Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Promises To Fully Support OOXML ... Later
Raul654 writes "OOXML is the Word document format that Microsoft rammed through the ISO last year. Last week, we discussed a blog post by Alex Brown, who was instrumental in getting OOXML approved by the ISO. Brown criticized Microsoft for reneging on its promise to support OOXML in the upcoming release of Office 2010, and for its lackadaisical approach to fixing the many bugs which still remain in the specification. Now, Doug Mahugh has responded to Brown's post, promising that Microsoft will support OOXML 'no later than the initial release of Office 15.'"
Office 14 is Office 2010.
So, Office 15 will be the version after 2010.
Word 2007 can save in ODT though. Hah. Even Microsoft cannot make file import/export filters for their own OOXML format.
2003 is Office 11. 2007 is 12, 2010 is 14. So 15 is the next release after this one... Here's to waiting 3+ years for support... Maybe...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
Skipped due to superstition... Or at least that's what WikiPedia claims: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office#Microsoft_Windows_versions
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
OOXML is the word document format that Microsoft
No it's not. It's the document format for representing all supported document types within the Office suite.
Yeah, OK, we all know what he's talking about. But still... is it really that hard to get the basics right in a summary?
*Alex brown shakes his fist at MS* "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"
The enemies of Democracy are
Apparently it's the release after the next one, tentatively planned for 2013.
How they get to 15: They used version numbers through 4.x. Then somehow 5.x and 6.x were skipped (?) in the switch to year branding, and Office 95 was internally Office 7.0. Then it went sequentially for a bit: Office 97 was 8.0, Office 2000 was 9.0, Office XP was 10.0, Office 2003 was 11.0, and the current Office 2007 is 12.0.
Now they plan to skip 13 due to its negative superstition, and make Office 2010 be 14.0. Then the release after that, around 2013, will go back to non-year version numbers, and be Office 15.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
All of my software bugs get fixed in the "next" version.
I will gladly support your standards on Tuesday for the 'standards compliant' checkbox I need to continue my lucrative market dominance today...
Office for Mac can not either save or read ODT. No ODT plugins or converters available.
And Microsoft promised to support OS/2 after it sold 2 million copies.
Never happened.
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
Major Major
Ah, the version number thing (as pointed out by other posters in reply to my OP.) Thanks for the clarification!
Living With a Nerd
Wow. I can't believe that MS wasted three years and $millions on this. MS really needs to take a look at what is going on and do something about it:
* MS Tablet PCs fail
* Windows Mobile fails
* MS ISO Standard file format fails
* Windows Live fails
* Zune fails
The bodies are getting stacked deep, there MS. Time to get back to what made you great and become hacker friendly again... and not in the sense that your OS and software have lots of security holes.
-- $G
Maybe.
I'm sure that's the rational answer.
That's also what THEY WANT YOU TO THINK!
He really means Office '15, which comes out some time in 2017.
But if you assume he means the next major release, and that assumption pacifies you, all the better.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
So, when they release the next version without OOXML support they will retroactvely renumber so that the next version is still only Office 14 and hope that by the time they get to the 14th release of Office everyone will have forgotten this promise (or that the push for open standards will have run out of steam).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
They're responsible for this abortion of a standard and yet even they can't implement the thing. So much for eating your own dog food. They should be *MADE* to use it or the ISO should simply kill the standard since clearly it can't work.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Ok, then. They'll support it on the next version, just what they promissed by 2007.
Rethinking email
Office 13 existed as a skunkworks project within MS. It fully supported the ODF 1.1 standard, and was crossplatform to Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and BeOS (which MS also had plans to revive). It had clean, standards compliant HTML output. Even more surprisingly, it was decided that the project would be released as open source. Everything was going great until orders from the top led them to try and include Clippy. During the initial commit of the Office 2007 Clippy source there was a large bitsplosion leaving the GIT repository in waste. Forensic analysis concluded that the disaster was the result of the collision of evil bits and non-evil bits, which annihilated one another on contact, releasing huge reserves of pure information, scrambling anything in proximity. Furthermore, due to quantum entanglement, all backup copies of the promising office suite also disappeared, along with any instances of Clippy in Office 2007.
After this incident, MS abandoned any attempts at supporting open source and open standards projects. Ms Gates still bitches about the loss of Clippy in Office 2010.
as to how MS doesnt support their own file format, it because they're using a transitional version instead of the proper "strict" version. Wiki:
Doug Mahugh has responded to Brown's post, promising that Microsoft will support OOXML 'no later than the initial release of Office 15.'
When Microsoft follows through with a promise like this, I can't help but lol. How can one of the most rich and powerful software companies in the world not have the resources to do something like this HERE and NOW?
I smell fish - and it's not coming from Ballmer's underwear, for once.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
in the first paragraph of Mahugh's blog entry ? That one sentence seems to describe it all...
>>That’s why we’ve been looking into the issues and options for Strict support for quite some time.
So, the Frankenstein monster is disowned by its creator. Excellent.
Encourage your clients, friends and families to use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
Fully supported by all the major office suites, including of course Oo.
Nobody but boring technogeeks are going to understand the importance of the distinction between "strict OOXML" and "transitional OOXML." It's all very well for Alex Brown to say transitional OOXML was "not the format 'approved by ISO/IEC', it is the format that was rejected," but it sure doesn't _sound_ that way.
It wouldn't even take much dishonesty for a salesperson to say "supports OOXML," and the top-level managers who make the purchasing decisions will nod and smile. What are the chances they will know the importance of asking the question "is that transitional OOXML or strict OOXML?" And any top-level manager, approached by some intense young technogeek, is going to wonder if it's really all that important, and whether transitional OOXML isn't really good enough.
Within Microsoft, how many high-level managers are going to think it is urgently important for Office to support "strict OOXML" rather than "transitional OOXML?"
The battle was probably lost when they allowed those names to be used. Now nobody can ever mention the matter to any lay outsider without prefixing it with a couple of minutes of exposition.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Yes, but even if they do office 15 next, we're still looking at an easy 3+ years. The stuff from now won't even be relevant by then, enabling things to still be undocumented and not compatible.
Okay, you got your facts wrong. They pushed OOXML through a standards body to make it a new open standard, ostensibly to address the clamoring for interoperability. So really, it's not that they fail to support their own format, it's that they fail to support the format that they tried to set up as a new standard of interoperability.
In other words, the point is that this kind of proves that Microsoft rammed the OOXML standard through not to help achieve interoperability, but to prevent governments and companies from switching to other standards which truly do provide openness and a greater level of interoperability. It's evidence of further anticompetitive conduct by a company with a functional monopoly.
Yeah, it's correct. It's not a typo. It's MS's internal code for a future release called "When pigs fly".
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville