Counter-Claims On Flaws In OOXML Meeting

ericatcw writes "Critics have charged that last week's ISO Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) to decide the fate of changes to Office Open XML standards proposal was too perfunctory and deviated from accepted ISO practices, possibly in an attempt to smooth the passage of the Microsoft format. This week, the ISO 'convener' of the BRM disputed those charges, saying that voting to dispose of 900 changes to the spec at once and allowing 'O' Observer countries to vote were the correct moves. ISO released a statement backing him up. Also, Patrick Durusau, editor of the competing OpenDocument Format specification and a late convert to OOXML's passage, also said that claims the process was flawed were overstated."

Comments

This whole mess smells

[blind biker]

So we have more than just allegations of companies being bribed to take up membership and vote for OOXML. Those same new members are conspicuous absentees when it came to voting for other matters.

And now this? The stench of corruption is unbearable.

Re:This whole mess smells

[filbranden]

I also read yesterday that US was advised to vote "yes" by INCITS, despite of what the US delegates and the HoD Frank Farance told about the BRM on the media.

Because the countries raised issues in alphabetic order, and the second round wasn't even completed, US delegates could raise only one issue for discussion. And yet, they recommend that the text is good enough for approval. Unbelievable. As you said, it really smells. Bad.

You can get more details about this process...

[Lorien_the_first_one]

Here:

http://consortiuminfo.org/

And Here:

http://www.groklaw.net/

Enjoy the links. I've been reading groklaw.net for about 5 years now. Worth every minute. I've been watching the OOXML/ODF process since the state of Massachusetts started talking about using some other format than MS Office. Dave Berlind broke the story on ZDNet.com of all places. I really enjoyed watching Microsoft and their allies work themselves up into a lather over the whole thing.

Seems that once governments started to think about lock-in, MS got interested in interoperability. I guess MS is really worried about shareholder lawsuits with claims that they didn't do *everything* they could to maintain share value. MS doesn't seem to get that the question for governments is how to maintain their sovereignty instead of MS shareholder value.

Re:You can get more details about this process...

[filbranden]

At least the Microsoft version of propaganda (blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones) allows freedom of speech, and the owner there gets tons of abuse (warranted or otherwise).

Mod parent funny!!! ROTFL!!!

Only in software is this even considered. You don't hear about how Toyota or GM should be forced to accept Daewoo or Suzuki parts in their cars for "interoperability" purposes.

Terrible car analogy. If you've had a Toyota for 5 years, which is getting old and requiring high maintenance, and you want to buy a new car, will you just have to buy a new Toyota? No! You may choose any car you want. Maybe you won't be able to use the radio you bought for the old car on the new brand, and you'll have to relearn how to turn the A/C on on the new brand, but these are far from showstoppers.

Microsoft has done everything to lock in customers to their products. They've used their embrace, extend, extinguish tactics to drive competitors off the market. And then they've bastardized standards and created proprietary formats to raise the cost of the change. So, the next time you buy a computer, if you use products other than Microsoft's, you'll have problems to open your old documents.

"Hi, our product is super successful and makes tons of money. So obviously the right thing to do now is to spend lots of resources making our competitors's product better!" Crazy, just crazy.

Following standards is in no way using resources to improve the competitor's product! And nobody is saying that Microsoft should improve on Open Office or any other product. The only point in following standards is that, if you want to choose a different product, you'll still be able to access all your documents.

Standards are good because they force products to improve. With standards, customers can choose another product if they don't like or don't want to pay for the newer version of your product. This forces companies to improve their own products, to lower prices, and to compete fairly in a free market. With vendor lock-in, all those benefits are lost, and the only one who gains from it is the monopolist.

Situation as I read it.

[moreati]

I read up a bit on this last weekend. I got the following impression:

1. The time allowed for the BRM (1 week) was fixed by ISO rules for a fast track standard
2. Attendees generally felt it was better to get most suggested changes in as were. It was better to make the changes even if they had reservations, rather than leave the text of MS OOXML in it's original form.
3. All Participants were genuinely trying to improve the standard, regardless of their stance on ODF vs MS OOXML. Better to fix it as much as possible now, inc case it does become approved.

The failings of this BRM seem to stem from the following:

1. MS OOXML is a voluminous body of text. There are a approx 6000 pages
2. MS OOXML is controversial. There were over a 1000 comments, many participants were not happy in many ways
3. MS and ECMA inappropriately tried to push OOXML as a fast track standard, given it's size and the controversy
4. ISO were not setup for a standards process where the participants are so combative. I'm not so sure on this one, just a feeling I got.

Re:Situation as I read it.

[filbranden]

Attendees generally felt it was better to get most suggested changes in as were. It was better to make the changes even if they had reservations, rather than leave the text of MS OOXML in it's original form.

Wrong. See what Head of US Delegation Frank Farance said here:

"Eighty percent of the changes were not discussed," said Frank Farance, head of the U.S. delegation [...]
"Virtually every comment we processed did not survive unedited," he said.

The greek delegate Antonis Christofides also said here that Canada had a list of cases where the ECMA resolution made the text worse than the original.

Fallacies

[g2devi]

> And, it would give Microsoft
> developers, many of who are members of national bodies,
> an important forum where Microsoft has
> been shown to listen and respond to their concerns.
>
The conciliar tone of this response makes some fundamental errors:

1) The fallacy of lowering the bar: We could ensure that almost everyone has a medical degree by changing the medical degree exams to a potty training exam. Of course, if that were to happen, a medical degree wouldn't be worth the paper it was written on. Similarly, if a poorly documented, incomplete, sparsely reviewed (ODF's review took *years*), heavily manipulated standard proposal, is allowed to pass ISO, how credible would ISO standards be? If Patrick is sincere in wanting OOXML to pass as a proper standard, he'd propose that OOXML be sent back for a complete review.

2) The fallacy of appeasement to encourage reform: If Microsoft is unwilling to have OOXML go through at least as rigorous a review as ODF before standardization, then how on earth can Patrick expect that they'll hang around after standardization. One OOXML is standard, the pressure is off. If he *really* believes Microsoft is serious about standardizing OOXML, then disapproval would do nothing other than allow for OOXML to undergo a *real* review to iron out all the details.

3) The fallacy of "Let's just do this once...Never again, I promise": If you let Microsoft off the hook this time, how on earth can we turn them or any other major company down again?

4) The fallacy of assuming that OOXML is any good. Joel (a key former Microsoft developer) justified why OOXML is so complicated ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.htm l) and why no-one, even Microsoft is able to implement it from scratch (they use code from old versions of Windows). If OOXML is virtually impossible to implement, then what good is it?

5) The fallacy that OOXML solves any real need. There are virtually no OOXML documents out there (even if you include the various OOXML-like formats exported from MS-Office) so the "backwards compatibility" mandate. OOXML presents no other mandate other than getting the ISO stamp so Microsoft can get contracts that require ISO standards. If there's something legitimate missing in ODF, then it should be added to ODF, otherwise OOXML is pointless. And if "backwards compatibility" required, then DOC would make a *much* better thing to standardize for legacy data given that it's been frozen since Office 2000, it's been reverse engineered to death by OpenOffice and many other Office competitors, and most documents out there are (unfortunately) in the DOC format. Why isn't any effort spent on fixing a *real* need as opposed to a fake one?

Being "fair and balanced" is often the most popular position, but if a thief comes into your house and claims all your money, you'd be a fool or a wimp to settle on the "fair and balanced" approach of choose to splitting the difference. If ISO doesn't have the backbone to reject OOXML from fast track so it can be resubmitted for proper review at least as thorough as ODF, then ISO *will* be broken....which is just fine according to Microsoft since when you have no standards you can trust, defacto market standards win.

Re:This process was flawed from the begining

[filbranden]

You flaws 1 and 2 also applied to the ODF ISO standardization.

Not true. ODF standardization by ISO didn't use the fast-tracking process, it was done by the PAS (Publicly Available Specification), which allows the appropriate time for scrutiny of a standard, differently of a fast-tracking process, which is supposed to ratify a de facto standard, which OOXML isn't at all. If you want more details, read Fast Track versus PAS.

Also, from Wikipedia, you can see that the work on ODF started in December 2002 in OASIS, it was approved by OASIS as a standard in May 2005, was submitted as a PAS to ISO in November 2005 and "after a six-month review period, on May 3, 2006 OpenDocument unanimously passed its six-month DIS ballot in JTC1, with broad participation, after which the OpenDocument specification was approved for release as an ISO and IEC International Standard under the name ISO/IEC 26300:2006". If that's not enough scrutiny, I don't know what is.

(And it needed fixing...see the massive changes in ODF 1.2 and compare to 1.0)

Not true. The changes in newer versions of ODF are evolution of the standard. New features are being introduced. Version 1.1 introduced accessibility features. Version 1.2 introduces metadata capabilities, which allows the use of ODF in the semantic web.

So why is Microsoft being required to operate under different rules?

Actually, Microsoft is playing by their own rules, but not in the sense you imply. The rules for fast-tracking seem to have been written specially for OOXML.

People seem to want theirs to be flawless before allowing it to be an ISO standard--a requirement no one else has been subject to.

You're making a lot of false statements on ODF, I wish you could back them out. You base your whole line of thought on the assumption that OOXML is following the same process than ODF, which is completely false, as all the links I included here will show. Agreed, the links are from ODF backers, but it's clear that Microsoft wouldn't start making these comparisons, it only shows how they're abusing a process to have their way.

However, even if Microsoft would submit it as a PAS, after reviewing and finishing it in ECMA, and even if they didn't use dirty tricks to try to approve their standard, it should never be considered for standardization anyway! The thing about standards is that, unless everybody uses the same standard for the same purpose, they're irrelevant. They only solve problems if they're adopted. There already is a standard for office documents, it's ODF.

Instead of promoting their own, on the basis that it provides legacy compatibility (fallacy, otherwise there would be tables on how to convert binary documents), and that standards should compete (fallacy, products should compete, they should all use the same standard so that you can move from one product to the other and take all your documents with you, you would choose products based on features and would not be locked into any vendor), Microsoft should instead just adopt ODF.

The argument that ODF is insufficient for MS Office is a fallacy as well, because ODF supports extensions, and for versions 1.1 and 1.2 (or 1.3, there's still time!) Microsoft could indicate exactly what they think is needed in ODF to support conversion from legacy formats. Microsoft is part of OASIS, they were actually invited to cooperate on ODF when the process started, but they refused. ODF proponents would certainly be interest

Utterly insane

[seebs]

I was involved with the C committee during the work on C9X.

The process described here shows essentially no similarity to a real standardization process. We have established, conclusively, that OOXML is not ready to be called a standard; it needs serious revision and work. The only time a "fast-track" process makes sense is when a standard is widely implemented and in use as a de facto standard, and is known to be workable.

It does not make sense when the "standard" is known not to be workable, has been implemented at most once, and there are literally thousands of unresolved comments, questions, or concerns -- many of them, as reported previously, impossible to resolve without the addition of huge chunks of new text to the specification.

It took years to get the C standard, about a tenth the size of OOXML, to a state where we could in good conscience vote to adopt it as an actual standard.

This process is an insult to standardization, and that the Microsoft-paid folks are talking about it as though it were a success leaves me utterly stunned. I can't decide whether to ascribe such claims to malice, incompetence, or both.