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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.
As a number of people in the Seattle Times Forum have noted, using this "web based" Office product *requires* downloading and installing an .exe
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
andMicrosoft 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.
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.
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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.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
Parent IS NOT "informative". You may not create new documents with this web app unless you have the EXE installed. The Parent is "Uninformed".
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.