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.'"

Comments

Re:Office...15?

[Jazz-Masta]

Office 14 is Office 2010.

So, Office 15 will be the version after 2010.

No it's not.

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

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?

Re:No it's not.

[dwiget001]

And, no, it's not the document format for representing all supported document types within the Office suite.

If it was, then it would have already been implemented *and supported* in Microsoft Office.

Microsoft just wanted to get OOXML an ISO stamp of approval, so it could say that it's products conformed to international standards when quotes for potential purchases required such a thing. Of course, in hind sight, it was all a lie, Microsoft never did support the ISO approved OOXML standard, and never intended to. And that's a realted but slightly different story.

Re:No it's not.

[cheesybagel]

You have to realize the biggest client for Microsoft is the government. Governments like standards compliance, even if the standards themselves do not mean a damn.

Re:No it's not.

[marcosdumay]

Ok, that old story... ODF does have ISO approval, and governemnts around the world were trying to require open office (lower case "o" here) suites by requiring ISO approval of their document format. Then, MS got into a delay and destroy tatic that consisted on making a lot of confusion about what does or does not have ISO approval, and on the sideline continuing their usual way of gaining governement bids (that is composed of bribes, lock-in and blackmail). Now, their task is done, but everything would start again if they just recognized that they'll never support OOXML, so they must keep the fuzz alive.

I 3 Alex Brown

[Chris Burke]

*Alex brown shakes his fist at MS* "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"

This is why I love Microsoft

[NaCh0]

All of my software bugs get fixed in the "next" version.

Re:This is why I love Microsoft

[l0perb0y]

And in open source projects all the bugs are already fixed in Subversion!

As the old saying goes.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I will gladly support your standards on Tuesday for the 'standards compliant' checkbox I need to continue my lucrative market dominance today...

Re:Office...15?

[Anonymous Coward]

Office for Mac can not either save or read ODT. No ODT plugins or converters available.

They promised to support OS2 too

[demigod]

And Microsoft promised to support OS/2 after it sold 2 million copies.

Never happened.

Another Battle Lost Because MS Has No Mojo

[salesgeek]

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.

Re:Another Battle Lost Because MS Has No Mojo

[jollyreaper]

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.

Nobody looks forward to using Microsoft products. They use them because they have to. Even if you think that all the hype around Apple products is just advertising brainwashing and the fans are just drooling zombies, here's a thought: Microsoft has even more money to spend on branding and they can't even manage to inspire lukewarm enthusiasm.

It's their own format......

[GreatDrok]

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.

Re:Office...15?

[marcosdumay]

Ok, then. They'll support it on the next version, just what they promissed by 2007.

The real story.

[pavon]

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.

For thos who are confused

[gad_zuki!]

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:

On 31st March 2010, Dr Alex Brown, who had been the Convener of the February 2008 Ballot Resolution Meeting, posted an entry on his personal blog[111] in which he complained of Microsoft's lack of progress in adapting current and future versions of Microsoft Office to produce files in the Strict (as opposed to the Transitional) ISO 29500 format:
" On this count Microsoft seems set for failure. In its pre-release form Office(TM) 2010 supports not the approved Strict variant of OOXML, but the very format the global community rejected in September 2007, and subsequently marked as not for use in new documents - the Transitional variant. Microsoft are behaving as if the JTC 1 standardisation process never happened...

Great news!

[Bearhouse]

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.

Battle was lost when they named it...

[dpbsmith]

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.

Re:Office...15?

[poetmatt]

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.

Re:I Don't Care

[Bryan3000000]

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.