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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 Its yet unpublished format ISO OOXML will not be supported before the release of the next Office generation.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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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.
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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?
Well, yes. But that's just what they say in public. In private they're probably saying, "oh shit, we were way too obvious and public about our criminal behavior and the EU looks ready to stomp on us hard for this one. Maybe if we pretend to roll over and pretend to support ODF for a while, the EU will not make this a priority and use the courts to force us to play nice, with real consequences and oversight. At least if we look like we're willing to be open, we can subtly break compatibility with others and try to extend it with proprietary DRM or something. Really anything that stops us from being declared to have monopoly influence in the office suite market and doesn't make us compete purely on our software's merits is workable."
Given the lengths they went to, first to fight the very notion of an open standard format, and then to push OOXML, it seems hard to believe that this is over.
I'm as happy as anyone else if it is, but it's very unlike MS. To my knowledge, this has happened only once before, with HTML, and we're still paying for the fallout of that one.
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Two phrases come to mind:
"The cake is a lie."
"Beware of Greeks bearing gifts."
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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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.
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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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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).
- 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.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?