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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 Its yet unpublished format ISO OOXML will not be supported before the release of the next Office generation.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.
My blog
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.
... 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?
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.
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Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
Wouldn't you think they'd want all their products supporting that standard before embarking on such an ambitious process?
Yes, that would have been smart, but Microsoft is a company with thousands of people who don't always agree.
It really reinforces an idea I've had for a while not that there's currently a large culture war going on at Microsoft. The battle is between the old thinking "lock em in and control it!" vs "we need to adapt to standards or become extinct".
AccountKiller
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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
a). A Reference implementation conforming 100% to ODF 1.1 . Open source, freely reusable.
b). Requirement for any conforming implementation which wishes to be known as ISO ODF to be certified to pass a standard test suite.
c). Any "extensions" introduced after MS does the "embrace" to be by some standard mechanism which enables other implementations to quickly adapt to it.
Since (c) is practically a given where MS is concerned I'm most worried about that one.
Andy
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).
You know, in abstract, I don't think this is all bad. If you ask me, companies like Microsoft and Apple (and anyone else making office suites) should be involved in making ODF v2. If it's really going to be the common, standard interchange format for office suites, everyone should have input.
Because I could see someone writing an office suite and saying, "Standards are good and all, but ODF doesn't do what we need it to do. It's too bulky, but doesn't allow us to support [feature X], doesn't support [feature Y] in a way that allows us to get good performance, and [feature Z] makes it too difficult for us to develop a good converter." (or whatever. I don't know what valid complaints someone might have about ODF) And ideally, all those people would have a place at the table to talk about making ODF better, so that no one has any reason not to support ODF.
Of course, the only real problem here is that we don't trust Microsoft to work well within the system in order to develop improvements that will remain free. I still hold out some hope that one of these days, Microsoft will get the idea that they shouldn't be sabotaging technological progress by keeping a strangle-hold on computing, but I share your distrust.
i.e. what we need is an Acid Test for ODF.
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?