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Microsoft Spokesman Says ODF "Clearly Won" Standard War
Elektroschock writes "At a Red Hat retrospective panel on the ODF vs. OOXML struggle panel, a Microsoft representative, Stuart McKee, admitted that ODF had 'clearly won.' The Redmond company is going to add native support of ODF 1.1 with its Office 2007 service pack 2. Its yet unpublished format ISO OOXML will not be supported before the release of the next Office generation. Whether or not OOXML ever gets published is an open question after four national bodies appealed the ISO decision."
Sadly, no, this is not the end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft. I guarantee that ODF will not be the default format and that Microsoft's implementation of ODF will clearly be some variation of 'embrace, extend, extinguish,' just like everything else they do.
Still, it feels good to hear a Microsoft employee admit that OOXML lost.
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So after all of the time and money and arm twisting MS engaged in because they had to have THE open standard, they're just going to say 'Oh well, ODF was better anyway'?
Truth: If it's not one thing, it's another
Now we shall all have to wait and see if MS plays nice with ODF because they are scared of the EU, or if they try to extend and break the standard to prevent true interoperability, as they have done with HTML, CSS, etc. since being late to the Web standards game.
Porcine aviatrixes were spotted across the country.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
That, I believe, is the smell of heads exploding!
Is this a new embrace and extend policy? Will it cleverly be name capitulation? To say that ODF clearly won implies that there was a competition. Can anyone find quotes where MS denied such a thing?
Is this the moment that Linux fanbois have been waiting for? I don't know, but I DO know that whether ODF is perfect or not, it is open, and that make so much more sense that it shouldn't even be an argument. WOW
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... wait for the next phase!
The question is whether Microsoft is going to really support ODF or just give lip-service token support. For example, how fast are bugs in the ODF support going to be fixed? Remember how Micorsoft "supported" Java with their non-compliant, buggy implementation?
Its yet unpublished format ISO OOXML will not be supported before the release of the next Office generation.
Microsoft doesn't even support the format they've been bribing through the certification process? Wouldn't you think they'd want all their products supporting that standard before embarking on such an ambitious process? Talk about Ready, Fire, Aim.
After a while one comes to expect that MS is more chainsaw than timber but this effort seems even less organized than usual.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Hello, it's a trap people, not a sudden outbreak of commonsense. M$ is doing this to embrace, then to extend by adding all sorts of proprietary shit, and finally extinguishing it by eliminating that and going to their proprietary office closed XML format. Once done, ODF will be anchient history and M$ will reign once again.
--
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
tagged with "woot".
nuff said.
Interesting that anyone should choose to phrase it that way, since it was already an open question (ISO had missed the deadline, by a lot, with no explanation, and no announcement as to when the standard could be expected) before the appeal, probably because it was and is such a massive mess that they were overwhelmed by the task.
Hahahahaha!
Oh, it's June? Crap, and now fire is falling from the sky. I guess this is the apocalypse.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
OK, this is the first shoe to drop. (Sorry British Columbia, no offense)
The is the "embrace" part. Once they start using the format, just you watch, like Java, HTML, CSS, SQL, C++, C, etc. they will add features that break compatibility, because of, wait for it, "customer demand." As we all know "customer demand" will be asking a room full of carefully collected idiots a set of loaded questions.
I have worked closely, in the past, with Microsoft and they view any real standard as a threat. They wield their monopoly power and "defaco" status like a sledge hammer. They've done it in the past, and they'll do it with ODF.
The computing community has to monitor the situation and fight incompatibility as the run of the mill consumer has absolutely no idea what is going on.
And in fact asked the question "Is this just Microsoft doing the first stage of embrace, extend, extinguish?" I was not happy with his response. He floated the idea of merging the two standards, which really concerns me, and also seemed to acknowledge that there was going to be some extension.
From the impression I got, we got thrown a bone, and ODF and OOXML are going to be merged in the next couple of years, and MS will have de facto control because OOXML allows for proprietary extensions.
MS is not going to take this lying down.
I did shake Stuart's hand afterwards, however. He deserves props for showing up and taking a little abuse, although I was not near as hard on him as I would have liked to be, just because other people also deserved a chance to ask questions.
One thing that struck me is that one of the Singapore standards guys was there, and he was NOT happy. He was pretty pissed off that they could not provide even one reference implementation.
But... like I said. Props for showing up, MS. Now you just have many years of monopolistic behavior to live down, and I'll never trust anything you say again.
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It has to be! Microsoft and common sense? Give me a break!
This is Microsoft Innovation at it's finest. Don't like existing formats, propose and 'buy' a new one.
IT standards are not all that stringently controlled either, no wonder Microsoft doesn't even want to try the IEEE, they would need real honest to goodness engineers, and not 'Microsoft Engineers'.
In the end, its another piece of software, other fine programmers and developers will find a way around.
It certainly is a mystery why Microsoft would spend all the money and accept all the bad publicity with their effort to bribe everyone in the world to mark MSWordXML as a standard, and then just drop it right after they "won". With one press release they have killed their format dead, and thus they have cancelled every bit of the bribes, FUD, and the expense of a chunk of their remaining karma, so that they have lost everything.
Why the hell do all that work to end up in exactly same position they would be if they had just accepted ODF?
I don't think it's possible this is some nefarious complex scheme by Microsoft. It seems to indicate that this giant organization is losing control of itself. Somehow the FUD & bribery machine was started up, and probably immediately some engineers there started saying "whoa! whoa! It's not necessary!" and they were unable to stop the machine, which has it's own enormous momentum, until millions are spent and the company loses a good chunk of it's remaining karma.
You obviously used OOXML to post your comment.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
We are in a very important phase. We (someone) needs to create an ODF compatibility test utility, like an HTML validator, that will test the compliance of an ODF file.
It can be used to catch Microsoft's crap. Remember, a word processing document is unlike HTML. HTML is likely to be seen by a multitude of people where as a document is probably only going to be seen by a specifically targeted group. Microsoft will be able to add incompatibility and almost no one will be able to notice until they wish to open THEIR document with a non-microsoft word processor or spread sheet. At that point it will be too late.
We also have to make sure that Microsoft's products render ODF compliant documents correctly when they are created by non microsoft applications.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
when they really are out to get you.
This is the company whose CEO said they were going to kill google.
The company that has tried to get GPL invalidated in the US as "un-american". Paid for shills left right and centre to attack FOSS.
They ARE out to get us.
That isn't paranoia.
Of course, they will support ODF. It's too big a thing to ignore.
Also of course, their implementation will have a few... quirks. You know, implementation bugs that happen symmetrical on both import and export, so they never show up to you, as long as you stay within the MS world. Meanwhile, everything someone with a different ODF implementation sends you will show up buggy, and everything you send them will not quite properly work.
Details, of course. Like footnotes misaligned, or small formation differences. Just enough that nobody calls it bugs, just "quirks", but enough to make sure nobody within a corporation, for example, uses something different.
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So Microsoft seems to have a new tactic of admitting defeat. First the fall-through on the Yahoo deal. Now the battle for ISO OOXML. Vista may be next. Does Microsoft have something up its sleeve? All this open defeat is not normal Microsoft behavior. In fact China's correction of the fake anti-trust report among other reports makes it seem like the clown is getting pulled off stage. Where's Microsoft's plan for the future? Are they putting all their money on "Windows 7"?
Well it's more the opposite. And who can blame me for not trusting them. It's still Microsoft.
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
The only thing that makes the two companies actions even more perverted is that the number of Microsoft and Novell advocates/astroturfers who were "wacking off" while watching it unfold.
Just possibly, Microsoft is sincere about supporting ODF.
Microsoft cannot possibly be ignoring Apple, Google, the EU, the emergence in the last year of mainstream desktop linux and the $400 laptop, the OLPC, the mixed press that accompanied Vista and Office 2007, the bad press received by Windows mobile and the Zune, etc. It is a company that will go through major changes in the next few years. Ballmer is the boss, but probably not for long. Ray Ozzie is CTO and he and a host of managers below him will ultimately be rewarded for figuring out how to succeed in this new world where Microsoft has lost a lot of its market dominance and even more of its mindshare.
If I were at Microsoft I'd be figuring that hardcore corporate MS shops are going to stay MS shops for the forseeable future whether I support ODF or not (they've probably built their business around Exchange server). The fringe --- governments, small business, K-12 schools, universities --- are gone in the next two years unless I start to interoperate in a serious way. So I would support ODF, and I would do it sincerely, and I would figure that by doing so I'd be holding on to some of my customers in the short run. In the long run, well, everything is up for grabs. I'd be better be doing some heavy R&D in the hopes of competing with Apple, Google, and the linux community.
I don't remember there being a standards war. There was not two parties competing. It was an established standard (ODF) and MS attempting to corrupt it, dilute it, bribe their way in with their own product. It is amusing that "ODF won" when there wasn't even a competition.
I'm as jaded about MS as the next person, and always watch carefully where their interests lie before trying to second guess them.
This time, I think they may be serious about full ODF support. Without the 'extend' section.
The reason I think this is that they're no longer pitching to a set of businesses that can do what the hell they feel like, and ignore the rest of the world.
They're now having to play ball with governments. And many governments have been bitten by the 'changing of the format' game in word, where they can't read older documents anymore, thus the rising insistence on being able to reliably and moreover accurately save in a known, documented open way that anyone in 50 years time will be able to build a reader for from the well documented specification if there isn't one available.
If they're to sell to government (a lot of money is at stake here; they need to at least be in the market. If a government can't buy word, quite a few businesses would invest in alternate word processor software to maintain compliance with government and ensure they can pass documents around reliably), they have to abide by the full letter of the spec, and not break it. Governments can be quite uppity when you take liberties with their internal workings.
That doesn't mean that ODF will supplant OOXML in all places though, as I daresay there are things that can be saved in that format that ODF doesn't support. They're just few and far between. But you can guarantee the suits in the businesses will just hear the "Our format does more", and "You can easily make prettier presentations with our software", and the MS suite will still be sold.
They'll still have lock in to a level with business (who are far more prone to using the 'shiny' parts of software that are just toys, but require the 'extended format' of OOXML), plus the momentum they have there isn't going to go away anytime soon (IT departments not wanting to support more than one vendor of software for cost reasons).
For purely monetary reasons, I can see the benefit in them toeing the line on a standard. Which is why I think they'll do it and leave it alone (and then use the standard smoke and mirrors to try and get everyone, apart from Governments who insist on it, to completely ignore it).
I use both OOO and Office 2007, and honestly, getting full ODF compliance in Word would only make me more likely to use it more often (I currently only use it when I want to make some pretty things very quickly; all the real work is done in OOO).
This is definitely a good thing and it all is happening the right way. We must understand that the choices of the user/consumer should drive file formats, software quality, etc... Commercial software can only be as closed as the consumer allows, and only as crappy as the consumer will allow.
Early in words life-cycle it was for the most the only game in town therefor the consumer would bear with and work within M$ set of rules. A$ controls the music we listen to by way of being the only real place to get the music we want to listen to in town. Whats best now will probably not be best in 10 years. These bubbles form and pop.
Now that tech hardware is more decentralized "the market" is pushing the entire industry towards open formats and data sharing across system types and OS's. We want our applications to just work , we want them to work together, and to work on the platforms we chose to use. This is happening in multiple industries.
It is time,driven by consumer demand, for the Word bubble to pop or deflate. Whose to say that they wont be the premiere ODF document generation tool on the market. They just wont enjoy the monopolistic control they have had over the industry anymore.
My point is that these large companies will and should fight tooth and nail to maintain their supremacy. This insures that the successor is worthy. The choice must be made by the consumer. In this case we have chosen ODF.
Well I for one am glad the ODF won...lets just hope Microsoft would implement it properly.
- Create open standard that is copyrighted and trademarked
- Create free test suite for open standard
- Predicate free-gratis license to distribute on passing test suite
- Profit! and compatibility all around
For what it's worth, I think this should be used with html, ecmascript, and css. You should only be ALLOWED to implement those standards if you can agree to follow those standards. The Open Group does with UNIX and the Single Unix Specification, but ofcourse, they charge exorbitant fees.The validity of the output of OOo has been checked against ODF, resulting in a "no-oh!". The same with MSO 2007 and OOXML. (source: Linux Magazin; they should know their field, I recon). Rigorous standardizing doesn't seem to have the desired effect - rough consensus and interoperability hacks seem to work better.
This is the most logical move MS could have taken. They know that
1. They can't implement OOXML anyway, anytime soon.
2. Get MS Office "employable", at least formally, by those organizations that demand open formats for their documents.
3. The ISO ratification process was a bit too "noisy", so they better pacify the more gullible techies and the PHBs that followed the story (at least in a cursory way).
4. There really isn't a better tactic to destroy an open format, than embrace and extend. Remember HTML?
This was a genius move on MS's part. I don't know how the open community will parry it.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Who needs ODF when I've got FPS...FIRST POST SUCKAS! YAY :) :) :) Hooray, Hip Hip, Hooray!
I can't wait for the days that I can use ANY word process or spreadsheet program I want and be able to mail the contents to anyone (mac/pc/linux/whatever) and not have a hiccup.
Yeah, yeah yeah, they won. But still we won't accept it. And we have enough shills in the media and uninformed users, and bought and paid for CIOs we will continue the fight till we win by default.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Clearly the summary of this article is wrong. After all, if a employee of Microsoft was caught inferring that their own product was somehow inferior to open source, said employee would be looking for a new job.
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its kinda funny that microsoft supports odf before i can find a decent php class to output odf spreadsheets
I believe this would be the first time I've seen a flood of top-level posts all saying the same thing (ZOMG IT'S TEH EMBRACE,EXTEND,EXTINGUISHZORZ!!!1), all of them marked +3,4,5 Interesting/Insightful, instead of -1 Redundant. But then again maybe I just haven't paid attention to all the MS stories.
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Just like Bush clearly won the election of 2004
If OOXML has lost now the document war, it should be forget and only support the ODF, and so that all sides develope it together and implent when standard updates. So all applications would support only that one format and applications would fight about GUI and options what they offer. Or with price.
I guess you mean change tracking... it's fun when some government types fall for it, but for the sender it's a disadvantage or even a security risk.
Also, I think it is not very user-friendly if you want to track multiple revisions. The display gets really cluttered tying to display three or four different versions. Overall, I think it is a poor substitute for a version control system.
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I dont see how you can make such a claim... OOo is nothing worse than a clone of a pre-Office2007 clone. It does not stink litterally, it is not anything uglier than Word 2003, it is as easy to use as Word 2003 (except they have done a bit of cleaning, more properly seperated content, design and non-document settings, but that is mostly technical stuff, nothing an average user will notice). No, it does not offer anything in the way of improvement or new & useful features except this one: it is free. Could you specify what you want out of OpenOffice.org that it doesnt have?
I'd say that iWork isn't a fantastic candidate due more to the fact that it neither supports ODF nor (as far as I know) has any plans to. iWork's formats may bear a superficial resemblance to ODF in that they're based on XML, but they are nevertheless completely proprietary.
Completely proprietary doesn't mean the same thing as somewhat open unless it's also patented.
However, Apple appears to be lying down with the beast, not the 'freetards', in their push for the enterprise. They appear to be 'embracing' at this point, though I think they've already got 'extend' done, so they'll be moving for 'extinguish' post haste.
At least, that's their plan... likely they'll push out some WinCE and RIM while Android comes in and takes over on the carriers people care about.
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> M$... paytard
O hai twitter
In related news, Broyhill has been given the contract to replace ALL of the chairs at Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
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> Correction: "Beware of Geeks bearing .gifs"
I thought we burned all the GIFs years ago?
But I admit that "Beware of Geeks bearing .pngs" doesn't have quite the same ring.
I know many people are still looking at this and are skeptical of Microsoft. However this is a great victory for Open Source. Especially good is to hear that MS will be providing native support for odf in their products. While I was teaching I saw many professors grumble and complain when their students handed in their papers in ODF format. They failed to understand what it was, and what Open Office was. I even heard of one professor wanting to "take action" against a student, because he had clearly gotten a stolen copy of MS Office. It took a while to explain that OpenOffice was NOT stolen MS Office, and that students often use it because it is free, and they do not understand paying hundreds of dollars for a product they can get for free. I also spent many hours teaching students how to save OpenOffice documents in .doc format. It was much easier than teaching the teachers about OpenOffice. Now, hopefully, the battle is over in the classroom, and the teachers will be able to read their student's papers!
It always got me that teachers would complain about students resorting to OpenOffice, when the students had to pay for MSOffice, while the professor's got it free.
Open Source: Eroding the Digital Divide