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Australian Government Denies Microsoft Bias In OOXML Choice
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like the Australian Government is not taking criticism of its decision to mandate Microsoft's Office Open XML standard lying down. 'The policy is vendor-neutral which allows its principles and standards to be used across any platform,' they said this week. Yup ... except for the fact that almost no other office suite apart from Microsoft Office supports writing to the standard. And as for Firefox? Turns out 96 percent of Australian Government desktops use Internet Explorer. Looks like bureaucracy is winning here."
The others could support the standard. Or they could eat cake.
What kind of standard is a standard if nobody but a single vendor supports it? Moreover, what kind of "openness" is it if the single vendor is also the issuer of the standard?
No bias, my gluteus maximus...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I work for a major Australian Government department. The summary comment about how "96 percent of Australian Government desktops use Internet Explorer" should not be a surprise to anyone - it's the mandated platform for nearly all corporations these days, at least here and in the US. If Firefox had some OFFICIAL support for things like Group Policies and MSI package deployment (and I'm not referring to those hacks and repackaged releases you can find at certain places on the net), then maybe there would be an increase in the level of corporate uptake of the browser. As an engineer and not a lowly secretary for example, I'm able to have both Firefox and IE on the same machine. Shit I can have nearly anything on my computer, so long as it's legal of course (thank goodness for open-source). There was a lot of tweaking to get Firefox to accept NTLM authentication which is normally passed through into IE automatically (hence a lot of poking about with the network.automatic-ntlm-auth.* settings in about:config), but it works quite well in the end except for some peculiar pages.
My point is that whoever wrote the summary has probably never worked in the IT department of a company which has to suppose thousands of desktops. There's a reason Active Directory and by extension Group Policy is so useful, and hence why IE is a standard on said desktops, and it ain't about bureaucracy. As for Microsoft's Open Office XML... well, we apparently use a TON of .doc files where a nice PDF would have been more appropriate, so a cultural shift to more open standards was never going to happen quickly anyway.
Unfortunately that's not the case. Office 2007 requires significant pain for the end user and also doesn't support OOXML all that well. In face a 1.3mb template file is enough to cause 100% cpu load, where as libre office handles the same file without any issues. A number of our staff voluntarily use Libre Office and we deploy it on our rental equipment as we cant justify the license cost of MS Office to open the simple excel files our survey software generates.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
This isn't about the particular document creation software. It's about the notion that a clean room reimplementation of the document specs could be done without any knowledge of the originating software. This certainly can be done with ODF, because, though it is hardly perfect, has relatively straightforward specs.
OOXML, on the other hand, by even the most generous description, is a fucking mess. Yes, I'm sure sufficiently competent programmers could probably get the data and a good chunk of the formatting out of a docx file, the spec makes that quite difficult, and there are certainly cases, particularly since Microsoft has yet itself to create any software that in fact implements the ECMA version of OOXML.
No matter what way you cut it, from the basic position that adopting an open document standard should assure the ability to produce software to decode the document, years, even decades into the future, even if the original software is lost or no longer runs on any extant hardware, choosing OOXML over ODF is a sign of either intense stupidity on the part of the Australian government, or more likely that Microsoft and/or its Business Partners have had undue influence on the choosing of an open document standard. From a technical perspective, OOXML is a laughable joke.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I hear ya man. I worked at uni that went from an awesomely diverse mix of mac, pcs, linux & unix desktops to a nearly total microsoft takeover. What orgs like microsoft , dell, oracle & cisco tend to do is force universities to sign exclusivity contracts that stop them from making purchases from competitors. I mean sure cisco stuff is great, but when we want to just stick a 4 port in the photocopier room to make a little room for an extra terminal, it sucks having the dept told we cant spend $80 on a little d-link switch and instead had to blow hundreds on some overpriced cisco thing that was far overspecced for our needs because some prick in a suit and no idea of the implications signed an exclusivity contract. Even worse when our old 3COM router rack was forced to be dismantled and replaced with a hideously expensive cisco thing because the compliance officer took a shit when he discovered the perfectly reliable rack of unix+3com gear.
I felt really bad for the physics + chem guys who where getting denied unix workstations to run software that could ONLY run on unix because of these deals. I know at one point the dept actually threatened to unplug from the network and get a private fibre link to completely dissociate themselves from the university. Watching lawyers INTERNALLY battle is bizzare.
And yeah, we knew it was all over when our beautifully functional Solaris mail servers where replaced with exchange crap , requiring a grand total of 2x solaris servers servicing 10K+ students perfectly with a rack of about 10 exchange servers that NEVER where able to cope with the load. What a waste of good money.
And yeah, I knew my time was up when I was told my beloved Netware servers time was up. Good night sweet prince and hello private industry. Not sure I made the right decision though.
At least, that's why I've heard. The issue is that the documents Microsoft Office makes don't confirm to the OOXML standard. Programs that perfectly implement the OOXML standard can't ready documents created by MS-Word.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'm tired of Bureaucracy being blamed for good 'ole fashion political corruption. Did it ever occur to any one that the Bureaucrats just do what they're told, and it's the elected officials ramming this through? It's like when New Orleans was destroyed in floods. Everybody blamed the guy that ran FEMA, and nobody pointed out the he was just an organizer for the flood response, and he had not authority to order the Nation Guard in to shore up the levies. Also, nobody asked why the National Guard wasn't shoring up the levies early on (hint: they were all deployed in Iraq, still are too).
Mark my words, this anti-Bureaucrat nonsense is the start of a class war to pit private employees against public so the rich can drop all our wages without us noticing. You'll be too busy wondering why the public sector employees have it so good to ask why you've got it so bad...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Uhm. News flash, even MS Office doesn't fully support said "standard"!
AND IT'S THEIR FUCKING "STANDARD"!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
So exactly which politician is taking the M$ bribes then? Come on, name and shame time.
Sticking with MSIE is just dependence on an archaic IT infrastructure, and no respect for security, but forcing the use of OOXML just makes no sense other than for vendor lock-in.
#include <sig.h>
Time and again I've come up against the same thing. And every time I either say 'No' or 'Goodbye'. Watching the chaos when a large AD deployment gets munged and domain controllers start refusing to sync with each other, or exchange hits some arbitrary artificial limit that some dick thought was a good default that's impossible to change without a 8000 character powershell oneliner, or a mandatory microsoft security update fucks the tcp stack on a headless machine requiring a rollback or total removal-then-reinstall of the network drivers in a colo you can't get to, I've vowed never to administer microsoft shit ever again, no matter what they want to pay me to do it. The price to my health from dealing with users screaming all day (not to mention the self loathing that comes from knowing you put up with perfectly functioning and reliable setups being replaced by this shit) isn't justified by *any* paycheque. Never regretted leaving those places. And last I heard every single one of them have either gone bust when their customers got sick of services dying all the time and then being constantly charged for techs to fix things and the only knowledgeable techs leaving like rats from a sinking ship, or are currently in litigation because of introducing those things by switching to microsoft and will go bust very soon. There's a reason microsoft is struggling right now and it's a real shame because they do have *some* good things. Windows 7 is actually pretty sweet in my opinion. C# is a fun language and the latest visual studio still beats eclipse, monodevelop and netbeans hands-down (for the languages it supports at least). But SBS? Exchange? Sharepoint? IIS? No damn way. We really need businesses to get past this brain-damaged notion that Microsoft's niche is the enterprise.