Microsoft's Free, Online Version of Office To Premiere This Week

walterbyrd writes "Microsoft will offer an online version of Office 2010 for free. I have to wonder, will this remain free indefinitely? Or is Microsoft just trying to firmly establish its OOXML standard, then go back to business as usual?" Probably a harder sell after Google's acquisition of DocVerse.

Comments

Is it safe?

[CasualFriday]

Hopefully this won't be bundled with a trojan like MechWarrior 4. THANKS UNCLE BILL.

Re:Is it safe?

[WrongSizeGlass]

Naw ... this one is like crack. Getting you hooked is "free" but once your documents are in its clutches, um, I mean file format, then your ass belongs to them.

Re:Is it safe?

[CrazyJim1]

I downloaded MW4, where is the trojan found so I can remove it?

Re:Is it safe?

[QuantumLeaper]

I am impressed you got it downloaded, I think he means the downloader program was the trojan, since it didn't work correctly and messed up you computer if you tried using it.

I think it will be hard for MS to start charging for the free version consider there not much to the free version anyway.

Re:Is it safe?

[grcumb]

I don't really understand this FUD. Even if Microsoft does have a slightly different flavor of OXML it's not like it's impossible to convert them to something more neutral even if Microsoft took a play from Steve Job's playbook and completely went to the dark side.

Man, you must be really, really new here.

This is exactly the problem (and the same facile response) we've been coping with since the mid-90s, and I can tell you from experience that things are never as simple as you describe.

Let's take one client I'm working with right now. They're a national institution, responsible for archiving court documents in perpetuity. That means, effectively, forever. Just about everything right now is being sent to them in PDF or DOC format. What do you think the odds are of being able to access these documents in 25 years' time?

If, however, these documents were stored in plain text markup (e.g. XML) following an open, formal and workable specification whose definitions are slightly more robust than "Do this formatting the way we did in Word 97" and which consists of slightly more than dumping blobs of binary data inside tags, we might stand a chance. It would still be a bit of an ask, but in the worst case scenario, we could probably infer (or ignore) the parts that puzzled us most.

Document formats matter because a great many of them -especially those produced by the public sector- have historical value and need to be preserved for a very long time.

Re:Is it safe?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't really understand this FUD.

Are you serious or are you just that stupid? Microsoft's entire business model is based on locking their customers into formats of one form of another. I mean, I guess the whole embrace, extend, extinguish never happened, right? Yeah.

Internet explorer started out being fairly standards compliant too until they squished Netscape out of existence. Then we had IE6 for the better part of a decade and a whole internet full of "We're sorry, we don't support your browser." You'd have to be the dumbest motherfucker on the face of the Earth not to suspect that MS will attempt to do the same thing to OOXML when and if they eliminate their competitors.

I understand fear of the old pre-2007 formats since they were impossible to read without Microsoft's software, but the modern formats can be unzipped and your content is available plain as day. I'm no Microsoft apologist, but in this case your fear is unfounded.

Based on their past behavior, it is a virtual certainty that they are trying to figure out a way to stop you from doing just that. And you are an arrogant prick if you honestly think you are so smart that you can just get around it.

Re:Is it safe?

[fullgandoo]

What you say is right but not relevant to this discussion. The parent had commented on the comment of the GP that once you have a file in MS format, your ass belongs to them.

This may be true whether it is a file in Word format, PDF or an even more proprietary format from Apple. So it is not something unique to MS.

And as to your 25 year time frame, I can still read the oldest document produced by Word on the latetst MS Office. And lastly, who's stopping you from storing files in XML format in Office?

Re:Is it safe?

[obarthelemy]

It's true though. Once your docs are in MS format, your ass does belong to them. And let's not talk about macros. Other formats having the problem is true, but kinda irrelevant. PDF at least is well documented, and , IIRC, open.

I can't read my WordStar CP/M docs that easily anymore. Do you think MS will be eternal-ier than WordStar ? Do you trust MS to eternally produce good software at reasonably prices ? Or others to risk lawsuits and such for trying to import it ? And older versions of Word do have at least formatting issues with later versions. MS are doing their darnedest to leverage the document pool into more software sales, do you expect that to change ?

XML per se is not really good for simple docs, there's too many way to do things. MS's OOXML neither, it's too vague and immaterial.

Re:Is it safe?

[grcumb]

What you say is right but not relevant to this discussion. The parent had commented on the comment of the GP that once you have a file in MS format, your ass belongs to them.

Yes, that was exactly the intent when MS created its own proprietary document formats. There was a time when WordPerfect was happy to convert to and from Ami Pro, when Star Writer exported just fine to Word. Microsoft changed all that by relentlessly leveraging compatibility to feed their revenue stream.

This may be true whether it is a file in Word format, PDF or an even more proprietary format from Apple. So it is not something unique to MS.

Agreed. That's why I mentioned both Adobe and Word formats in the same sentence. I don't think either one is particularly appropriate (although PDF as a published specification is a great deal easier to work with when doing document conversion).

And as to your 25 year time frame, I can still read the oldest document produced by Word on the latest MS Office.

That's hard to believe, and not entirely relevant. What I'm talking about -as a minimal scenario- is a situation where the original software just doesn't exist any more. Twenty-five years ago in 1985, Word was something called Multi-Tool. I sincerely doubt one of its files would open in Office 2010 without significant effort from a developer.

And lastly, who's stopping you from storing files in XML format in Office?

Nobody. That's exactly what we do. The problem is that we work with legal documents from over 20 countries and hundreds of different sources. We have a limited amount of development resources (mostly just me) and we need these documents to be available forever, effectively. If people could actually settle on a standard that really was a standard, if people could actually agree to look slightly farther down the track than their own desktops, we could actually spend time building new searching capabilities, ontologies and frameworks to make the data way, way more useful than it is today.

Instead, I spend all my time dealing with half-assed, unstructured formatting brought about by the fact that people are content to use a second-rate implementation of a deliberately obfuscated format.

Other vendors may be guilty of this, too. But Microsoft has done it longer and more effectively than most.

Re:Is it safe?

[Anonymous Coward]

.docx is basically a .zip'd set of XML files, with a different extension... you can snag/read/process the content with open/free resources, and aren't tied to MS. Now how hard it is to do this, really depends. As to your wordstar files, if they're in a binary format, it's understandable.. for MS docx, or odf etc, it's a zip file with xml... Binary attachments/images may be a different story, but are pretty standard themselves.

Re:Is it safe?

[dissy]

Just about everything right now is being sent to them in PDF or DOC format. What do you think the odds are of being able to access these documents in 25 years' time?

That complaint about .DOC is very correct. Just a couple weeks ago someone at the company I worked for received a Word 2.0 document and was asking for my help opening it as he only had Word 2010.
Those formats are very temporary in their usability.

To be fair however PDF has a reasonable chance of surviving way past your requirement of 25 years.

PDF was made in 1993 by Adobe, which was only 17 years ago yes. But PDF is just a bunch of additions to PostScript ( or .ps files) which has been a widely used format since 1982, which was 28 years ago.

As long as one avoids the worst of the PDF specific features like DRM and scripting, the bulk of the content and markup will be readable.
This is one format that will probably remain around next to forever, just like ASCII.

Re:Is it safe?

[onenil]

Have you looked at the OOXML standard? Have you ever opened up Word 2007, saved a document, renamed it to .zip, and had a look at its contents? I would hope you have considering the inference that you work in document management.

"If, however, these documents were stored in plain text markup..." - that's exactly what OOXML format is.

May I suggest, particularly for the .DOC files, you could recommend to your client to start building a process to convert them to .DOCX files using perhaps the Word 2007 user interface, or maybe the APIs. That way the majority of content is plaintext readable, and the markup can be made sense of except for most extreme layout nuances.

And tell me, while you're at it - what do you need to do to get Word 2007 or 2010 to store all of a document's content as binary blobs? Are you referring to image data? Image data which can be stored in a .docx file in its original format i.e. PNG, JPG, GIF, BMP etc etc?

While we're at it, lets look at an alternative. HTML, I'm sure you'll agree, is a plain text markup (XML-like) standard which is open, and as formal and workable a specification as there can be. Do you think, in 25 years time, there will be a web browser that will be able to render a page from today's web in perfect form. Hell, can you show me a web browser TODAY that renders the most complicated web page markup perfectly? It all depends on how complicated the layout of the document is, and how complex the markup is.

In 25 years time, assuming there's a ZIP library of some description around, I will be able to open my OOXML .docx files and happilly read the content inside. I'll be able to develop something that could come pretty close to rendering those documents except for a few edge case layouts.

You need to get on-topic, this is a discussion on OOXML, not the previous .DOC file formats.

Re:Is it safe?

[Nimey]

At least for Office '03 and '07, there's a Registry hack to enable old "insecure" Office formats, which IIRC were disabled for '03 SP3.

I believe Microsoft has .REG files you can download to make this easier.

Re:Is it safe?

[grcumb]

To be fair however PDF has a reasonable chance of surviving way past your requirement of 25 years.

No, 25 years was an example of the simplest manifestation of the problem. For documents of historical significance, 250 and 2500 years also matter.

It's just that with time frames like those, it's almost impossible to usefully imagine what the world will be like, so we mostly encourage printing using the right paper and inks as well as proper storage.

Re:Is it safe?

[guruevi]

I concur. I make programs that generate documents based on some of these 'open' standards.
- LaTeX is really the only thing you can trust if you want an editable text document. However (sadly) outside of scientific literature it's hardly used.
- PDF and PostScript is great if you want a read only document, it works but I don't think it's really an open standard. It's more of a form of output, not really a form of carrying information.
- ODF is an open standard and works really well but sadly not all editors interpret all tags the same.
- OOXML is the worst of all. You simply can't open/read OOXML documents generated by Microsoft Office programmatically - sometimes they won't even pass an XML parser, you can generate documents programmatically according to the OOXML standard but a lot of the functionality (simple things like hyperlinks) will be misinterpreted by Microsoft Office and possibly corrupt the document (unreadable to all) if re-saved in Office.

Re:Is it safe?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody. That's exactly what we do. The problem is that we work with legal documents from over 20 countries and hundreds of different sources. We have a limited amount of development resources (mostly just me) and we need these documents to be available forever, effectively. If people could actually settle on a standard that really was a standard, if people could ...

So you want .docx then? Good.

Re:Is it safe?

[Daengbo]

What platforms do these readers work on?

Re:Is it safe?

[rubies]

That's hard to believe, and not entirely relevant. What I'm talking about -as a minimal scenario- is a situation where the original software just doesn't exist any more. Twenty-five years ago in 1985, Word was something called Multi-Tool. I sincerely doubt one of its files would open in Office 2010 without significant effort from a developer.

I thought Word (and later Word for Windows) was a new development effort - didn't realise it was based on that crudware they shipped for Xenix way back. It hasn't improved.

Re:Is it safe?

[Anonymous Coward]

the thing is MS provides readers for free anyway, so no one has any grounds to complain.

Wait, is this some kind of super troll trick question and I'm just not getting it? Will their free reader work on my iPad? How about my Android phone? Didn't think so. How about, I just use somebody else's shit and not take the chance of depending on technology from a company that has proven their desire again and again to lock my information up in their proprietary format on their proprietary platform? MS is just one player in the document game so I think I'll just take my chances with somebody else.

Re:Is it safe?

[timmarhy]

We are talking about long term ability to read document formats, not the availbility of MS office on linux. Two completely separate issues. nice try though.

Re:Is it safe?

[hairyfeet]

Did you even get MW4 to install? Because I tried 3 times to install the damned thing and every time it would get to around 90% and die horribly with an unhandled exception error or some shit. Personally I blame the stupid MTX client crap that Mektek uses, as I had that thing crash more times that I could count!

As for TFA, why all the hate? If you don't like Office, don't use it. It isn't like they are the only game in town. Use Google, OO.o, hell there are tons of text editors and office suites, pick your poison. As for the poster that has to archive docs? Couldn't you find a way to automate conversion to RTF? RTF may have been a MSFT invention but its specs have been published for so long pretty much anything that deals with text can read and deal with RTF. And considering I have dealt with early 90s RTF files and haven't had anything choke reading them RTF should be suitable for archiving if you don't want PDF. Short of ripping out all the text and stuffing it in a .txt file I don't see much of a choice there, as there are no guarantees there will be software that reads ODF in 25 years either. Sure the spec is open, but if nobody supports it you are still gonna have to write something from scratch to read it.

Re:Is it safe?

[BraksDad]

I worked for a state supreme court in 1997. They wanted to archive all their docs for forever so... the converted everything to Word Perfect. UGH!

Re:Is it safe?

[Daengbo]

We are exactly talking about long-term ability to read document formats. If, in 2035, I have a copy of Windows Vista/Server 2008 and a machine (or VM) to run it in, then I probably have access to MS Ofice 2007, too ... so why would the reader be required and what problem would it solve? If I don't have that stuff, then having the reader doesn't help me at all.

Re:Is it safe?

[Bing Tsher E]

And we are talking about the ability to read these documents long after Microsoft is (hopefully) dead and out of business. Unless some agency steps in to make sure their internal non-published specs are released before the Redmond campus is bulldozed to make space for the new WalMart.... well.....

Re:Is it safe?

[dudpixel]

why would you intentionally go for the -1 troll?

Re:Is it safe?

[dudpixel]

Isn't the contents of .docx files tied to the (proprietary, closed, secret, patented) algorithms within MS Word?

For example, you may be able to retrieve the text (not sure) but getting your formatting to look exactly like it did in MS Word, will require MS Word.

If you want proof, find another word processing app that can display it 100% compatible with MS Word without calling any code from MS Word.

Now explain how in 25 years time when most people vaguely remember what MS Word 2010 looked like or did, you will somehow open your .docx documents and have them look as they do now. If I know Microsoft at all, I know that the OOXML "Standard" will change (read: "extend") a LOT in 25 years.

Re:Is it safe?

[Anonymous Coward]

We are talking about long term ability to read document formats, not the availbility of MS office on linux.

Wait, what? Where did the GP say anything about Linux? Oh, I get it, you're one of those Windows religious zealots that when anybody mentions there may be something other than the One True Platform(TM), you just stick your fingers in your ears chanting, 'la la la'. At any rate for the saner among us that may be reading this...

Two completely separate issues. nice try though.

Actually, I'd say the longevity of any piece of software is more than tangentially related to the diversity of platforms it runs on. No OS lasts forever.

Re:Is it safe?

[Capsaicin]

As to your wordstar files, if they're in a binary format, it's understandable.. for MS docx, or odf etc, it's a zip file with xml...

Now I might be wrong, it's been several decades since I had to work with WordStar files, but weren't they just basically text marked up with control chars? Probably even less of a challenge to write a tool to read them than it would be to xslt docx into a preferred format.

Re:Is it safe?

[Anonymous Coward]

OOXML is a mess, poorly specified, badly designed, and incompatible. I won't be readable in 25 years, it isn't even readable now.

Use ODF if you want something archival.

Re:Is it safe?

[ClosedSource]

Sure, if only we could open Office documents on the iPad we'd never have to worry about losing are ability to read them.

Re:Is it safe?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the generally regarded standard as far as text files go? Isn't ASCII the current standard? Who's to say what standard will be what in 50 years time. Then how will you open any XML file anyway?

Re:Is it safe?

[Anonymous Coward]

At least with the iPad, you know where you stand. Contrast that with MS who will just string you along with "open" standards like OO"just do it like in office 97"XML long enough to bury their competitors at which time you can be assured they will pull the rug out from underneath you and "your" documents. Not this time, though. I'll just create my documents in a real open standard.

Fucking MS zealot nutter motherfucker.

Re:Is it safe?

[lakeland]

PDF is an open format and should load in 25 years just just fine. Technically, it's practically just a zipped Postscript which was invented about 25 years ago.
DOC I suggest you save to PDF.

There's lots of advantages to XML over PDF - metadata support for one - reliable plain text extraction for another - but it is technically an open standard.

Re:Is it safe?

[fyngyrz]

Somehow, I don't think that 25 years from now, people will care if it looks exactly like it looked now, as long as the text and section headings, toc and index, tables and lists... are intact, recoverable, and comprehensible by an archivist, and from there perhaps into public hands.

The best way to store a document isn't PDF. While the spec is open, the documents may not be -- copy and paste disabled, passwords, etc. PDF is a format with easily used features designed to LIMIT access. That's a hella poor choice for an archive format.

Text files - perhaps unicode files, today - are the best option. Markup languages like HTML are excellent because they let the viewer set the presentation to a great extent; section subheading sizes, font sizes, etc. Until we can edit defects out of the genome and repair all injuries, we also should be considering accessability. PDF, again, bad choice. Everything is determined by the document. HTML or something like it is oodles better: You set the font size, feed it almost directly to a reader, etc.

And as for formats like .doc and so on... no. Just, no.

But as bad as format issues are...

Storage media is worse.

You want to read your 1970's STWPC FLEX text files? I can do it for you. Not only do I have a working system with usable drives at 35, 40 and 80 track, single and double density, I also have a working emulation so once i have your data, I can put it up in software that was meant to understand it.

That's your most serious problem. Not the data format -- the data storage medium. better make it easy to transfer from a to b to c to n... because otherwise, it'll be like FLEX files... right now, I'm one of very few people in the world that can still read the original floppies. And I'm getting old, and am definitely not all that healthy.

Re:Is it safe?

[clarkn0va]

Just a couple weeks ago someone at the company I worked for received a Word 2.0 document and was asking for my help opening it as he only had Word 2010.

Just move the decimal. Duh.

Re:Is it safe?

[Nyder]

Just about everything right now is being sent to them in PDF or DOC format. What do you think the odds are of being able to access these documents in 25 years' time?

That complaint about .DOC is very correct. Just a couple weeks ago someone at the company I worked for received a Word 2.0 document and was asking for my help opening it as he only had Word 2010.
Those formats are very temporary in their usability.

To be fair however PDF has a reasonable chance of surviving way past your requirement of 25 years.

PDF was made in 1993 by Adobe, which was only 17 years ago yes. But PDF is just a bunch of additions to PostScript ( or .ps files) which has been a widely used format since 1982, which was 28 years ago.

As long as one avoids the worst of the PDF specific features like DRM and scripting, the bulk of the content and markup will be readable.
This is one format that will probably remain around next to forever, just like ASCII.

Um, no.

Ascii, you can open up in anything and read it.

you can't with a pdf.

Re:Is it safe?

[Alex Zepeda]

Just about everything right now is being sent to them in PDF or DOC format. What do you think the odds are of being able to access these documents in 25 years' time?

If PDF/A is being used, I'd say your chances are pretty darn good that the files will be accessible in twenty-five years. From the wiki page: audio, video, javascript, and encryption are not allowed in PDF/A files. Use of standardized metadata is mandated, and *all* fonts used must be embedded. IOW it's a simplified, well defined file format.

Re:Is it safe?

[ClosedSource]

"Fucking MS zealot nutter motherfucker."

That's quite a mouthful. Can we just call you AC?

Re:Is it safe?

[CondeZer0]

> - OOXML is the worst of all. You simply can't open/read OOXML documents generated by Microsoft Office programmatically - sometimes they won't even pass an XML parser

And don't forget that even if/when the XML is valid, XML has no semantics and making sense of it is not necessarily any easier than making sense of any random bunch of bits, and can be harder because you need to deal with the overhead of the XML representation.

XML doesn't really add any value to the format other than bloat and complexity.

Re:Is it safe?

[mikechant]

Sure the spec is open, but if nobody supports it you are still gonna have to write something from scratch to read it.

Hardly. All you would need to do is get just one of the existing open source products** which supports it now to compile on a modern system (preferable), or get (say) an old version of Linux to run in a VM. Not necessarily trivial, but nowhere near as difficult as writing something from scratch. And at least it's definitely possible, as opposed to a closed source product where 'compile for a modern system' is not one of your options, and the VM of a closed source OS may not run years later due to license key checks etc.

**Or even just the small subset of code that 'understands' the relevant format.

Re:Is it safe?

[dissy]

But you can extract the postscript from a PDF (For 99% of them, you don't even have to do that) and dump it straight into any laser printer to get a printout.

Ironically in that case, ascii is less useful to a printer since sending text to a printer will require it to map it to a font and then translate that into postscript before it can be printed.

Re:Is it safe?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly just because something has already been around > 25 years doesn't mean it will exist for another 25. As technology advances, the next 25 might embody rates of technological change equivalent to more that a century's worth of change when compared to the rate of change over the last 25 years. New standards are already popping up like weeds in a field. As new technologies arrive and impact our day to day applications, we will certainly need a lowest common denominator file format that can effective carry any data forward whatever else may happen.

Re:Is it safe?

[CrashandDie]

I'm confused, is this the one with Ricky Gervais or Steve Carell?

Re:Is it safe?

[wye43]

Don't you dare to compare PDF with ASCII! ASCII is a character-encoding scheme, PDF is a file format. Apples and oranges.

[rant] PDF is the main exploiting door currently used to grow botnets. PDF is a no longer a document format, it became a plague.

Do you like how the Adobe Updater relentlessly creates a shortcut to Adobe Viewer after each update? Who in their right mind is ever actually opening an empty viewer? [/rant]

Re:Is it safe?

[Draek]

Who in their right mind is actually opening PDFs with Adobe Reader? just get Evince, Foxit and whatever OSX comes bundled with and forget Adobe was ever involved with the format.

Re:Is it safe?

[PopeRatzo]

long after Microsoft is (hopefully) dead

What, you don't want an Xbox36000?

Re:Is it safe?

[PopeRatzo]

Will their free reader work on my iPad?

Is that the new standard? No formats should be allowed that "don't work on my iPad"?

Re:Is it safe?

[JasterBobaMereel]

If you are discussing OOXML Standard

Then there are two : ECMA-376 which Word 2010 supports (But so does Word 2007 and OpenOfficeOrg)

and : ISO/IEC 29500 which Word 2010 does not support .... and neither does anything else (Microsoft are "working towards" the standard)

Re:Is it safe?

[dissy]

Don't you dare to compare PDF with ASCII! ASCII is a character-encoding scheme, PDF is a file format. Apples and oranges.

So you are seriously trying to argue that PDF existed as long as ASCII or Postscript?

Seeing as that is the only way they were compared (year released to public), and you are arguing, that seems to be your stance.

So I will dare to compare them, and will say it once again. ASCII and postscript will remain usable and displayable LONG LONG after PDF has disappeared. You will need to provide more of an argument as to WHY that is not true to convince me otherwise.

Re:Is it safe?

[Phoghat]

That's why:

Open Office is the app for me

Does what Word does and it's for FREE

Converts to almost anything for me

Now ain't that too damn bad!

Re:Is it safe?

[Anonymous Coward]

because he really likes your mom?

Re:Is it safe?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, sure, that's the new standard, you ignorance feigning idiot.

Re:Is it safe?

[someSnarkyBastard]

Forget your crappy iPad, will Microsoft's own software be able to run that reader 25 years from now? I very high doubt that.

Re:Is it safe?

[inode_buddha]

Plain ASCII txt comes to mind. Works on anything as far as I know. I long since abandoned the format wars however, and went Linux/Ooo.

Re:Is it safe?

[Anonymous Coward]

1970's STWPC FLEX text files? I can do it for you.

In other words, thirty or forty years after a document is committed to a file format, maybe one eccentric and highly skilled techie can read it.

The greatest problem with computer storage of absolutely everything is that, while it makes the material exponentially more accessible, it also dooms it to certain oblivion within an astonishingly brief period.

Previously, librarians worried about the inevitable loss to the world of information stored on high-acid-content paper, which has been a problem since the last decade or so of the century before last.

That problem is being solved by the obsolescence of libraries themselves. Once these are lost, nothing will replace them except (still) storage on magnetic media, which is of all forms of information storage the most expensive and the most ephemeral, far surpassing in its transitoriness even the frail medium of newsprint.

Any high-tech solutions to this? There must be a load of clever tricksters at work on the problem.

Re:Is it safe?

[david_thornley]

PDF is a documented standard. Adobe keeps adding things to it, but there's nothing stopping me from implementing it myself. As long as there's a copy of the standard around, and a way to read it (my copy is a PDF file), somebody will be able to write software to read all PDF documents.

Re:Is it safe?

[AthanasiusKircher]

Plain ASCII txt comes to mind. Works on anything as far as I know.

Yeah, if you only need 128 characters, about a quarter of which are mostly obsolete control characters.

If you need to write in a language other than English (or even use foreign terms in an English text, with accents and such), you'll need something a little better, like unicode-based plain text.

But I take your point -- plain text using an international standard works pretty well for the vast majority of documents, though making it look pretty can take a tiny bit of work if you actually want to read long sections of it.

Re:Is it safe?

[hairyfeet]

How are you gonna recompile it if x86 is long dead by then, hmm? Have you looked at every line of code to make sure none is x86 specific? Might be a problem if you are trying to encode for an arch long dead. And "run Linux in a VM"? What, are you high? The guy was talking about a government archive here. You think they are gonna have the horses to make running an assload of VMs practical? And of course with VMs you are also gonna run into licensing issues, unless they run Linux for a full stack, which I say the odds are pretty slim for.

My point still stands that just because it is FOSS isn't a magic bullet for decades of abandonment, because unless you have the money to hire an entire team of developers to rebuild from what is there you are SOL. Take what we had 25 years ago, take the Amiga. The Amiga ran on a funky blend of custom chips, with many bits of code using hacks to squeeze that last bit of juice. Would it be trivial to port a custom Amiga app to X64, with 1000 times the RAM and speed that the Amiga had? Not bloody likely.

My point is that like any other massive undertaking you are pretty much gonna have to start from scratch, all FOSS does is give you a starting point. THAT'S ALL. It doesn't magically make 25+ year old code work on a completely different arch with specs light years ahead of anything even thought of then. I'm sure there is old Source-forge code abandoned since 1992, why don't you go there and see how long it takes you to rebuild it to a totally functional and stable state on an X64 build running 8Gb of RAM? If it is so easy, then impress us with your wisdom. Good luck buddy.

Re:Is it safe?

[Elektroschock]

To me it looks like ODF 1.2 is the future, it is also backed by Microsoft.

Re:Is it safe?

[fyngyrz]

In other words, thirty or forty years after a document is committed to a file format, maybe one eccentric and highly skilled techie can read it.

I'm not eccentric. I'm a crackpot. Get it right!

Re:Is it safe?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what he's asking for. A standard format. Office 2010 will speak ISO, so when every other suite does that too, you have your wish.

Re:Is it safe?

[buzzn]

> Just about everything right now is being sent to them in PDF or DOC format. What do you think the odds are of being able to access these documents in 25 years' time?

Since even Google Docs can import these formats, they must not be as closed and impenetrable as you seem to think they are. Not saying it wouldn't be easier if the formats were completely "open", but ... ok let's pretend MSFT and ADBE go out of business tomorrow. Nobody'll be able to read those documents? I don't think so.

I'm not defending closed formats here. But I have text documents bitrotting on tapes whose hardware readers have very much expired.

Re:Is it safe?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't understand the difference between a file format and an encoding scheme?

Postscript is a file format. But the fact that an 'A' in that file is represented by 8 bits that have the decimal value 65 is the ASCII encoding scheme. You can have Postscript files in other encodings.

Take plain text, which is a file format. That is mostly done in ASCII encoding. But more and more this same plain text is encoded in Unicode (or, more correct, UTF-8).

See the difference? The file format describes the structure of the file, the encoding describes the way that information is serialized (for lack of a better term at this ungodly hour).

Requires .EXE Download

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

As a number of people in the Seattle Times Forum have noted, using this "web based" Office product *requires* downloading and installing an .exe

Re:Requires .EXE Download

[Anonymous Coward]

IEXPLORER.EXE ?

Re:Requires .EXE Download

[WrongSizeGlass]

As a number of people in the Seattle Times Forum have noted, using this "web based" Office product *requires* downloading and installing an .exe

IEXPLORER.EXE ?

That *is* an interesting thought. Which browsers does Online Office 2010 work with? If it requires an .exe that kind of excludes Linux & Mac users (not to mention thise crazy enough to try it on their smart phones).

Re:Requires .EXE Download

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

IEXPLORER.EXE ?

Nope. Sorry, should have made it clear, some kind of "helper" exe. But I wonder, does it work on any browser or only IE? That I don't know. Perhaps the "helper" exe is an... (get ready) ActiveX componant? Of course they are not calling them that anymore...

Re:Requires .EXE Download

[Anonymous Coward]

It does not. It works with plain old JS and CSS in IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome on Mac/PC.

Re:Requires .EXE Download

[Anonymous Coward]

Even on linux?

Re:Requires .EXE Download

[KibibyteBrain]

The exe is only necessary to allow Windows shell integration with the online Office service, i.e., so you can double click on a docx on your desktop and have it open in the web office.
If you want to go through the same hassle to open local files you go though with other online office suites, it is not required.

Re:Requires .EXE Download

[stephanruby]

You mean saving a shortcut that goes to a local file, or dragging and dropping the local url to put on your desktop?

Re:Requires .EXE Download

[Anonymous Coward]

No.
1. establishing some kind of link/synchronization between the cloud-resident & local file.
2. performing authentication to log in to the cloud.

You wouldn't want that kind of information stored in the local copy, now. would you?

Bash MS all you want but after knowing the facts. Since I don't know what that executable does I will refrain from making any positive or negative statements. Although I think that the above two tasks can be performed using a dll instead of an exe. may be exe is the installer, who knows?

Re:Requires .EXE Download

[Anonymous Coward]

It's written on http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/office-web-apps/overview.aspx that: "You must install the free Microsoft Office 2010 Beta before using Office Web Apps. Install it today, and then get started using Office Web Apps.", but it's not true... I'm using with Linux, Chrome and no .Exe ;-)

Re:Requires .EXE Download

[Anonymous Coward]

As evidenced by this discussion and the plethora of "where does shit go?" options in the beta...

Microsoft's offering is fucking convoluted as hell.

Also, while an EXE may be required to sync documents. At this time, near as I can tell... You can't^h^h^h^h^h aren't allowed to create new documents on their service without installing it.

Re:Requires .EXE Download

[jellomizer]

As someone who has been on record defending Microsoft from some of Slashdot Microsoft can do no good crowd...
I think it is more to the point you need to install a platform specific program to your computer. Which really misses the point of having a web based version of your tool. The point of having a web based program is to not have any bit run on your computer... Why?
1. Security. Although a lot of fuss and whining about security of a cloud etc... But if it access data on your drive it can effect overall security. So you have a virus infected excel file, that you open up and share with other systems then download it again... Guess what that gets infected too. Secondly ok you have an EXE it is only matter of time the data that EXE does is found out. It seems like a way to try to work around some bad security practices.

2. Updates. A lot of IT for companies are not keen on keeping your systems up to date. They should but they don't however to compensate that they try to lock your computer down so if you try to install this EXE it will fail, sure you may be able to get the EXE once... But if they update their code and you cannot get the EXE then you are stuck.

3.Platform indépendance. Yes I know Microsoft is using this to push windows... But really... Use silverlight or some other Microsoft plugin that even pretends that it is more platform independent then an EXE.

4. Mixing the worst of both worlds... So you are going to have a clumsy browser to do the UI with an EXE to do some communication... Seems kinda backwards to me.

Microsoft for Web Application has been on the record of being really bad... I have tried threw out the decade (with my last attempt a couple of months ago) to see Microsoft web based applications and they all seem to be a decade behind the time. Heck I do a lot of Web Based Development with .NET however I rarely if ever use any of the additional tool boxes that come with it... Because they are so crappy that I have to make them myself to get any real quality of out my product.

Re:Requires .EXE Download

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Yes.

You aren't allowed to create new documents on their service without installing it.

Re:Requires .EXE Download

[Anonymous Coward]

Incorrect. It's a browser plugin so the JavaScript doesn't matter and it uses Microsoft's SilverLight / Novell's Moonlight which is .NET to draw Microsoft Office.

Microsoft haven't embraced HTML5, they're still pushing SilverLight.

Re:Requires .EXE Download

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, I concur. Requiring exe to create a new document (as mentioned below) is full of BS. I thought that it was for offline mode or something.

Re:Requires .EXE Download

[Nyder]

As a number of people in the Seattle Times Forum have noted, using this "web based" Office product *requires* downloading and installing an .exe

Shit, we are all stoned here in Seattle.

Re:Requires .EXE Download

[RobertM1968]

The exe is only necessary to allow Windows shell integration with the online Office service, i.e., so you can double click on a docx on your desktop and have it open in the web office. If you want to go through the same hassle to open local files you go though with other online office suites, it is not required.

Oh... I thought it was required to enable/implement certain .NET capabilities and Silverlight - through which this "integration" you speak of actually takes place.

Sorry I misunderstood what the exe really was... regardless, I am not about to take a chance that I am wrong. I dont use IE, and I am not about to make any other browser as insecure.

Re:Requires .EXE Download

[shutdown -p now]

It uses Silverlight if it's available to improve rendering fidelity (you can't do pixel-perfect text rendering in a browser otherwise, because you don't control the browser's text rendering engine) - but it still does work without Silverlight.

Re:Requires .EXE Download

[shutdown -p now]

You can.

Gee, that was simple. I didn't even need to give a reference, because neither did you.

Re:Requires .EXE Download

[shutdown -p now]

You can definitely create new documents in Office Web Apps preview in SkyDrive. Indeed, I just tried that a moment ago - there's a "New" button on the toolbar while browsing folders, which expands to the list of document types. Here is even a blog post from the team explaining this and showing a screenshot.

I do wonder where that FUD comes from - there seems to be a proliferation of posts in this discussion claiming that this functionality is missing, so, apparently, people are getting it from somewhere?

Re:Requires .EXE Download

[JasterBobaMereel]

So that excludes Macs, Linux, Smartphones, all other operating systems, all minority browsers.....

A recent version of windows, with an up to date IE should be OK ..... Probably?

On-line office suite : Run anywhere from any system ..... as long as it's a specific system .... typical Microsoft

OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bother? I swear to god, I can do anything I want in sun (oracle? no hate here.) oo32 that I used to do in o2k3

Have you seen the OO32 release? My God! hahaha

I already collect text editors, but gosh darn I just can's see paying thousands anymore? Maybe you got a translator or some proprietary nonsense? I think we all would be wise to audit and revise what we really need.

Hey if you need Microsoft Office, more power to ya, the only thing I need now is a way to export their proprietary format to a real format which can be used in oo32 ;)

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember back in the day when NT 3.5 wasn't even known by my COLLEGE! word perfect on dos was on the boxes. I've been through AVERY label school god damn it.
I had those extra memory cards what was they called um hell I forget, but they had switches and chips and software (which was always hard to find for some reason) memory expansion cards that's right.. OKay back then, their stuff was friggin DOS and not the good kind with deltree, masv, if you were lucky you had win 3 4 networks! hahahaha Where are all those MFM parts now? hehehehe There's one flaw with cloud computing, and I ain't even saying Microsoft ain't being gracious by providing this. But I ask myself do I need a Live Passport? No. Do I need a webmail which opens up exploits? No. Now can I open a VM on the cloud and edit and export to some other format? If yes, then cool, there's my new primary goal for such a service. The problem with the cloud is Denial Of Service. It doesn't matter why. So if it's up, I convert my docs to something else then hang up. the opposite of ATDT ATH_ Especially when these garden of fruitbowl documents have rich rivers and dangerous mammals. ;o)

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[blai]

Why bother? I swear to god, I can do anything I want in sun (oracle? no hate here.) oo32 that I used to do in o2k3

I've been hoping to think the same way as you for 6 years now, but I still can't have something as trivial as rotating an image in a word processor to be done within the program where the image is: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=689876

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's where GIMP in 3..2..1..

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[MBC1977]

I beg to differ, kinda. I've been using OpenOffice 3.2 for about a month now and I'm not very impressed (could be because I enjoy using MS Office, but thats a different argument). Building charts in Excel take me about 5-10 mins tops (including the information I need to plug in). It took me 2 hours (and frequent references to the help, which on an aside, why is not available locally!?). I will grant its definitely made some improvements since the last time I tried it. Writer is actually fairly decent, I actually could use that without really needing to go back to MS Word.

While I haven't gotten to try out the other aspects, I will note that I am also conducting a 6 month experiment where I use Linux exclusively for my day-to-day work. So far its interesting, not as bad as I thought it would be (though I don't like having to type my password in for system updates or to use sudo (speaking of which if anyone can tell me what the difference between sudo and su is I'd appreciate it).

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[Alex Belits]

Do you still use Google to look for "linux problems" or did your master tell you to switch to Bing?

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[Anonymous Coward]

you have an excuse, your using it for a specific application. Excel . So use what works for you. I never said don't use Office, nor did I ever say don't use the cloud, I merely give up some cautions.

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[Anonymous Coward]

fancy graphical newsletters should not be made in writer, but draw. OO better segregates the office applications than Microsoft does.

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[Zerth]

su changes to another (priveleged, presumably) user and requires that user's password

sudo merely allows you elevated privileges based on your own account and does not require sharing a password. Changes made are still logged as being done by you, ownership doesn't change, etc. It is less of a security risk than su since you don't have to share the password of a priveleged account.

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[coolsnowmen]

If you read the thread you linked to you would have found plausible solutions on the 1st page.

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[bmo]

though I don't like having to type my password in for system updates or to use sudo

This is no different than using Windows from a limited user account, which you should already be using. If you are not, you are being silly. Updates are an administrative task and thus belong to administrator, not Joe or Jane in Sales.

su - requires root's password
sudo - doesn't require root's password - no password sharing. It also allows you to unset root's password so users can't login as root directly, and cough "guests" to the system must guess which user (you should not be using fingerd) has sudoer rights in order to access root privileges.

--
BMO

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[Anonymous Coward]

Also sudo can have restrictions on who can run it, which commands they can run, and what logging is done. With su the only restriction is who can su to root, to other accounts if you know the password you can do it.

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[hairyfeet]

I think you just accidentally hit the nail on the head on why Open Office sucks for business. Don't get me wrong, it is just fine for little Sally homemaker or Billy who needs to make a doc to print for school (just don't give it to the teacher in OO.o Doc format, as I found it'll be turned into Word salad by MS Word) but it is an Office Suite not just a single app. I have been messing with OO.o and giving it out on my freeware disc to customers since 1.5, but I've found here is pretty much what to expect with OO.o "Here is the latest OO.o! Writer is 50 times better! It has more cool stuff, and the next version will be leaps and bounds better than that! And ..oh...here is some other shit, use it or not. whatever"

Now I personally don't have a clue why that is, maybe someone from OO.o is here and can explain, but it seems to me that OO.o treats anything in the suite that isn't writer like red headed stepchildren. I would say writer is getting close to 2K3 in usability, and maybe in some areas even better, but the rest? Hell the ancient Office 2K I use is better than that crap. I don't know why they waste all their resources on writer, as with the except of MS Office/Open Office compatibility I would say it passed "Good enough" at 2.xx and at 3 was better than good enough. But with their Excel and PPT apps being so shitty I just can't recommend it to businesses, it just isn't anywhere close. Anybody here know why all the love goes to writer?

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[MBC1977]

Thanks! I appreciate the help. :)

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[fast turtle]

Screw that. Fancy Graphical Newsletters should be created in Scribus not OO Draw.

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to put you down or anything but you have to get use to GNU/Linux before you can judge it. The "it took me two hours to do it in OO and only 15 minutes in excel" is obviously due to the fact you already know how to do it in one and not the other. Yea- OO doesn't have the built-in help that you crave although it also doesn't take three days to download it either or two hours to install like MS Office. Exaggerated- (well- not for allot of MS Windows users... but.. hehe that is another matter). For every negative thing you see there is a positive I can counter it with. Microsoft Office is a POS in my opinion and while I learned it, liked it or thought I did, and switched years ago I would NEVER go back. There is a reason for that. Once I got over the OMG OO is a little different I realized how much better it was. I spent MANY MANY months actually using GNU/Linux.. no... about a year I would say. It was that long for me to really discover the majority of the die-for features that I'd kill for today and reasons why I'd never return to MS Windows. It isn't to say that GNU/Linux doesn't have benefits right out of the box. It does for the majority of people. Many of them are under the hood. Immunity to viruses and other malware for PRACTICAL purposes (since everything is in the repository and security updates aren't just for the OS and a handful of core MS programs) and then a few other more obvious benefits like speed, user friendliness, and better support (and Vista/7 have way less support than GNU/Linux despite more manufacturer involvement- especially since most older hardware just isn't supported whereas on GNU/Linux it is).

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[Anonymous Coward]

* my post above. I know said OO in one line and started talking about GNU/Linux in the next. The same was true for OO. I didn't use many of these applications often and many I didn't use until years later or I'd use them for a while and then not use them and learn them in GNU/Linux but a year later. So... It didn't really necessarily take me a year to learn to use OO or any particular program. If you switch an entire operating system overnight and are a power user like me though... and you've learned allot of applications... it'll take along time to learn all the new applications to the same point you knew the prior ones. It has only been in the past year I'd say that I even passed my level of knowledge in GIMP that I knew in Photoshop. I don't use graphics editing applications all that often though. i did at one time. I did't for a while and now I am again much more. Of course with the GIMP know I've learned a whole lot more than I ever knew in Photoshop and I knew allot in Photoshop. I never really liked Photoshop actually. I think Paint Shop Pro was better- GIMP is the best of all three though.

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you suck cock only on Wednesdays or all-week?

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[Nyder]

Why bother? I swear to god, I can do anything I want in sun (oracle? no hate here.) oo32 that I used to do in o2k3

Have you seen the OO32 release? My God! hahaha

I already collect text editors, but gosh darn I just can's see paying thousands anymore? Maybe you got a translator or some proprietary nonsense? I think we all would be wise to audit and revise what we really need.

Hey if you need Microsoft Office, more power to ya, the only thing I need now is a way to export their proprietary format to a real format which can be used in oo32 ;)

\

EditPad Pro is my 1 and only text editor. it rocks.

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[Anonymous Coward]

For charts, I find Gnumeric far superior to either MS Excel (though I haven't really used Excel since it got the new ribbon interface) or OpenOffice, er, the spreadsheet application.

It has a nice gui for editing a chart with everything in the one tree-structured interface.

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[Sandbags]

If all I did was create some general documents and spreadsheets, maybe the occasional presentation file, or a small database to more easily access content across multiple sources, I'd be fine with OO.

However, integrating rights management, auto-populating shared workspaces in SharePoint for document collaboration, group editing, live sharing, native embedding with cross document real time editing (embed a Visio object in Word, edit the Visio digram, open word, changes are already there), compatibility natively WITH Visio and Project, and more; all of these things we do DAILY around here, and OO is capable of onyl a tiny subset of these things, and with a learning curve vs users already trained in Office.

Yes, for free I can get a copy of an office suite (though use for business purposes is a grey area with some of them). Sure, I can save about $200 every 2 years per user by doing so. The loss in efficiency is 10 times that if not way more, just for my basic users who do document collaboration or document templates hosted on servers. The loss in training is easily measurable at somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 hours per employee.

Again, for home use, for simple uses, OO might be fine. For a real business, or for someone who makes complicated documents that other people need to be able to read, edit, comment, and respond to, in their native format, there is no other option.

People talk about standards... Sure, we could get office to export to oo32, and you could read the content, certainly edit the text, and maybe most of the formatting, but the other functions (embedded content, sharing, rights management, collaboration and more) are all lost, and that costs more than the office license, so i say to you people, FREE COSTS MORE MONEY.

The format is only proprietary in such a sense that you can not make an app without paying royalties that can open and edit natively the format in its entirety, but you CAN write tools that can open and import this format, and the documents how to do so ARE published by Microsoft.

As for archives: Documents to be archived are not required to be in editable formats, and in most cases that's actually not desirable anyway. A common export format like PDF is fine, if not document images... We don't archive .doc and docx files at all, our archive system batch converts and saves only a readable version.

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how you manage to spend 2 hour in OO spreadsheet for something that includes typing in trivial data and then creating the graph.
Granted, the graphing system was UGLY around 2003 or so, but nowadays its nearly on par with MS Office visually.

It's never taken long to set up a graph in OO, however ugly it used to be earlier on.

Still, I applaud your effort in learning Linux - even though you seem to have problems with even the simplest things.

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[Anonymous Coward]

PPL slag Bing but face it, it was the only competing SE to get Google to change their search results page format.

Both of them look freaken identical, I preferred the old Google TBH, the new look-and-feel is awkward.

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[cyberthanasis12]

I looked at the link that you mention, and I found out that the folks there gave a solution. Use GIMP to rotate the image and insert to your word processor.
Sometimes I need to rotate some images 32.2365 grad (not degrees, gradians). It is trivial to convert between degrees and grad. Does/should MSOffice do this? (I confess I have no idea. I 've been using OpenOffice, and StarOffice before it, since 2000 - or was it 1999?).
Because GIMP is free to use, you are not forced to buy additional software to do a rotation. And if you used a Linux distribution, the odds are that GIMP would already be installed. And chances are, that you are able to do better job to an image with GIMP.
But if this is trouble to you (it really isn't; my 7 years old son does it routinely to print photos), continue to use (and pay for) Microsoft Office.

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[Elektroschock]

And it does not seem to get worse, indeed.

The government should dump 500 million $ in development to get rid off our MS-Office dependencies.

Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[bjb]

Unfortunately, wake me up when Open Office writer supports a proper "outline mode". If you've ever had to write documentation, this is the most valuable feature of a MS Word.

I DO use OO at home, but I'm not doing anything serious with it there.

Don't forget kids!

[Anonymous Coward]

That first sample of crack is free too!

Re:Don't forget kids!

[Anonymous Coward]

That first sample of crack is free too!

Not to mention a whole lot more fun than Microsoft Office.

Re:Don't forget kids!

[mgblst]

This is completely not true. Have you actually ever tried to get the first sample for free? It doesn't work.

Re:Don't forget kids!

[Anonymous Coward]

It works better if they come to you rather than you going to them and asking them for one.
If you already want it, they have no motivation to persuade you with one for free.

Oh joy! More Cloud computing

[dwillden]

So now the PHB's in the upper offices find this and think it's great, and move everyone to this. Great! Until the day the network has problems. Or you have to finish that presentation but are temporarily sitting in an office with no network because yours is getting remodeled.

Two weeks ago my entire office was shut down for doing any real work, because all our work data is on a shared drive located on the network. Problem was that our office was being re-carpeted and the temp space they moved us into had NO network available.

On the other hand we did enjoy watching several movies at work that day.

Re:Oh joy! More Cloud computing

[Abcd1234]

So now the PHB's in the upper offices find this and think it's great, and move everyone to this. Great! Until the day the network has problems. Or you have to finish that presentation but are temporarily sitting in an office with no network because yours is getting remodeled.

And therefore this thing is completely useles!

Wow, congrats, you should tell Microsoft why this product is completely pointless and utterly sucks. I'm sure they'll be interested to hear your insights.

Two weeks ago my entire office was shut down for doing any real work, because all our work data is on a shared drive located on the network.

Wow, way to invalidate your very complaint. As you point out, people are *already* hosed if the network goes down. Doubly so if you have remote sites hooked up over VPN.

Re:Oh joy! More Cloud computing

[dwillden]

Yes we were hosed because our employer relied on network storage. I didn't explain it well. There were projects we were unable to work on. But those of us who did keep copies of the projects on our own hard drives were able to work on those, because all the necessary office software is on the individual computers.

Yes we were limited in what we could do because the major project we were supposed to be working on was on the network. And we had to scrounge a USB cable to be able to print anything but we were able to do some paperwork. Just not the main project.

Had our office suites also been reliant on the network we would have been totally hosed. Or even the internet often tends to bog down at times (they need a fatter pipe), and at those times even though the network shares are available, cloud apps would not. I admit I explained my point poorly. But it didn't invalidate the complaint.

Change in business model ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Microsoft slowly changing it's business model ? Selling Microsoft Office licenses is one of the major sources of revenue.

And at what point will there be a free windows version ?

Re:Change in business model ?

[biryokumaru]

And at what point will there be a free windows version?

When they can get it to run in internet explorer.

Re:Change in business model ?

[spyrochaete]

Is Microsoft slowly changing it's business model ? Selling Microsoft Office licenses is one of the major sources of revenue.

And at what point will there be a free windows version ?

YES, Microsoft is changing their business model big time. Steve Ballmer announced in his recent University of Washington speech that Microsoft is dedicating 70% fo their software engineers to creating cloud-based versions of their local software, and by next year it will increase to 90%. They were slow to adopt the cloud but plan to become a big contender in a short amount of time.

The speech is about 90 minutes long and is very interesting, for those who care to watch. He's quite a good speaker with a very good knowledge of the industry, and he handles people's questions directly and in detail. What impressed me most was that he openly praises other companies and their cloud apps like Salesforce and Google.

Re:Change in business model ?

[turbidostato]

"Is Microsoft slowly changing it's business model ? Selling Microsoft Office licenses is one of the major sources of revenue."

Yes. And they see those days are passing away and moving on towards the second best: SaaS.
  * Main advantage for them: they rent the services so if they carefully stablish their lock-in strategy they'll be securing their revenues forever; you won't even have the option to lock the computer and "freeze" it in time using your same old licenses for as long as it does the work (think a Windows 3.1 box with something that is still useful). They already tried to "rent" you the licenses but it didn't seem to work so well except, maybe, for big corps so they'll try to force you into their "you owe us a bill each month" this way.
  * Main disadvantage for them: they'll have to expend for the computer power instead of you and they'll be easily fingerpointed when things wreak havoc.

All in all, it's a "second best". No wonder they...
a) Embrace it
b) But only when it's clear their "first best" is going nowhere.

Re:Change in business model ?

[Nyder]

Is Microsoft slowly changing it's business model ? Selling Microsoft Office licenses is one of the major sources of revenue.

And at what point will there be a free windows version ?

YES, Microsoft is changing their business model big time. Steve Ballmer announced in his recent University of Washington speech that Microsoft is dedicating 70% fo their software engineers to creating cloud-based versions of their local software, and by next year it will increase to 90%. They were slow to adopt the cloud but plan to become a big contender in a short amount of time.

The speech is about 90 minutes long and is very interesting, for those who care to watch. He's quite a good speaker with a very good knowledge of the industry, and he handles people's questions directly and in detail. What impressed me most was that he openly praises other companies and their cloud apps like Salesforce and Google.

What? No frothing mouth and crazy rants?

Ballmer must be on his meds finally.

Re:Change in business model ?

[Anonymous Coward]

What impressed me most was that he openly praises other companies and their cloud apps like Salesforce and Google.

Why does it impress you? It's self serving. The more the big companies push for ridiculous modus operandi called cloud computing, the more they can eliminate what they would consider licensing violations, and entrench vendor lock-in. It would be impressive if MS supported/encouraged anti-vendor-lock-in standards, or produced software from which one could easily move away (I'm looking at you, Outlook).

AC because I'm too lazy to log in.

Re:Change in business model ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay Ballmer, I get it. I'll go watch the video.

Re:Change in business model ?

[jonaskoelker]

<a href="not video">University of Washington speech</a>

Could you please post a download link (for viewing in my favorite video player)?

Re:Change in business model ?

[Anonymous Coward]

"What impressed me most..."

You're easily impressed boyo.

Re:Change in business model ?

[spyrochaete]

The URL I posted had a download link. I hope your favourite video player supports WMV.
 
  download

Re:Change in business model ?

[bazorg]

The speech is about 90 minutes long and is very interesting, for those who care to watch. He's quite a good speaker with a very good knowledge of the industry, and he handles people's questions directly and in detail. What impressed me most was that he openly praises other companies and their cloud apps like Salesforce and Google.

I just watched it and it drags on a while. I wish there was a transcript. The meaty parts would not take more than 15 minutes to cover. Maybe this is what I need to do for a living now that the web is turning into TV: get a bunch of people to watch videos, make transcripts and publish them for subscribers to save time instead of having to watch the whole bloody thing :)

Re:Change in business model ?

[Doctor O]

Dude, you've got the link to the speech wrong. It's this one.

Re:Change in business model ?

[spyrochaete]

I just watched it and it drags on a while. I wish there was a transcript.

A quick Bing search could have saved you a /. post.

Re:Change in business model ?

[bazorg]

Thanks, I will ask /. for a refund immediately.

Business model

[Registered Coward v2]

I see MS doing several things with this, including:

The free version builds understanding and credibility; especially if it integrates with teh desktop version. Once taht is done, migrate to paid for versions for businesses since the model is now accepted.

Working to a client server model (despite the "cloud" what's old is new again) and partner / acquire a company in that space to offer businesses a full suite of services.

If OfficeLive catches on, advertising will follow.

Ultimately, I think it's about building a tight eco-system around office / entertainment / information that allows them to capture eyeballs for ads and combat piracy so content providers sign on. This is but one more shot in that battle.

Re:Business model

[M. Baranczak]

My take on it: they decided to do it because Google's doing it, and they don't want to get "left behind". Then they came up with a plausible-sounding business case for their scheme.

Re:Business model

[Registered Coward v2]

My take on it: they decided to do it because Google's doing it, and they don't want to get "left behind". Then they came up with a plausible-sounding business case for their scheme.

Yea, that works for me as well. MS has always been a fast follower; letting someone else build the market and then moving in to capitalize on it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Re:Business model

[Anonymous Coward]

Offering Office as a web app would not constitute distribution of software, hence allowing them to use all the open source code with or without their own modifications without actually making those modifications to code open.

You are no longer buying software, you are now getting free/paid services. Now they can take all the free innovation the OSS crowd loves to wave around and add their mix of proprietary innovations.

MS users just got a bit more smug as this means "You have functionality x in Open Office? So does MS Office, plus functionality y and z!".

Actually, OO has been mimicking Office so it hasn't been the case that MS has had to take from OO, but now OO will never have a functional advantage over MS Office, unless MS just simply don't want that functionality.

As a consumer, I'd go with whichever product has the most for free. MS only have to offer what is available free + a little more. And they can do that easily.

Re:Business model

[outsider007]

MS actually came out with something like this years ago before google did. They had search before google too.

Re:Business model

[Bing Tsher E]

That's true, so long as all you're trying to search is C:

Re:Business model

[jimicus]

MS actually came out with something like this years ago before google did. They had search before google too.

Lots of people had search before Google. It's just that most of them did a lousy job of it.

Don't forget GUID.

[Jane Q. Public]

Remember that all Office applications embed a GUID in the document. My guess would be that the online version would as well. So your privacy is up for grabs.

Who cares if it's free, if you don't want it anyway?

Re:Don't forget GUID.

[Anonymous Coward]

What sort of information is in the GUID?

Re:Don't forget GUID.

[WrongSizeGlass]

Remember that all Office applications embed a GUID in the document. My guess would be that the online version would as well. So your privacy is up for grabs.

Oh joy! Does this mean I'll be able to track my documents via Facebook or will Facebook just do it for me without my knowledge?

Re:Don't forget GUID.

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean I'll be able to track my documents via Facebook or will Facebook just do it for me without my knowledge?

First one, then the other.

Re:Don't forget GUID.

[Jane Q. Public]

Microsoft used it once to track down a virus writer. You may remember that case. But what it boils down to is that Office "called home" and reported to Microsoft what this person's GUID was. And Microsoft looked it up in their database to find the person who originally authored a Word macro virus.

Cool, huh? Except that the potential for abuse is far larger than any good such data would be used for.

People on the Web need to wise up to the concept that mere existence of personal data creates a potential for abuse.

Re:Don't forget GUID.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's stuff like this that has me pre-print random patterns of tiny yellow dots on any text documents going to paper. It's bad enough that I keep running out of yellow anyways, at least this way I'll use it to stay anonymous.

I'm sure somebody clever enough knows a way or two to spoof GUIDs as well.

Re:Don't forget GUID.

[drsmithy]

Microsoft used it once to track down a virus writer. You may remember that case. But what it boils down to is that Office "called home" and reported to Microsoft what this person's GUID was. And Microsoft looked it up in their database to find the person who originally authored a Word macro virus.

This is false - though typical Slashdotist - anti-Microsoft hysteria.

What actually happened was simple, old-fashioned police work. The original upload of Melissa was tracked to a newsgroup posting, which was subsequently tracked to an IP address belong to an AOL account. The police got the logs for that account from AOL, identified the address of the number that dialed into it, and then arrested the resident along with seizing their computer.

The only role the GUID played was as supporting evidence that the document containing Melissa was, in fact, created on the computer that they had seized. It was also used fairly extensively throughout the computing world to identify other viruses that had been written by the same author, as they all had the same GUID.

No phoning home. No centralised database of Office users. No conspiracy.

Re:Don't forget GUID.

[Jane Q. Public]

I read an article about the matter at the time, which included an interview with a Microsoft representative who claimed credit for tracking down the culprit, exactly as I described. If it isn't true, then blame the news and Microsoft, not me.

It is true that I am not particularly fond of Microsoft as a company, but I did not make this up. It came from the "horse's mouth", as it were.

Re:Don't forget GUID.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, its impressive that you blindly believe anything some random MS executive says. Ofcource unless it doesn't suit your trolling purposes.. then anything they say is FUD, nonsense, etc, etc ;)

Re:Don't forget GUID.

[Nyder]

Remember that all Office applications embed a GUID in the document. My guess would be that the online version would as well. So your privacy is up for grabs.

Who cares if it's free, if you don't want it anyway?

Damn, paranoid are you?

Ever here the saying, if you want to keep something private, you don't put it on the internet? Well, ya, that would apply here.

Anyone who thinks they can keep stuff private on the internet, well, deserves what will happen.

As for privacy, well, ya, dang dude. Your paying something to use their software, thats how the freaking market works.

You watch TV, you pay by getting commericals. Same for radio.

You go to free internet land (and not so free) you are going to get hit with ads and other things that record your IP number.

In fact, mr/i(s)(s) paranoid, your post has been tracked and recorded.

Welcome to the internet. You want to keep things private? Don't want your parents to find the sex vids you did with that dog?
Don't put them on the internet. Don't store them on a computer that is connected to the internet.

Otherwise, just produce as much static as you can, so it's harder to find the true info.

Re:Don't forget GUID.

[shutdown -p now]

Remember that all Office applications embed a GUID in the document. My guess would be that the online version would as well. So your privacy is up for grabs.

Look...

We're talking about storing documents - as in, text, spreadsheets, etc - in "the cloud". Which is to say, the storage provider has full access to their contents.

What. Fucking. Privacy?

Re:Don't forget GUID.

[Anonymous Coward]

party pooper

Re:Don't forget GUID.

[cyberthanasis12]

Microsoft used it once to track down a virus writer. You may remember that case. But what it boils down to is that Office "called home" and reported to Microsoft what this person's GUID was. And Microsoft looked it up in their database to find the person who originally authored a Word macro virus.

This is false - though typical Slashdotist - anti-Microsoft hysteria.

Please slashdot moderators. Enlighten me why is the parent informative, but not the grandparent?

Re:Don't forget GUID.

[Anonymous Coward]

What? You mean Microsoft's Online app doesn't guarantee the privacy of their client's documents? What's the point of using their service then? All user-created contents belong to Microsoft or somehting, is it?

Re:Don't forget GUID.

[shutdown -p now]

There are probably some legal guarantees. I'm not a lawyer, so I'll just refer you to the official Microsoft privacy policy (the link "Privacy" on SkyDrive just redirects there). You're welcome to try to parse the legalese, and post the human-readable explanation here for the benefit of all of us.

Technologically, however, if it's stored on the servers, and said servers can serve you content to any machine and any browser (which implies that there's no encryption key that travels with you, for example), then, clearly, the content is stored on the servers in such a way that it can be accessed by the operator of said server. Or any government agents legally in power to request this information from the operator. Or anyone who hacks the servers.

This, of course, equally applies to any other online documents / file storage / email service.

Re:Don't forget GUID.

[Jane Q. Public]

Right. But there is (often) a difference between "can be", and "can legally be". I would argue that anyone who would use such a service without strong privacy terms in their user agreement is a very foolish person.

S.O.B.

[smchris]

Trying to do a cloud version of what they did with Office 97's monopoly underpricing against WordPerfect. We'll see how it works this time.

Re:S.O.B.

[ClosedSource]

WordPerfect was effectively dead long before Office 97 came along.

More to the point

[Anonymous Coward]

How long until they drop the retail version and charge a monthly fee for the on-line? They've been trying to push for a monthly fee for Office for a long time. They won't stop trying until they get everyone paying a monthly fee. The problem they are facing is just how many more must have features can they add? Open Office has done everything I needed for 6 or 8 years at least so most Office users wind up needing an upgrade more for the new OS than features, gee I wonder if that's a coincidence? Really their only hope of keeping a cash flow is to get everyone on a subscription. They've known this for years but they have yet to make a compelling case to switch. Internet penetration with their core customers is near a 100% so they can potentially phase out upgrades to Office and go to subscriptions. Other softwares are headed in that direction including a lot of graphics software. Really what's their choice? Either get people to pay a monthly fee or face sales dropping and the company radically downsizing. Microsoft really has two products, Windows and Office. By tying Windows to new computers they have some security there but Office sales are very subjective. They've yet to have a blockbuster product like Apple, Xbox was only profitable from game sales the hardware was never all that profitable. Zune? How many people do you know that owns one? Zero for me but I knows dozens with iPods, maybe hundreds personally. They either force people to pay monthly or yearly for Office or the company will loose value very soon.

Re:More to the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude! Repeat after me: "

and /> work on Slashdot". Geez!

Re:More to the point

[nacturation]

Dude! Repeat after me: "<p> </p> and <br /> work on Slashdot". Geez!

Hitting [ENTER] works well too, and Slashdot will auto-convert it to the appropriate HTML for you. Choose your message options as "Plain Old Text" which also allows you to insert links, style it bold or italic, quote text, insert ordered or unordered lists, and so on. Who the hell manually enters paragraph or line break tags on Slashdot anymore?

Re:More to the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has enough sense not to do this. Cloud based apps may work for consumers, but will fly over like a lead balloon when it comes to the enterprise. There are a lot of businesses out there who do not want to have their document data stuck on a third party server (such as anything classified+ on a military network). And if Microsoft does not provide them a version of Office that can be run on machines isolated from the Internet, someone else will. IBM has Lotus Symphony (a rebranded OOo version). Sun has StarOffice, Corel has WordPerfect. And don't forget AbiWord. Incompatibilities? If there is a wholesale shift away from Word, I'm sure some software company (or OSS project) will spend the millions of dollars it would take to make a 99.9999% compatible format exporter (compared to the 98-99% correct formatting we have now.)

Unlike Apple where their toys are in plain view to every consumer, Microsoft's killer apps are not as visible to end users. Instead, what their core business is the enterprise. Exchange, and to a lesser extent, SharePoint, Active Directory, SQL Server, are important and are crucial foundations to a lot of company infrastructures. Businesses with hundreds to thousands of PCs (if not more) find it critical to have manageability. And the one thing that can be said about Windows is that it one can manage a lot of PCs just by pushing out GPOs. Couple examples:

Say company legal puts out an edict forbidding USB flash drives to be accessed, it is trivial for a domain admin to edit a GPO and push it out forest-wide and then write a memo for the record saying the dirty deed has been done.

If a corporate officer wants everyone to have their E-mail archived, it is very easy to not just complete this task (create an archiving mailbox, then an Exchange rule that selects all users, and copies/forwards a copy to the mailbox), but to show in an audit that it was done. (Of course, this is a general case, there are third party solutions that do a lot more and offer a lot more archiving features.)

If an edict comes out dictating that all copies of Word in use in a company have to have the password protection to save disabled, a domain admin can make that happen in a decent amount of time.

None of these features are really consumer oriented. Most people don't really need enterprise grade features. However, for companies that do, Microsoft does a decent job at delivering a solution.

How exactly do you pitch this to management?

[Colin Smith]

How about something like this?

"Well, you see, Google got hacked, they had the code to their global authentication taken, who knows what the hackers found there and what access they've got now... So, we decided to go with Microsoft instead."

 

Re:How exactly do you pitch this to management?

[im_thatoneguy]

At which point they simply purchase a copy of Microsoft Office instead for most use, just as Microsoft hopes they'll do. I don't imagine any business will want their office software tied to internet connectivity. And many won't want their documents in the cloud out of their control. So Microsoft Office EXEs will still be profitable while the online Office offers essentially what most companies already have in the form of Outlook Web Edition.

If the documents though are stored on your Microsoft(tm) Sharepoint(tm) server running on Microsoft(tm) Windows 2008 Server(tm) then you can use Sharepoint(tm) to host your documents off of Microsoft(tm)'s server while still using this free interface while on a mobile device.

Personally I find Google Docs only marginally useful even for the simplest of tasks, it would never replace a copy of Office for me. But it has some really useful features and is great for collaboration. Collaboration requires everyone to have free access though. I can't put up a document and require a client to purchase XYZ software to be able to make edits.

I don't see this cutting into Microsoft's sales too badly.

Re:How exactly do you pitch this to management?

[tomhudson]

Personally I find Google Docs only marginally useful even for the simplest of tasks, it would never replace a copy of Office for me.

Personally, I find any "office suite" useless for the simplest of tasks. Why do people think their to-do list or 1-page memo requires anything more complicated than plain text?

Re:How exactly do you pitch this to management?

[tagno25]

Personally I find Google Docs only marginally useful even for the simplest of tasks, it would never replace a copy of Office for me.

Personally, I find any "office suite" useless for the simplest of tasks. Why do people think their to-do list or 1-page memo requires anything more complicated than plain text?

Even multi-page letters and reports should be in a plain text file. All the bad formating does is make the document harder to read.

Re:How exactly do you pitch this to management?

[postmortem]

Sad thing is that today people don't even know what is plain text format, but they do know what is .doc file.

Re:How exactly do you pitch this to management?

[Draek]

Because Times New Roman is boring, and they don't know you can change Notepad's default font to Comic Sans anyways.

Re:How exactly do you pitch this to management?

[obarthelemy]

I usually have OOo open, and opening another app for simpler documents seems kinda silly. Plus I like the creature comforts (files history, automatic bullet lists...)

Re:How exactly do you pitch this to management?

[flabordec]

I'll have to disagree. If I have a table of numbers I just obtained from a benchmark and I want to see how they compare to the past then it is very easy to use a spreadsheet to automatically give me the percentages. Further still, if I want to see graphically if the numbers are better or worse I could use conditional formatting to give me shades of green or red, depending on how much better or worse it is, then, with one quick look, I will be able to say "you know what, xyz got much worse but everything else looks the same, maybe we should investigate that". If I only had plain text the information would still be there, but unless I were a computer it would be very hard to make any sense of it.

Re:How exactly do you pitch this to management?

[tagno25]

That is a spreadsheet (math), not a document (text).

Re:How exactly do you pitch this to management?

[flabordec]

That is a report that will eventually get to decision makers and if decisions have to be made fast they will want the information to be apparent not hidden in text only.

Re:How exactly do you pitch this to management?

[tomhudson]

That is a report that will eventually get to decision makers and if decisions have to be made fast they will want the information to be apparent not hidden in text only.

It's stupid thinking like that that led to bad decisions through a badly-done powerpoint presentation that resulted in the shuttle disaster.

If it's an important decision, it shouldn't be made fast, and it should be made by someone who can actually understand the information without it being dumbed down and pre-digested.

Look at the case where financial models were out of whack for a year because a secretary changed one cell - and replaced the formula with a number.

Re:How exactly do you pitch this to management?

[Richard_at_work]

At which point they simply purchase a copy of Microsoft Office instead for most use, just as Microsoft hopes they'll do. I don't imagine any business will want their office software tied to internet connectivity.

Microsoft is offering an 'on-premise' version of Office 2010 Web Apps, so no reliance on an internet connection or requirement to have your data on third party servers.

I think a lot of people have missed this point.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/ee815687.aspx

Re:How exactly do you pitch this to management?

[flabordec]

It's stupid thinking like that that led to bad decisions through a badly-done powerpoint presentation that resulted in the shuttle disaster.

Of course! It's stupid thinking like that! Instead of doing badly-done powerpoint presentations we should be making decisions off of raw text. For example, it would be much easier to determine if a shuttle's systems are on line by parsing a two hundred line document than by looking at a green light, I mean, who needs lights when you have text?

And while we are at it, it's stupid thinking that punctuation marks are useful, they only help to dilute the data in your sentence. If people really want to make sense of what you say, it better cost them. We don't want all those stupid people understanding what you say, right? (I'm happy the world has geniuses like you, I don't know where we would be if everyone was a stupid sheep like me)

If it's an important decision, it shouldn't be made fast, and it should be made by someone who can actually understand the information without it being dumbed down and pre-digested.

Obviously! Where I work we have thousands of incredibly smart people just waiting to memorize raw data, every single point in the two million point benchmarks analysis, they want them all. I am glad we have the kind of man power to have all this people looking at numbers in a text file rather than, you know, revolutionizing the world or something. Of course... by the time they actually made sense of the two million points of data it is a bit late to make any decisions regarding performance because we have already shipped, but decisions like "we should investigate why this is slow" shouldn't be taken lightly!

Look at the case where financial models were out of whack for a year because a secretary changed one cell - and replaced the formula with a number.

You are completely right! Financial models would be much better if everyone had to make their own calculations, that's why every time I do kinematics problems I recalculate the value of gravity. Of course that takes some time, but it is better to calculate everything by hand than relying on technology.

Re:How exactly do you pitch this to management?

[tomhudson]

You are living proof that powerpoint indeed makes people stupid.

Informed decisions can only be made when you have enough info to make an informed decision. Powerpoint works against that. Anyone who bases a decision on some monkey's powerpoint slides deserves what they get.

Re:How exactly do you pitch this to management?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm... I think you're missing flabordec's point. By representing tons of data in a single graph, you are not dumbing it down. It's just another way to look at it, to analyze it. Of course, only those who are well-informed will be able to make sense of that graph.
What would be easier? Parsing through 1000 results in plain text, looking manually for the alarming values, or telling your computer to mark those values with red? Or maybe you could see in which scale the alarming values compare to expected results in a graph. The computer won't lie to you unless YOU give it the incorrect data (which would result in a disaster anyway, using plain text or not). The case of the secretary who changed that single cell, well, it did not have to do with using Excel or PowerPoint or any other tool. The problem lies in the fact of someone giving the secretary control over data that DID NOT correspond to her or that she wasn't prepared to manage. The same goes to the Evil PowerPoint Slides that destroyed the space shuttle.

No one here is defending bad PowerPoint slides or saying that important data should be dumbed down (specially when it will be presented to experts). Just don't go to the extreme of disqualifying other data representations and saying that plain text is the best for every task.

Re:How exactly do you pitch this to management?

[tomhudson]

The point was that powerpoint is the worst way to present information. It was implicated as the point of failure in NASAs decision to launch. His argument was a straw man attempting to divert attention away from the real issue - that powerpoint is a waste of time and leads to bad decisions.

The case of the secretary who changed that single cell, well, it did not have to do with using Excel or PowerPoint or any other tool.

Then either it was the wrong tool for the job, or it was improperly used by the person who set it up. The cell should have been protected, but more important, instead of using a spreadsheet - spreadsheetitis - the data should have been processed as a batch job, where ONLY the data can be changed, not the formulas.

So there were two points of failure, either of which could have been corrected, but only the second one would have prevented people from "working around" the cell protection.

Re:How exactly do you pitch this to management?

[flabordec]

Whooooosh! Missed the point completely. Let me put some formatting so you get the idea. GGGGGGP said:

Even multi-page letters and reports should be in a plain text file. All the bad formating does is make the document harder to read.

What I answered was:

If I only had plain text the information would still be there, but unless I were a computer it would be very hard to make any sense of it.

Then you decided to stick your nose and make an unintelligible comment bashing power point, which wasn't even part of the discussion, and calling people stupid.

The point here is formatting, when used appropriately, makes important information apparent (see what I did there?) Text only files hide important information in seas of irrelevant information.

Apparently in bizarro world where you come from people have all the time in the universe to get the full information of every single problem and analyze it fully without the use of machines (they are evil). On the real world I prefer having important information be as clear as possible and if possible have the computer give me just the data points relevant to my current problem so I can make informed decisions fast. This does not mean I don't have the same information you do, I do.

But we'll just have to disagree seeing how we live in different universes.

Free is a good price

[NicknamesAreStupid]

I can afford it. No return hassles. No sales tax. No need for a warranty. No elevated expectations. Can they do this with Windows?

Re:Free is a good price

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you should try the new OS release: http://www.ubuntu.com/

Free to use, easy to install, no viruses, software store like iTunes but for your desktop!

Re:Free is a good price

[vlm]

I can afford it. No return hassles. No sales tax. No need for a warranty. No elevated expectations. Can they do this with Windows?

Did that years ago, at piratebay.

Re:Free is a good price

[walterbyrd]

It's free to put your foot in bear trap.

Once you have all your documents in OOXML format, then what happens when Microsoft can no longer provide the service for free? Or what if the free version of OOXML is not compitable with Office-2012?

I don't know if that will happen, but from what I know of Microsoft's history, it seems possible, even likely.

Re:Free is a good price

[Anonymous Coward]

Free to use, easy to install, no viruses, software store like iTunes but for your desktop!

Free to use - Unless you want to use patented/proprietary codecs.

Easy to install - Yeah it either installs or it doesn't.

No Viruses - Only if you source your software from white-listed sources. Gee, sounds like windows.

iTunes but for your desktop - Thats almost never up to date.

Re:Free is a good price

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes absolutely ... You'll need to buy a Mac so you can access windows in the cloud though . . .

JavaShit

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you use a CrapTastic JS based office 'web app' when you can just use openoffice or another better, free, minimalist more responsive ad-free version? Desktop applications re-written in JavaScript suck, especially if they are made by Microsoft

Re:JavaShit

[sqrt(2)]

Starting the word processor in OpenOffice is slower than either Pages or Word on my Mac. It's incredibly slow. GoogleDocs in Chrome is the fastest (when internet connection cooperates) and when I need to edit something offline I use Pages even though I don't like it as much as Word Windows. At least Openoffice is free so I can't really complain, but I'd like if they could focus on speeding it up instead of chasing the latest features in MS Office.

Re:JavaShit

[ClosedSource]

"Desktop applications re-written in JavaScript suck, especially if they are made by Microsoft"

Sure I have trouble with the dozen desktop applications that MS re-wrote in JavaScript too. What were their names again?

We all live in a giant cloud of death

[Anonymous Coward]

b1ecause of it's inherent instabilities and identity requirements, a true cloud would have no such restraints, and though the day can be clear the operations of such a cloud would be to convert to a useable format anonymously and then exit the system. Surely your not even thinking about voting through such hogwash?

This has nothing to do with OOXML.

[Motard]

Microsoft has no interest in OOXML. From Microsoft's perspective, it's deprecated. That's why they let it go. This is about XAML, upon which Silverlight is built. And XAML could be a very powerful thing.

A subset of XAML, XPS replaces Postscript. Any static page that can be printed can be stored as XPS. XPS is/will be the printer control language in Windows.

But XPS can also be displayed on screen (good bye Acrobat). XPS could be used to store any static document (goodbye Illustrator).

But the superset XAML is dynamic framework for rich internet apps (goodbye Flash).

XAML pages/apps can be designed in an Illustrator-like ExpressionWeb (goodbye HTML5 and CSS).

Of course, you can use the Office Web Apps without Silverlight and you can still see PNG images of your document. But if you should decide to install Silverlight I bet you'll find it a better experience.

Re:This has nothing to do with OOXML.

[thoughtsatthemoment]

I get it. XAML is the new .NET, which was to replace C/C++/Java, and did a helluva...

Re:This has nothing to do with OOXML.

[Motard]

No, XAML is the new HTML. At least if Microsoft get its way. Get thee to Wikipedia and read. It's very comprehensive. Put the blinders on if you wish, but don't say I didn't warn you. .NET is subservient to XAML. .NET is an effort to herd the corporate developers to XAML. XAML has always underlied .NET.

Re:This has nothing to do with OOXML.

[thoughtsatthemoment]

No, XAML is the new HTML. At least if Microsoft get its way. Get thee to Wikipedia and read. It's very comprehensive. Put the blinders on if you wish, but don't say I didn't warn you. .NET is subservient to XAML. .NET is an effort to herd the corporate developers to XAML. XAML has always underlied .NET.

Nonsense. .NET started a long time before WPF, which introduced XAML.

Re:This has nothing to do with OOXML.

[Motard]

And you don't think they had a plan? I am a Windows developer and was left wondering for a long time why they were literally backing up in terms of productivity. Most of the industry was as well.

In the beginning, nobody knew what .NET was.

Compare with Apple who wanted to lock their developers into their own IDE. Then a new architecture comes out and everything works on it. Okay, now I get it....

Re:This has nothing to do with OOXML.

[bmo]

Two words:

Display Postscript.

That's what you just described. The only thing is that Display Postscript always had an onerous licensing scheme so it got dropped as a technology by nearly everyone. Adobe could revive it tomorrow if they wanted and XPS would be a smoking crater. The only question is if they're smart enough to do it.

--
BMO

Re:This has nothing to do with OOXML.

[Anonymous Coward]

If Adobe made it reasonable to license both DPS and PostScript for low end printers, they would immediately become the standard, and essentially there will never be a driver issue. At worst, you can print using the standard PostScript commands, and if you want enhanced, printer specific functionality, maybe install a driver for that.

However, since Adobe chose not to allow people to go this route, we have our current problems. Adobe still probably can do this, and then they would have a stranglehold on the printer market.

Re:This has nothing to do with OOXML.

[hairyfeet]

No, XAML is MSFT's answer to "everything...in a box" pretty much. If you have Windows and silverlight check this out, and remember that silverlight is a subset of XAML. With XAML you can have FMV, audio, apps, pretty much anything and everything, online or off, and use hardware acceleration (via DirectX of course) to make it all flow smooth as butter.

Say what you want about MSFT, and I'll agree they have done some seriously boneheaded maneuvers (canceling the family pack for W7 was seriously dumb) but their R&D dept does cook up some cool shit.

Re:This has nothing to do with OOXML.

[ClosedSource]

"I am a Windows developer and was left wondering for a long time why they were literally backing up in terms of productivity. Most of the industry was as well."

I've heard all lot of trash talk on .NET over the years, but I've never heard anyone claim it was "backing up in terms of productivity". Since "Most of the industry" believed it, it should be easy to find a link you could post here to prove it.

"In the beginning, nobody knew what .NET was."

In the beginning of what? While it's true that .NET marketing was muddled by MS's attempt to attach it to everything, it was pretty clear to developers what it was all about.

Re:This has nothing to do with OOXML.

[Anonymous Coward]

good bye Acrobat

ha...

goodbye Illustrator

HA!

That Microsoft is something else. Is there anything they won't overengineer? Maybe they should call Cisco and convince them to use XAML on their routers. Then you could get new firmware images from Windows Live Router, as long as you have an MSDN account.

Re:This has nothing to do with OOXML.

[shutdown -p now]

Silverlight is not a "subset" of XAML, not anymore than XHTML is a "subset" of XML. Rather, Silverlight is an application of XAML, and is a subset of WPF.

XAML, by itself, is nothing but an XML-based markup language to describe trees of objects (and arbitrary graphs in XAML 2009), with an object model mapping more or less directly to that of CLR (though nothing precludes you from using it in C++ or Java). It doesn't care what the classes are, or what properties they have - it works with those concepts in a generic way.

And Silverlight (and WPF) simply define a lot of classes - for UI and other things - designed to be composable as a tree such that they are conveniently defined using XAML.

Of course, XAML by itself has nothing to do with hardware acceleration, or any other presentational aspect. It's the implementation of those Silverlight/WPF classes that handles that. You can write a Silverlight application entirely in code, by calling constructors, setting properties, and wiring up evens manually - with not a single line of XAML - and it would work just the same (only be several times longer).

Re:This has nothing to do with OOXML.

[Anonymous Coward]

"But if you should decide to install Silverlight I bet you'll find it a better experience."

haha

Re:This has nothing to do with OOXML.

[Anonymous Coward]

Silverlight

Oh great, let's replace the dominant proprietary Rich Internet Application framework (Flash/Flex) with another proprietary format except this time only make it work in half the internet browsers.

Or maybe we could just use open standards like HTML5 and Javascript?

Re:This has nothing to do with OOXML.

[Anonymous Coward]

What a bunch of crap.

Re:second post

[tomhudson]

suck the shit off my dick you faggot!

You have shit on your dick? And you're calling someone else a "faggot"?

clear strategy

[DaveGod]

The summary suggests this is a push to cement the OOXML standard and ultimately lock-in for MS Office. I don't really see why they need a free cloud-based offering to do that, MS Office has done extremely well at locking-in their standards in the past. TFA that it refers to also clearly argues this is MS having to compete with Google Docs, a much more evident profit motive. MS is also quoted that they see this as an opportunity to get at least a little income from people who, for various reasons, aren't currently paying for MS Office.

Whether it remains free indefinitely depends on how it works out, i.e. whether they think it is making more money (directly and indirectly) than doing something else. Stating the obvious but it's a silly question. Even Openoffice is freely supported by Sun for a profit motive: breaking the MS standards lock-in.

The Google quotes are on the money though. It's standard practice now for businesses to install Office on every machine while all the documents are saved to a network drive. This is a bit of a kludge really, people hunting through directories trying to find files is very cumbersome, especially since lots of people insist on saving works-in-progress to their desktop and only copying over when they're finished - and very often forgetting or not getting around to it.

Re:clear strategy

[walterbyrd]

I don't really see why they need a free cloud-based offering to do that, MS Office has done extremely well at locking-in their standards in the past. TFA that it refers to also clearly argues this is MS having to compete with Google Docs

You seem to have almost answered your question. Msft has been successful at vendor lock-in, in the past, but now more people are wise to the scam. And now msft has to compete with google docs, and for the first time in a long time, msft may not be able to fully control the document standard. Some governments, and major institutions are taking a hard look at ODF.

Msft hates and fears ODF. Why do you think msft went so totally balistic - bribing judges etc - to get their OOXML accepted as an ISO standard. Msft will stop at nothing to get people away from a truly open standard.

you can wiki it

[RobertLTux]

but the short version is that it is a very long funky number that should be unique to whatever

will this remain free indefinitely?

[nurb432]

Only if viable alternatives still exist. Once they are put down, then it will be converted to a pay service.

Civilization Teaches . . .

[MarkvW]

eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate!

probably not

[v1]

Or is Microsoft just trying to firmly establish its OOXML standard,

I doubt that's the case at all. When you're going against other software such as Google Documents, you either have to offer a better product, tight lock-in, or better pricing. Free is hard to beat, you've committed (on paper anyway) to open standards which greatly hobbles your lock-in, and so you're left having to offer at least a good chunk of the features the competition is giving that you currently are not.

Right now, Google Documents is offering a powerful new online service. I use Google Spreadsheet daily. It ain't perfect, but considering how new it is, it works amazingly well. It's easy to forget you're using a web browser when you just hit certain key combos for example out of habit, and to your surprise, they work perfect. Some of my spreadsheets can't be used with it, but the ability to collaborate online with others maintaining the same spreadsheets, at the exact same time, no emailing files back and forth all day or fighting over update locks on the LAN (or possible file corruption / data loss from an update war) it provides a unique, powerful, useful feature that my current use can't live without, and that MS Office doesn't offer. And my needs are far from unique. Everyone I tell about this is amazed and wants to try it because it gives them a useful option that MS Office just can't deliver.

This is it for Office, this is their shot to either keep or lose a market. It's not surprising in the least that they're rushing to get something available asap for online collaboration.

And if it were anybody but google, you can bet your last dollar that MS would have a whole herd of lawyers at someone's door with fistfuls of litigation trying to put a stop to it or at least stall it a year or two to give them a chance to catch up.

IMHO Google Documents is one of THE best things to come out of Google Labs. In the end, who knows, maybe MS will be offering a superior product. But there's simply no way this could happen without the necessary motivation.

Re:probably not

[Anonymous Coward]

In the end, who knows, maybe MS will be offering a superior product.

Fortunately for the world, MS just don't know how to create a superior product. They rely on lock-in, monopoly tactics, bribery and end-user naivety. All of which work for a while, but not in the very long term.

Re:probably not

[ClosedSource]

"Fortunately for the world, MS just don't know how to create a superior product."

Yes, it would be tragic if MS created a superior product. OMG! It's already happened! Quick, duct tape the Windows! Down to the basement! Oh, I forgot the depends!...

Re:probably not

[Anonymous Coward]

IMHO Google Documents is one of THE best things to come out of Google Labs. In the end, who knows, maybe MS will be offering a superior product. But there's simply no way this could happen without the necessary motivation.

They already do, it's called Microsoft Office. It has better performance, better reliability (no mysterious outages for hours without explanation afterward), better portability (ever tried to access Google Apps while flying?), better privacy (local storage!), better usability (direct pasting of images, among other things), and more power (as many fonts as you want, paste-special, styles, etc.).

The way I see it, if you don't need office programs for business (ie., to make money), you should probably stick with the free Google Docs. If you actually use your software to make money, it's worth it to fork over $150 for Office. Figure you can use Office for 3+ years... suddenly you're less than $50/yr that Google would charge you for Docs for your business.

Google Docs just doesn't make sense yet...

Re:probably not

[v1]

And it hasn't been sued into oblivion by Microsoft, despite by your claim.

That's only because it's nowhere near as popular as Google Documents.

The little-known Zoho online

There's the magic words keeping them out of the crosshairs. They're no threat.

Re:second post

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, now women can also enjoy being anally penetrated doncha know.

PDF

[way2trivial]

you are converting the PDF to PDF/A right?

I'd say the likelyhood of being able to access those 25 years from now is pretty good.

Really Too Little Too Late!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/feature.asp?contentID=1864392

Why do I need an online version of Office again? Because I want to turn my data over to Microsoft? WTF?

The cheap shot.

[westlake]

That first sample of crack is free too!

No, it ain't.

You want a sampling of MS Office?

There is the 2010 Beta. The 60 day trial on your new PC. The Docs for Facebook Beta...

Sales are quite good as well. MS Office Home & Student 2007 No. 1 in software sales. 1,231 Days in the top 100. Free upgrade to F&S 2010 if purchased before September 30.

Who needs Office

[Anonymous Coward]

when you've got groff??

Have you tried NeoOffice?

[IANAAC]

It's an OS X port of OpenOffice. Not having tried it, I would think that the native version would be quicker than standard OO.org.

That said, I've recently upgraded my version of OO.org to 3.2 on Ubuntu and it's significantly faster than then previous version.

Re:Have you tried NeoOffice?

[drtsystems]

NeoOffice is unusably slow, or sat least it was last time I used it. When I got my Intel MacBook Pro before MS released an intel version, I had to use Word 2004 though Apple's emulator environment (Rosetta). Absurdly slow. NeoOffice was SLOWER and they had a NATIVE BINARY!

Re:second post

[Anonymous Coward]

speak for yourself. I read Eric Raymond's guide to getting laid and I'm getting more trim than a barber shop, more ass than the taco bell toilet, more pussy than a crazy cat lady.

what's the point?

[jipn4]

Everything you describe already exists. What possible reason would people have to throw it all out and move to Microsoft't proprietary (and probably patented) standard?

Re:what's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything you describe already exists. What possible reason would people have to throw it all out and move to Microsoft't proprietary (and probably patented) standard?

It's objectively better?

Parent IS NOT "informative".

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Parent IS NOT "informative". You may not create new documents with this web app unless you have the EXE installed. The Parent is "Uninformed".

Re:Parent IS NOT "informative".

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent IS NOT "informative". You may not create new documents with this web app unless you have the EXE installed. The Parent is "Uninformed".

Have you actually tried and verified this or have any authoritative source for this information to point to?

Because as other posters have noted, actually trying this in the office web apps preview on Skydrive seems to refute your claim.

Re:Parent IS NOT "informative".

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Because as other posters have noted, actually trying this in the office web apps preview on Skydrive seems to refute your claim.

So, you're bitching at me with second hand info you haven't checked out yourself? Is that what I'm getting here?

Re:Parent IS NOT "informative".

[Anonymous Coward]

Because as other posters have noted, actually trying this in the office web apps preview on Skydrive seems to refute your claim.

So, you're bitching at me with second hand info you haven't checked out yourself? Is that what I'm getting here?

Nope, same AC here, I did try it myself and it worked for me in the preview on Skydrive without any exe. Same experience have been reported by other posters in this discussion. Sorry for not being clear on that. And I just asked a friend to try, he could immidiately create new documents without installing anything. It would be interesting to know where this strong claim that it isn't so is coming from.

Use a Virtual Machine?

[spaceturtle]

Have you considered archiving virtual machines with old versions of Word along with the documents? I think that you can get old versions of Word for about $50 each on ebay.

Re:Use a Virtual Machine?

[someSnarkyBastard]

That does not address the issue though, just offloads it to making sure that your VM software will be able to open the file and kick up a functioning VM. Hell, what you propose might actually make matters worse, who's to say that VM software 25 years down the road will support stuff like SATA or PATA? If they don't and you can't access the VM file, then you effectively lose the documents entirely, unless of course you want to go bit-hunting through the VM file, which still leaves you at square -1.

Its a trap.

[xtracto]

Naw ... this one is like crack. Getting you hooked is "free" but once your documents are in its clutches, um, I mean file format, then your ass belongs to them.

Yup, I believe the same. I wonder what happened to /. "itsatrap" tag, I I kinda liked it as it separated in a clear way stories from Microsoft.

This is not true

[wall0159]

Firstly, if docx files were plain text markup (PP asserts that is "exactly" what they are), then any word processing package would be able to reproduce, exactly, the documents as they appear in MS-Word. Other applications are not able to do this, and the reason is because the file format is NOT plain text markup.

Secondly, nice distraction with HTML. Since when is the web supposed to be an archival medium?

GP was on-topic. The specification for OOXML includes references to previous .doc file formats, hence discussion of those is relevant in any discussion of OOXML.

I'd say your post is one-eyed to the point of propaganda -- were you paid to write it?

Re:This is not true

[onenil]

Nice flamebait in your final sentence. So, I'll bite, just not on that.

To claim my point on HTML is a distraction, is disingenuous at best. What's ironic is you're using the point I made on HTML and re-applying the exact same logic to your argument on MS Word generated content. No two web browsers will render HTML the same way. And its as open a spec as it can be. You've said exactly the same of two word processors.

Perhaps just TRY what I suggested. Rename a .docx Word document to .zip, open it up in your favourite unzipping app, and take a look through the XML files inside, and look for the one that's got the document content in it. Wowsers! You might find inside is a condensed form of markup that signifies such things as "bold", "underlining", and, oh I don't know, "paragraphs".

I'd like to know what utopian world you believe we're in where you can find two pieces of software written in complete isolation, with the same spec available to each, where they'll both come up with exactly the same result. It doesn't happen with web browsers, it would never happen with word processors. The reason has nothing to do with whether its plain text markup or not, but one part of the answer in the case of word processors would probably have something to do with the complexity of code required to write a modern day word processor. When compared to - for the sake of this example - a web browser, a word processor not only has to render the content, it also needs to provide an easy to use UI for any Joe to write the content.

Specs are just documents. They are there to be interpreted, that's their purpose. People (programmers) interpret specs differently (see web browser as previously mentioned for further reference material).

In my experience of working with the OOXML spec (ZOMG - YES I work with it, I must be paid by MS to write this!!) I've never once had to refer to any previous DOC format. This is perhaps the edge case that I was originally referring to. And, I hazard a guess Microsoft included such references for backwards compatibility.

Slashdot zealotry at its finest!

Re:This is not true

[wall0159]

"No two web browsers will render HTML the same way. And its as open a spec as it can be. You've said exactly the same of two word processors."
That is true, and I concede that my statement about "exact" reproduction is wrong.

However, the web is transient and fluid. Office documents are not (or shouldn't be). Hence, I think it's fair to apply a stricter standard to office documents with regards to standards compliance. I think a more appropriate example is PDF -- how much variation is there between PDF renderers?

If you were not astroturfing, then please accept my apology regarding the final statement. I stand by the rest of my comments.

Re:This is not true

[onenil]

I don't agree with your comparison with PDF renderers. The key difference here is most PDF software is just what you mentioned - rendering. Adobe don't need to worry (much) about creating PDFs, because most people use Word processors to do that. All they need to worry about is a bit of translation (sometimes from another spec they own - PostScript), and the rendering side. This makes for a far easier world to keep everyone ticking along with new functionality. To me, PDFs are a secondary document spec - great for rendering, but of no value to the creation and development of documents, and this is reflected by the number of word processors you see out there that actively store documents natively as PDF.

I also believe, in contrast to your assertion, that Office document specs are transitory. They have an (albeit, slower) evolution process due to the evolution of the Office productivity tools used to maintain them.

As an example, if you take a look at the user interface changes implemented in Office 2007, regardless of what you think about the ribbon, you'll notice a proportionally higher emphasis (quantified by screen real estate) on tools that define documents.

Prior to Office 2007, and in fact in most competing, current, 'mainstream' versions of word processing tools (e.g. Open Office), UIs pushed people towards creating non semantic documents. You want more emphasis on a heading? Up the font-size, and bold the font-face. With MS Office 2007, the UI not only gives you a whole bunch of styles, but shows you what they look like so you are more likely to choose them to obtain the effect that you want. This - to me - was a real coup for Office.

The document format they use has evolved with the product. Do a bit of research, here on slashdot even, and you'll find out / be reminded that the .DOC format is legacy from the old Word 6 days, where changes to documents were actually appended to the bottom of the file in some case, so that time to render documents ready for editing was kept efficient (this was back when 486's running Windows 3.1 was the norm). Microsoft made a huge leap that began in Office 2003 and culminated to something really helpful in Office 2007.

I'm from a web development background, and I understand the need to create semantic-rich documents regardless of the medium in which they're published. With 2007, the docs suddenly become far easier to maintain in the long-run.

I saw the change Microsoft made with this particular component of Office's UI as being a genuinely good thing for the future of document management. And its my belief that until other office products come up to speed with this, they'll continue to remain where they are in terms of marketshare, or possibly go backwards.

What Microsoft did with Word 2007 is update the document standard profoundly. Now you can argue against their non-Free attitude all you like. But, purely from a non-political, technical standing, the OOXML spec is much more Open than their previous document formats (e.g. .DOC), and they are much better than where they were.

With the example of a system that may take the contents of a document, and re-purpose that content for the web, I'd be much more comfortable with Word 2007 than any other word processing products, for the two aforementioned reasons: their UI pushes users to create well defined documents, and their underlying format is far more readable, and closer to HTML, than previous Microsoft formats.

This is how Office productivity software has changed. The time scale of this change is far greater than web standards, and that is because the user base is far less open to change. It's still quite common for users to be on Office 2003, and they blame the UI for not upgrading, which, from a wholistic point of view, is exactly why I think they should upgrade.

I think you're right - Office documents "shouldn't be" transient and fluid. Perhaps I'm being optimistic, but it's my belief that they won't b

On RTF- it's a subset.

[Maxo-Texas]

Microsoft will offer a product which does some of what Office 2010 does but which does not offer key features and does not offer 24/7 uptime.

There is no promise to support the product for any particular time, so based on past history, the product will change every 3-4 years and at least once per decade, prior data will become unsupported to lesser or greater degrees.

I really disliked office 2010. I can buy it for $10 if I want to. It was slower and it was unable to print a lot of my complicated office 2003 documents. On loading them into Openoffice 3.0, I noticed that office 2003 had allowed a lot of overlapping tables and graphic files which a test showed was the problem. Since neither office 2003 nor office 2010 DISPLAYED the frikkin graphic or table boundaries there was no way I could fix this issue in Office.

So I converted all the documents to OpenOffice. Took me about 8 hours for the first 100 pages.. then once i understood OO sections, I got it down to about 2 hours per 100 pages for the rest.

Still have to use Office at work. I can even buy a full copy for $20 for home use if I want. But really don't want to go back now.

I dislike the office 2010 ribbons and approach to formatting documents and working with tables.

Get your head out of the Cloud's!

[EricTheO]

If your smart you'll stay away from Cloud Computing applications a.k.a: ASP, SASP etc.
Keep your data and uptime reliability local.

Re:second post

[L4t3r4lu5]

You're assuming that being called a "faggot" was supposed to be an insult. Re-read the sentence, replacing the exclamation mark with an ellipsis.

I think you were just hit on by a gay guy with poor grammar :)

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[account_deleted]

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OOXML is far from transparent

[Mathinker]

OOXML (not to say that I'm claiming that .docx is exactly OOXML, it isn't) can contain proprietary binary blobs. Or has Microsoft gotten around to providing a "make sure that this document will be easy to transfer to other formats" button/preference. No? How surprising....

> Now how hard it is to do this, really depends.

Duh. So prove to us that it's easy and release, in the near future, an open-source renderer for .docx which is 100% compatible with the behavior of any given version of MS Office (my guess is that they don't all render it exactly the same, themselves).

Only save in docx

[Anonymous Coward]

When I use word I only save it in the legacy version .doc so that it can be used by everybody. I tested out the online version and it will let you save a local copy but only as .docx.

So Sick and Tired

[Anonymous Coward]

I am so sick and tired of all your idiots wearing tin foil on your heads.
Oh my god! Microsoft did something! It must be evil!!

Clean the sand out of your vaginas, you bunch of whiny children.

Re:So Sick and Tired

[walterbyrd]

Apparently you not aware of msft's history. Msft has proven itself, over and over, to be every bit as evil as the "whiny children" here seem to think.

BTW: it was a US federal judge, not a slashdot poster, that accused msft of using "Tonya Harding" tactics.

Re:So Sick and Tired

[Anonymous Coward]

Waaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!

Re:Is it safe? No, it isn't.

[WillAdams]

If people would actually format their documents w/ markup, then yes, that would be a workable assumption.... but they don't. People ``fingerpaint'' documents w/ font and style and size changes, sticking text in movable frames to work around their inability to control how Word will place text and for most things more complex than a basic memo you're left w/ an unintelligible wreck if the .doc is opened in anything other than the same version of Word w/ the same fonts and the same printer driver loaded.

Re:Is it safe? No, it isn't.

[silverglade00]

You're lucky! The people I know don't know how to change fonts or styles and do all of their layout with the space bar. I need new friends...

There are emulators for the Apple ][

[spaceturtle]

Given that there are emulators for the apple ][, which is over thirty years old now, it seems likely that there will be an emulator capable of running say Windows 2000 a couple of decades down the track. But I guess it would be better to archive the ISOs of the installation media than the installed image. There are other methods they could use: convert to PDF (can't edit document easily); Convert to OpenDocument (likely to mess up formatting etc.); convert to plain UTF-8 (mess up formatting even more). It hard to tell what is best without knowing more about their requirements (perhaps a combination of all of the above).

Windows/mac only:(

[jwhitener]

While I was pleasantly surprised to see office live supporting firefox, it sure is lame that it is only supported on windows or mac.

I still need to open and save microsoft project files from time to time, and Openproj is fairly buggy.

Re:Jews for Nerds!

[Elektroschock]

How does Microsoft Office Online relate to this.

Re:Is it safe? No, it isn't.

[fyngyrz]

That finger-painting is markup, though. Swiping a word to select it and clicking bold is no different than surrounding the text with <B>word</B> there's no technical roadblock to storing the document that way, either.

You're conflating document creation with document storage. Believe me, the document doesn't store the swipe or the click. It just stores regions with markup. The issue is will this markup be easily understood (just text, obvious from context like <B>word</B>), with external references to other media (stills, motion sequences) or will it be some binary munge snuggled around some custom text encoding, interleaved with image and chart data in *their* own formats so that no one has a decent chance of decoding (*cough* PDF *cough*) without a significant (and expensive) effort?

I really believe text markup is the way to go.

I've got old docs (from "Stylograph", ca. 1970's) in text form, complete with markup, and I can read them and know just how they were intended to look, even *outside* of Stylograph. were I inclined (I'm not) I could write an importer for a current formatting app, for instance a filter for Tex would probably be very short work. But I actually don't care how these docs look, I'm just interested in the content - family letters, old resumes, design proposals, etc. Which is entirely readable because... it's text!

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