzilla may have thrown chairs, but he didn't have such a potty mouth: Ballmer Throws A Chair At "F*ing Google".
You're assuming that Microsoft wants to compete. It's much easier and more profitable to dominate a market by lock-in than to compete in the market. Not to mention the fact that Microsoft's main competitor right now is not OpenOffice but its own earlier versions of MSOffice. One way they force people to upgrade is to change the file formats so your old MSOffice won't open documents from a newer version. They couldn't do that if they had to stick to a standard format.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Re-worded quote from the comment above: "Most companies out there are All-Microsoft shops -- They won't even consider anything else. Most people care only about their core business, and that isn't IT."
True, but IBM is influential with people who understand Microsoft's abuse. See this quote from the Ars Technica article:
A ZDNet article published late last month quotes Microsoft officials who claim that IBM is solely responsible for ISO's recent decision to deny OOXML fast-track approval. "Let's be very clear," Jean Paoli, Microsoft's senior director of XML technology, told ZDNet. "It has been fostered by a single company--IBM. If it was not for IBM, it would have been business as usual for this standard."
I'm glad we don't have "business as usual", as defined by Microsoft.
...it's time to resurrect the term "IBM compatible?"
Seriously, this phrase is a throwback and an oversimplification, but it has built-in acceptance among a certain age bracket.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
IBM sell hardware and Software too. Open standards allow IBM to suggest its own software and hardware as part of its consultancy :)
Where can i send my CV?
This term is very much still in use. It just doesn't have anything to do with PCs.
(Hint: Mainframes)
IBM appears to be one of the few surviving "last generation" companies former Labor Secretary Robert Reich writes about. They seem to have some appreciation at the highest corporate level that the long view has real value, and that corporations are to some degree responsible for the well-being of the society in which they operate. IBM's stand against the clearly-inferior OOXML standard indicates that they understand long-term viability sometimes means sacrificing a bit of short-term profit.
This is a lesson Microsoft has never learned.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Translation: "We would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for that pesky megacorp!"
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
IBM is fighting lock-in by OOXML. Google has MSFT on the defense in the internet services arena. Linux has a dominate presence in the server space. Mozilla is a growing and viable alternative to IE7 and Apple, though a bit player in TOTAL sales, is making strong gains in the desktop market and the iPod continues to stomp the Zune. Sony and Nintendo have ensured that Xbox won't make real money for years to come, if ever.
I suggest MSFT has fallen victim to a classic blunder. The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: you can't fight an entire industry, even if you're the biggest punk around.
That might be the battlefield that Microsoft would like to have chosen but it isn't the one that IBM is playing on. For IBM, the money is in the middleware. For Microsoft, the money is on the desktop.
Before I go on, yes, I work for IBM. What follows is entirely my own opinions and is not a formal statement of IBM policy.
ODF is a huge enabler for middleware document services because it removes barriers at the desktop end and allows significant freedom for customers to choose solutions. IBM already has plenty of XML integration ticking in its products (such as pureXML integrated in DB2 and the Content Manager products) and ODF fits very nicely into that scenario. IBM would like to be able to go to customers and offer a complete end-to-end document/content management system. Why do you think that IBM would produce the Symphony products and integrate Document editing into Lotus Notes 8?
While OOXML also fits into the XML-on-middleware approach, it necessarily ties itself to a set of Microsoft clients because only Microsoft will know what the next version of Office will support with respect to OOXML and even the most assiduous followers of OOXML implementations outside Microsoft will be months (or more likely years) behind the latest OOXML version.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Is that Microsoft Office blows OO.org away. Completely. Microsoft could go with ODF and still compete very well against OO.
But Microsoft doesn't want to compete with OO. They would much rather have a monopoly based on a de-facto document standard that is incompatible with other software. After all, you make more money with monopoly sales and monopoly markup than you do in a competitive market, even if you're the market leader.
If Microsoft fully supported ODF, then it may happen that a great deal of people who would not consider anything but MS Office today due to requiring Office compatibility would decide that OO does what they need well enough and has the right price. Already many people who don't require perfect MS Office compatibility have made the same decision.
And if you don't need MS Office, then maybe you don't need MS Windows. The entirety of the Microsoft business model is built upon these two monopolies reinforcing each other by being incompatible with anything else. If either of these monopolies is broken, if software compatibility means that MS Office or MS Windows are merely choices rather than requirements for the majority of people, then MS' days of dominance are over.
This is absolutely bog-standard MS thinking, it's how they've operated for the last twenty-plus years. They always prefer to monopolize over compete, and only compete when absolutely necessary (with very mixed results).
So that's all there is to understand -- competition is anathema to MS, and they will protect their monopolies at all costs. ODF, an actual standard juxtaposed with their de-facto standard, threatens their monopolies. They will fight against supporting it tooth-and-nail.
The enemies of Democracy are
Wow, IBM attacking Microsoft. How newsworthy.
Maybe if IBM's software didn't suck so much, people would care what they have to say. Maybe if their software didn't suck so much, they wouldn't have been forced into becoming a really big consulting company (half their revenue comes from consulting).
Your management just bought the wrong IBM product for the job you are doing.
Blar.
> Micro$oft pretends to want an open format but really wants an 'open but biased' format
OOXML is not 'open but biased' OOXML is not open - period. But you made a valid point about msft being full of sh!t.
> IBM pretends to like Open Source, but really makes an enormous percentage of their income from services directly related to such endeavors.
WTF? If open source is helpful to IBM's business model, then IBM is not "pretending" to like open source. Furthermore, why should IBM support any standard that is not helpful to IBM's business model? However, unlike msft, IBM is not calling a closed standard "open." And IBM is not involved in bribery and ballot stuffing to pushed a proprietary system though the ISO process while called that closed standard "open."
Being an all-MS shop is irrelevant because more and more companies are switching to server-side applications for their needs. It started with Content Management Systems and database front ends, and with google docs the public at large is beginning to get a glimpse of office on the server.
And this next generation of applications is going to be OS-agnostic-- you can run WAMP just as easily as LAMP, and you can view an html-based application on any browser on any type of desktop/kiosk/cell phone/... . That is really all that IBM and many others want: interoperability so that customers can choose the solution that is best regardless of who everybody else has chosen.
They want this, of course, because their systems are better and they know that companies will move to them.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
A recent Danish study into conversion between ODF, DOC and OOXML concluded that MS Office was the best at dealing with all of those formats. So Microsoft need have no real fears that people will leave Office immediately if ODF was widely adopted.
http://dokumentformater.oio.dk/
But it still makes sense that Microsoft are unhappy with ODF and want to push OOXML. ODF is controlled by OASIS, and would allow much greater competition in the office software market. In the medium to long term, the Office software monopoly could be broken - if they failed to innovate and compete, that is.
yes. is nice.
Q: What's the difference between a mainframe and a high-capacity, legacy-compatible application server?
A: About fifty grand.
I'm here all week, try the Hawaian salad.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I have two problems with calling this open. First, Sun leaves themselves an out. The grant only covers 1.0 of ODF right now. It only covers future versions if Sun participates significantly in their development. This means that Sun, not OASIS, has the final say in how future versions of ODF develop. For a standard to be open, it should be a standards body that has final say over how the standard develops, not a single company. If OASIS decides to do something in, say, ODF 2, that Sun is opposed to, all Sun has to do is walk away, and ODF 2 is dead in its tracks.
Second, this license does not allow for private forks of the standard. On of the hallmarks of something being "open" is that people can adapt it for their needs. If I need a document format for something that isn't quite ODF, I am not allowed to make my own internal format based on ODF.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
and where's my financial advisors phone number to buy IBM stock!
so why the feck did you bring it up in the first place?
Either you're an idiot, you're lying or it's a WAG.
> Perhaps you should define what *you* mean by open as 'Open XML' is an 'open standard.'
Parts of the standard say stuff like "do this the same as it's done in win95" but the win95 format is closed. Therefore, OOXML is not fully open. Also, msft can change the format whenever msft choses to do so. The EMCA are just a bunch of msft rubber-stampers.
> My point isn't to try to make Micro$oft look better, it's to point out the hypocrisy of IBM trying to make Micro$oft look like "the bad guys" when IBM are exactly the same.
You are trying to drag IBM down to msft's level, and that is not fair in this case. IBM has not lied about ODF being open. IBM has not subverted the process by bribing and ballot stuffing. IBM has not launched a massive PR campaign to twist the facts.
If IBM is acting in it's own self interest, so what? That of itself is not unethical. It's only when you start lying, cheating, and stealing (like msft does rountinely) that it becomes unethical.
So is saying that both companies are at the same level is pure bullshit.
Clear enough?
Precisely. In fact, not only should IBM not be blamed for something that Microsoft refuses to do (support ODF), but that point is an absolute argument-stopper for the whole debate.
Microsoft could support ODF and compete
OOXML is able to be implemented fully only by Microsoft and only on a Windows platform. There is no implementation of OOXML at all
Before I go on, yes, I work for IBM.
... enabler for middleware document services...
Yeah, we can tell by the way you said
Nobody else can spin out buzzwords like that!
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
I really wish the market forces would hurry up and deal Microsoft the reality check it deserves. I'd like the non-IT users of word processors, spreadsheeters and hobby database creators to realise that Microsoft Office isn't the only application around where you can write documents and calculate your company's P & L statement. Then those customers may actually CHOOSE their office apps for themselves, instead of Microsoft TELLING them that "you must use Office or you ain't being productive". Companies can choose to keep all of their documents in ODF format - freeing up the choices of office application that their users/customers/supplies use to create and share information. The most important thing to the non-IT user is their data and being able to share that data - not the app that helps them create that data.
Isn't this what IBM's stance has always been? I don't see how this is any different. IBM has been fervently pro-ODF. Here's them spouting more pro-ODF lingo.
I personally think they're wrong; ODF is just as product specific. It's designed around the feature constraints of OpenOffice just as OOXML is designed around MS Office.
Besides, all of the bitchly compatibility code in OOXML would prove to be a huge boon to the industry if ever correctly implemented, whereas ODF would require manual kludging of an endless mound of legacy documents because it's so "clean-room". Chances are the implementation required to properly bring all the proprietary legacy documents smoothly into ODF in an automated manner would likely bring ODF closer to the 6000 pages of OOXML. ODF is, in this sense, less complete, in sight of its real world purpose.
Not that I care-- I'm not spending any money on MS Office... I'm just tired of having to convert my documents back and forth in order to get work done across platforms. One specification would be nice- I think it would work best if we just implemented the one that's being used in the dominant office product.
They pretty much say we won't bring a lawsuit on you unless you do it to us first.. You have a problem with this?
But I would have end with,
"...and Steve has a tiny wiener."