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The Anti-ODF Whisper Campaign
eldavojohn writes "Groklaw is examining the possibility of an anti-ODF whisper campaign and the effects it has had on the ODF and OOXML Wikipedia articles. In the ODF article, Alex Brown bends the truth to make it seem like no one is supporting ODF, and that it is a flawed and incomplete standard. From the conclusion, 'So what is one to do? You obviously can't trust Wikipedia whatsoever in this area. This is unfortunate, since I am a big fan of Wikipedia. But since the day when Microsoft decided they needed to pay people to "improve" the ODF and OOXML articles, they have been a cesspool of FUD, spin and outright lies, seemingly manufactured for Microsoft's re-use in their whisper campaign. My advice would be to seek out official information on the standards, from the relevant organizations, like OASIS, the chairs of the relevant committees, etc. Ask the questions in public places and seek a public response. That is the ultimate weakness of FUD and lies. They cannot stand the light of public exposure. Sunlight is the best antiseptic.'"
It really shows how desperate a company is when they have to get the FUD written so they can refer to it as tho it were fact. Its just like "get the facts" which was show up as paid for information. How many times have we seen information come from Microsoft that states the truth but they leave out the relevant parts that make it the complete opposite of what they say. Rob Weir gives an example of Microsoft have 15 proposals for ODF 1.2 and Microsoft says none of them made it into ODF 1.2. All was true but they failed to say they withdrew so it wouldn't hold 1.2 up. So what they say may be true but one still can't believe what they. I can't anyway and I think more and more people worldwide are starting to see thru them.
Kind of sad how few Word processors there are these days.
Even on your list at least four of them are based on the same code and two of them are Office.
I don't know that it's necessarily a bad thing. Word processors have a pretty big network effect, especially in business. So long as the same document format is rendered differently on different word processors (no matter how small that difference), there will be an incentive to standardize on a handful.
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
If people tell each other that Microsoft sucks, and that Microsoft products are buggy and easily penetrated, would you say there is a 'whisper campaign' against Microsoft?
If people say that republicans are dishonest assholes, is that a 'whisper campaign' against republicans?
In short, how do you define 'whisper campaign'? Is it simply "when people we don't like speak negatively about something we like without being purely factual"?
What defines accurate?
I love how ambiguous this all is. It really comes down to is "Bob doesn't think this but Rob does" How does the average person on the street know when accurate has been reached?
One could say that the accuracy of the article will suffer even more based on the bias of the site this article was submitted to.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I agree, at this point the only thing to really innovate is making them smaller and more efficient. Dumping unnecessary functions into some sort of addon/extension system and slimming them down. As you note there isn't really a whole lot that the average word processor can't do and which people need.
Personally, while I have an old copy of MS Office XP, I haven't used it in years, except to export the files to an interoperable file format, and that wasn't much work, since I had so few of them.
I stated exactly what application versions I used in the tests. How is that "rigging" ? Of course I'll use the latest code available to me. That's a no-brainer.
Actually there is a lot, a whole lot.
Anyone who wants good quality page layouts has to wrestle these programs to the ground and force them to do it. Try integrating drawings in your text with Word or OO, it is awful. Word 2003 plants a giant drawing canvas in the middle of the page. Laying out text with graphs and getting anything sensible looking is worse. Ask a typeface geek about typefaces. Ask Edward Tufte if default page layouts are anything approaching decent.
I know the fallback response is that most people don't care, or don't need proper page layout features, but that is just a chicken and egg argument. People have made due so long they no longer recognize the absurdities. Galileo published books in the 1600s that integrated text and pictures better than most modern word processing programs can.
They don't need to become full blown Pagenmaker-esque graphics hybrids, but there is whole lot of room to improve.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
[citation needed]
-knewter
Don't hold your breath, the next time you go "wow" at a word processor you will probably be seeing the same old Word but on a touchscreen PC, in which case you're not really impressed in Word.
Why is it remarkable to you that a list of criticisms about the objective technical merits of a proposed standard does not include items about the political actions of parties to the standardization process?
Did ReiserFS gain or lose functionality for the sole reason that the author committed a crime? Did any of Alan Turing's theories gain or lose logical validity due to his sexual orientation becoming revealed? Did the arguments of the civil rights movement become wrong when they engaged in some quid pro quo actions to gain exposure?
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
It's obviously in Microsoft's best interest to highlight these issues with ODF, even though the same sentiment, "flawed and imcomplete", could also be applied to any of their own file formats...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The political problems did sidetrack actual technical problems which should have prevented the use of the fast-track process. If they had done right and actually spent some time fixing the technical problems in the draft standard, the final standard would have been a lot easier to implement in a compatible manner.
I thought the point was about the current state. Saying it will get better in the future isn't really relevant now.
I'm Rocco. I'm the +5 Funny man.
Everyone should just use TeX.
With LyX.
Seriously.
If it's good enough for Knuth, it's good enough for me.
Always back up, never back down. ---- Think you're cool 'cos your uid is prime? Take mine, modulo the one digit integers
Exactly. Show me a version of MS Office that does this right, whether beta or released, and I'll gladly update the table. I want interoperability far more than I want to complain about Microsoft Office.
As far as I can tell, the problem here is that the article is not bending the truth to match the usual reality-distorted pro-ODF bias expected by slashdot users and other FSF goons.
Let's start with this statement:
In the ODF article, Alex Brown bends the truth to make it seem like no one is supporting ODF, and that it is a flawed and incomplete standard.
It seems to be like he doesn't fail to bend the truth. It's a flawed and incomplete standard, in some ways it is vague, in others it's simply inconsistent.
Let's take tracked changes for instance, a feature in ODF 1.1 which pretends to be complete. The reality is that the standard is so vague and broken that the most popular implementation, Google Docs, ignores the standard entirely, implementing changes in their proprietary system. Microsoft simply solves the problem by disabling the functionality in order to avoid future breaking.
http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2009/05/13/tracked-changes.aspx
Let's not talk about ODF 1.2 either, since its only a working draft.
So Microsoft was somehow able to do a perfect by the letter implementation of the ODF 1.1 (the current standard) spec, and yet they haven't got full interoperability with OpenOffice? It sounds an awful lot like Sun took a very liberal interpretation of their vague standard and are now standing by their wonky mess of source code (Ooo) as the standard-- similar to Solaris and POSIX. Thats unacceptable, ODF passed the standards bodies, not OpenOffice.org.
The fact that Microsoft could create one of the only correct implementations of the ODF standard and still break interoperability suggests that the ubiquity of this standard is largely overstated:
http://adjb.net/post/Notes-on-Document-Conformance-and-Portability-4.aspx
There are arguments to be made on the subject of digging through Sun's source code to make this vague standard work, but then ODF violates the FSF's very quote bashing MS-OOXML:
"For any standard it is essential that it is implementable by any third party without necessity of cooperation by another company"
Source: http://fsfe.org/documents/msooxml-questions
So, you can't make interoperable ODF without referencing OpenOffice because it is vague and incomplete... but it's not a complete standard unless you don't have to rely on the assistance of a certain corporation (Sun) to implement it properly?
It sounds to me like ODF is locking functionality to Sun's software the same way DOC locks functionality to Microsoft Office. MS-OOXML may be wordy, but it turns out that you need a lot of words to make a complete office standard. ODF is a paper tiger, end of story. The problem slashdot points out here is simply a lack of reality-distorting pro-ODF bias... this "whisper campaign" might be the seeping shadow of "reality" in the reality of writing a complete and interoperable standard escapes Sun--leaving them with something terse but heavily marketed with a vicious and aggressive activist campaign by angel advertisers who fancy themselves freedom fighters.
Versus Rob Weir being a known paid anti-ooxml shill from IBM?
Yes, that way people who write articles on, let's say, Abortion, can be tracked down by radical pro-life "enforcers" and harassed or worse.
There's a reason why anonymous editing is allowed.
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