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Feature:Alternative View of Microsoft Monopoly
Microsoft's domination has limited the axes of competition to one variable, the ability to work with others on the creation of documents. It has not achieved this from a monopoly in operating systems but a monopoly in application file formats. With this understanding, it makes the charges of Microsoft abusing it's monopoly position in the browser market irrelevant. So it's clear what legal action should be taken by the government to create an open market in software. I come to these conclusion from my own personal experiences and that's a good place to start.
As I sit here composing this essay, I am surrounded by three computers and let me explain why. People purchase computers to perform certain using software applications, and I am no different, except that I may be a little more techno savvy than others. I have an Apple Macintosh Powerbook that I prefer to use for doing my writing work because it allows me to concentrate on my writing and not the computer. A fairly common claim about the Macintosh, and I am going to leave that at face value because it is my experience, and for me that's all that matters. I also have a machine that is running the increasingly popular open-source operating system Linux. I use this operating system because it the most stable and affordable operating system that meets my needs as a web publisher and programmer. Lastly, this brings me to my machine running Windows95. I often receive files from others that I have to read, comment and edit. And more times than not, they are Microsoft Office documents. The best way and until recently the only way to read Office97 documents is using Microsoft Office on Windows. Given my choice and convenience, I use other easier, more stable alternatives for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations when I know that I am the only one who will be reading them. Unfortunately, most of the time that is not the case. So I possess what I consider this extra machine, because I have to do something as basic commenting on a memo. This is the sole reason I continue to have in my possession a Windows machine. Finally, the other major task that I do is web surfing, and surprisingly, I find all three platforms acceptable for that task. So I in effect have no choice but to run Office97, and hence Windows95 and to understand why this is, one has to understand the transformation that occurred in the last 10 years in how we create, manipulate and exchange information. Since the creation of movable type and the printing press nearly five centuries ago, we have not fundamentally changed the way that we work with information. Gutenberg triggered a revolution by enabling the mass production and distribution of information. A more recent minor leap occurred with photocopying which enabled mass publication without the necessity of typesetting. Both these technological leaps involved improving the way we work with the underlying medium of information, which is paper, not words. Paper enabled distribution of ideas and its hegemony in every stage of information creation has been unchallenged until now.
The major application of computers is word processing. Word processing is not about efficiency, but about enabling non-specialists the ability to create finished documents. Word processing is more correctly called document processing.
Historically when someone created information in the form of a memo, a play or an accounting log, she would use pen and paper and create in long hand. This paper would then be handed to a secretary who would transform this into a distributable form by typing it out. A secretary was used because she could reliably and quickly do this. Secretaries were in effect specialists in using a typewriter. Not much different from a concert pianist in the precision and flawlessness required. Word processing changed that, because the person running the keyboard no longer had to execute flawlessly. The computer tolerated the introduction of errors by delaying the final output. Word processors made it safe for idea creators to create not only ideas, but documents as well. All without the assistance of secretaries and delivered the final kiss of death to the typing pool. This ability to manipulate the final product is what human interface specialists call direct manipulation. The actual process may not have become more efficient -- I am a slower typist than most, but it enabled it to be more direct. But the target has always the same, a well formatted document on paper.
To further emphasize how important paper was in our conception of documents, the importance of the Graphical User Interface or GUI was not ease of use, but in the fact that the computer screen was true to its eventual appearance on paper. WYSIWYG -- "What You See is What You Get" should have really been called WYSIWYGOP, "What You See is What You Get On Paper." It was this fidelity in desktop publishing that gave the Macintosh its foothold into the prepress business.
Word processors may have initially simplified the creation of documents, but it did not immediately change the method of distribution and the revision of documents. These processes still took place on paper. A typical scenario was you would use the computer to create a manual, print out a draft and make photocopies for distribution. Others would then make comments and edits on these copies and return them to you. At which point you would make these changes on the computer. An especially comedic situation was that someone would type a letter using a word processor, printed it out, send it using a fax machine and once it was received on the other end, retype it into another computer. This situation did not change until the advent of cheap removable media and computer data networks.
The edit and revision process slowly transformed when people started passing floppy disks around, and later through the use of e-mail. In both cases, the actual data file was being exchanged and now editors and reviewers also engaged in direct manipulation. Data networks accelerated this sharing of information and finally intruded into publishing. No longer was it necessary for one to actually print out a document if one didn't want to. Once display technologies improve to match the resolution of paper, paper's hegemony will end except for long term archival purposes.
Paper has been replaced by the computer data file, but more specifically the Microsoft Office document. Word for word processing, Excel for spreadsheets and Powerpoint for presentations. This is the paper of our new age. When computers were used as instruments of creation and publishing, it was less important what program was used as long as the final product was on paper. But today the digital file serves this purpose. It would be ridiculous if you had to buy paper that required you to use a special pen to write on it, but that is exactly what happens today.
How Microsoft became the new paper standard is akin to the random events that lead to VHS becoming the standard for VCRs. One who has gets, gets and gets some more. Microsoft's initial aggressive marketing, bundling and discounting of its Office Suite led to a clear dominant position. This path dependency lead to dominance. Microsoft did in fact earn its riches through old fashion solid marketing, and has benefited from the spoils.
Today in the U.S., you cannot be an effective part of the information economy if you are unable to read a Microsoft Office document. It is for this reason, that when people buy computers for home, they buy what they have at the office. One has to have the ability to manipulate and read the documents they create and receive at work. Steve Jobs realized Apple would not have a chance if it a parity version of Office did not exist for the Macintosh. The importance of this commitment is under appreciated with respect to Apple's resurrection.
To understand how important file formats are, let's take a look at where another file format has emerged and not fallen to Microsoft and why -- the World Wide Web. Earlier I mentioned that I use all three of my computers almost equally well to surf the internet. The reason is that each of these machines has browsers which able to render and display web documents that are in a format known as the Hyper Text Markup Language or HTML. The conventional wisdom is that HTML is inter-operable because it is a public standard. This is only half of the truth. During the great browser war of the early 90s both Netscape and Microsoft tried to co-opt HTML by creating proprietary extensions. This resulted in a lot of web pages which would not display properly because they contained extensions which the competitor's browsers could not interpret correctly. The critical point is that the document was not displayed properly as opposed to not being displayed at all. In most cases, the relevant information is available to the reader. Compare this to the case where one receives a Word97 document by e-mail and does not have Word97; one is simply out of luck.
This information availability is a result of a quirk in the way the HTML language is specified and defined. In HTML, directives to the browsers in how to display a piece of text are sent in instructions contained in angle brackets. For example "" tells the browser to display all text following in bold until an off directive is encountered in the form of . These directives are known as "tags." What is brilliant is that if a browser encounters a tag that it does not understand, it is instructed to ignore that tag and continue to display the text as it has been. So when Netscape introduced a new tag that Microsoft's Internet Explorer did not understand, it did its best to display the remaining HTML. So the page was defective, not inoperable. This also means that HTML is by definition un-cooptable. Anyone can introduce a new tag into their web documents and this will not prevent others from reading the document, only the likelihood of them viewing it properly. HTML is unique in that it is mostly forward compatible as far as relevant data is concerned. The presence of standards is not sufficient to prevent bad behavior from companies, but a standard that cannot lock others out is necessary for a competitive marketplace. HTML can be broken but not crippled. A side point is that HTML was specified in ASCII which is a lowest common denominator encoding format open to all.
So it is clear that there can and will be real competition and choices in browsers, the same cannot be said for applications that can read Office documents. If I have another word processor I cannot generally view a document in the latest Word format. This even applies if I have an older version of Word. To work with the majority I am forced to upgrade or change. To see how critical the file format issue, let's look at some other markets where Microsoft does not dominate. Let's start with the aforementioned browser market which is very healthy relative to the office applications market. It supports two major players and many niche players successfully. Recently Microsoft became the market leader in the browser market, but it does not own the market in the same way it owns the office productivity market. It no more owns the browser market than the Republicans currently own Congress. If you look at the server market which makes up the infrastructure of the internet. For web servers, Linux and Apache are the market leaders, yet Microsoft and Netscape still have thriving businesses in this segment. This is the case because what is exchanged between computers is HTML. It doesn't matter who serves it up. The same applies to the back end database market, most data returned and stored in databases is ASCII and there is little interchange between them. Because of this Oracle, IBM and Microsoft and a school of smaller competitors are fighting it out in this market giving consumers a choice.
Lastly, let's look at the segment where Linux has risen to great popularity, the market niche of programmers and system administrators. These people tend to work independently and do not need to create documents in Microsoft Office and hence have no need to have a Windows machine. Now this is not to say that programmers and systems administrators do not use Windows, there are those who do. But most choose a system for other reasons such as stability, cost or scalability. Document compatibility is not an issue. At a major company I know, most of the programmers prefer using an operating system known as Unix, but they still have two machines at their desks. A Unix machine for doing their primary job, and a Windows machine to read and send documents to people outside of the programming community.
In every other segment, Microsoft does not dominate the market because in every other segment, the medium of interoperability is different. Web servers are a fragmented market, mail servers are a fragmented market, web browsers are a fragmented market and databases are a fragmented market. People have choices to perform these functions using alternatives which emphasizes the features that are important to them be it stability, ease of use, cost of ownership, supportability or whatever. However because the primary task of most computer users is document creation, people purchase Windows to work with others because they must run Office.
If this insight is correct, what can the government do to restore competitiveness to the software market? I believe there is a less draconian step than those being bandied around. The first step requires Microsoft to open up their document formats in sufficient detail such that others can create applications which can read Office documents flawlessly. Second, require Microsoft to publish all changes in these file formats six months in advance of any new release to allow competitors to update their products to read and write these new formats. The terms of this information can either be gratis or a reasonable licensing agreement. Third, Justice should oversee Microsoft's pricing practices, if there is one thing to be learned from what happened to internet browsers is that Microsoft is willing to engage in predatory pricing to drive out competitors. Even with open formats, very few organizations have as much cash on hand as Microsoft and are unlikely to last long in a price war. In an information economy, the medium of exchange is too important to be allowed to be controlled by one company, and until something web centralized is created, most information will be created and exchanged in Microsoft Office. The standard arguments to this proposal are the following. First, HTML is becoming the standard and that the marketplace will take over. This is faulty in that HTML is insufficient to accurately render paper documents, and the new XML standard is more concerned with data representation than with presentation. Others have pointed to Adobe's PDF or Portable Document Format to handle rendering, but it is a publishing format, not a creation format and definitely not an editing format.
Others counter that there exist conversion programs which allow you to use any program you choose. Unfortunately, these are usually reverse engineered solutions that are incomplete. Often the data is manipulated because the end product does not support a certain feature. Additionally the time delay to produce the converter after the introduction of a new format by Microsoft means that most people will not wait and deal with the inconvenience as their vendor upgrades their product. Lastly, there is the argument that Microsoft Office is available on the Macintosh, but the response is so laughably obvious in who provides that. History has also shown that Office for the Macintosh is usually not a parity version, that its release is behind that of the Windows version and generally available only at a higher cost than the Windows version. It also begs the question of conflict of interest for Microsoft to jeopardize its other businesses. A cynical view is that Microsoft's production of Office for Macintosh is more an effort to hold off anti-trust action than a sincere effort to grow a market.
Non-technological arguments include that the government has no right in defining the features and formats that are the basis for competition and innovation. In response, the government has historically imposed guidelines and standards when interchange is involved. This is no different from the government defining what gauge railroad tracks. And today, there is no other dominant form of interchange that is more unregulated than the Microsoft data formats.
This is a less drastic solution than forcing Microsoft to give up its source code or breaking Microsoft into applications and operating systems divisions. The latter does no good anyway, if the premise that interoperability of documents is the most important driver of computer choice. This will only result in two new monopolies at two new levels, especially if the applications division writes Office only for Windows.
So this proposal addresses market concerns, and shifts the market emphasis away from file formats which lock users, to other areas which are more beneficial to users. Computers are rightly disparaged for being too unreliable and too hard to use. Unfortunately, there are products which address these issues, but for most people are not acceptable because they need to be able to work with others at the document level. Hence the choice is either own multiple computers, or accept what Microsoft gives us. Most individuals and companies do not have the financial resources or time to do the former, so the majority accept the latter -- even if it means tolerating that stupid paper clip. The personal computer market has often been compared to the VCR war between VHS and Beta. But the focus of the analogy has been faulty, the correct format comparison is not between Macintosh and DOS/Windows, but in Office applications vs. everyone else. If I go to a consumer electronics store, I have a choice in VCRs which can all play VHS. Unfortunately, I do not have the same choice when "playing" Office documents. We live in an economy driven by the creation and exchange of information, and for any one company to own the format of the dominant format of interchange forces us to accept whatever that one company gives us. Doesn't seem like much choice to me.
The author makes some good claims, but lets not forget there are other software packages out which can read MS Word files, and with the new MS Word using XML (even though it may not be by anyone's standard other than MS's) ... the door is open for any other players who wish to partake.
Some Microsoft products are real bowsers :-)
The essay is accurate, however many "standards" have emerged to challenge MS Office. For example, most e-employment agencies, etc. want your resumé in rtf, pdf, or of course, word(.doc) - you have a choice.
Most documentation I read is html, ascii, or pdf.
For writers, I agree, Word seems to be a must for submissions, comments, editorial work, etc. but for the rest of us it seems to me that more "open" standards are prevailing. Hey, at least the damn Acrobat Reader is free and has a Linux version.
Lets put aside the fact that OFFICE 2000 uses XML or whatever, and MS do use standards where good standards exist like TCP/IP.
Why should Microsoft publish its own property ?
Are the US government then going to force BMW to release its engines specs so we can all manaufacture cars with great engine ?
I am afraid the only thing that can tumble MS is a competitive product, any else means americans don't have freedom at all, like being free to be successful.
i believe that XML will unify most everything and make other formats relatively obsolete. it just makes sense. having one data pool with various styles of output. Microsoft is charging ahead with XML, and i think that's a great thing for the rest of the world. once MS starts creating well-formed XML from MS Word, i'll be happy. XML is the standard.
IMHO, this is far more important than
the browser issue.
A final point is that there is NO good
technical reason why every word format has to be totally incompatible with the previous one. Micro$oft could have created a clean extendable
format by now, if they wanted too. But obviously
it's in their interest to make everyone
1) use office
2) upgrade whenever the decide to shuffle
some widgets around.
"The major application of computers is word processing. Word processing is not about efficiency, but about enabling non-specialists the ability to create finished documents. Word processing is more correctly called document processing."
Word processing!=Document processing.
It would be more proper to think of *word* processing as a subset of *document* processing.
A document can contain more than just words.
Way back when, I've seen where one part of a company decides to upgrade to and use office97. Without approval, of course ;). The rest of the company can't read the bloody stuff; so the mad rush to upgrade office, but not the operating system, on every stinking pc starts (offically this time). More chump change for you know who. At another company, they're already wanting to deploy office00. This is the true monoploy. Web browsers and operating systems are side issues. But I am preaching to the choir. ;)
Hey dude... There's office viewers FREE from Microsoft for your Macintosh and your Windows box. Microsoft didn't make you buy Office. Somebody told me there's a freeware opensource word viewer for linux. And low and behold, non-Microsoft office programs can load and save as office documents too.
It's only microsoft's fault because that's the way you are looking at it. Nobody ever blams word perfect for their file format. I never blamed Netscape for their non-WC3 browswer tags like Layer and their akward table rendering, but Microsoft adds Iframe and people go bezerk.
--
AC
100% Non-Microsoft Software User
100% Microsoft Supporter - Go Figure.
Or why not get StarOffice for the Linux box? To claim that you are stuck with a windows box simply because you get the occasional word document or excel spreadsheet is stupid. There are options open to you. In my company we have nearly equal numbers of Windows NT workstations and Mac's. No one in my company seems to have a problem transferring documents across these two platforms.
My advice is that if the windows box is causing you such pain, sell it. Use the money to buy yourself a copy of Office for the Mac and stop your bitching.
I can't believe that this minor problem warranted a whole slashdot discussion. Shesh, do you need us to hold your dick while you go to the bathroom too?
The point is that XML is an open standard, it isn't owned by M$, but by W3C...if M$ supports it all the better...but the future is document creation using XML. If I create a document using XML I can send it to any other platform and format the XML anyway I see fit...no matter what the medium. A full XML word processor would be great for the open source movement, it would kill the M$ monopoly in application software.
Of course, if you even have to ask why XML is superior to HTML...
Ahh, but when you first start using it what file-format does it default to? Remember any other format it exports requires a wee bit more effort to use.
Remember people can be lazy and/or forgetful.
I use StarOffice 5.0 for OS/2 and have no need for Windows Office. Take it back and refund my money.
Rene
"Why should Microsoft publish its own property ? "
Well your encoding *your* data into *their* standard. And they have the key[MS wordprocessor}.
Do you really trust anyone else well enough to give them that kind of power over you?
If MS wants to be a standard then *everyone* should enjoy the benefits not just MS.
Suppose that Standard Oil and Ford had merged, way back when, and formed a single company. Their business tactic was to produce cars which could not run on anything except Standard gasoline, and gasoline which would not work in any other manufacturer's cars.
Imagine the result. You could not buy a Mercedes or a Deusenberg or a Cadillac and expect to find fuel for it except in a few places; if you wanted to be able to use the most widely available fuel, you would have to buy a Ford. The "competing" fuel companies would be competing for business from the ever-shrinking numbers of owners of non-Ford cars, eventually leading them to extinction and forcing all car owners to buy Fords or continuously (and belatedly) "upgrade" their cars as Standard changed its fuel specifications. Eventually there would be a few niche markets for vehicles like taxicab fleets, with their fuel suppliers; everything else would be Ford/Standard.
As long as MS gets to define a proprietary format as the standard, the situation in office applications will be just as bad as the scenario I just painted.
Very origional. I have been unhappy with the analysis of the Microsoft trial because nobody has come up with a satisfying solution. Until now. This is just bang on. I too have three operation systems. And for the same reasons.
The Excel file format _is_ public. Unfortunately, it's a mess.
Your point is poorly made. The goal is an open standard that can easily gain wide acceptance. Who cares if it's a bit inconvenient. Measure the inconvenience against what it would take to completely replace Office on every machine using it.
I enjoyed reading that even though it was a bit long and was clearly intended up be understandable to non-nerds.
This guy makes some good points. Forcing Office file formats to be an open standard would certainly make room for a lot more competition in the word processing, spreadsheet and presentation market.
This is definitely an idea that should be taken seriously, although I'll still use lyx!
> it is easy for the government to achieve the same goal, ...
That same thought had occurred to me. And was quickly discarded.
Please see my post entitled "Missed A Point, I Think" for the reason
why.
Basically, unless the U.S. Government does a lot better job of
producing a standard that's not full of holes, it'll do little good.
Microsoft will find some way to meet "the letter" of the standard,
all the while working to subvert the intent.
For purposes of exchange, MS has long been able to read and right the very capable rich text format, which is fully documented. MS provides the source code for an RTF parser free on their web site. It's just another markup language.
It doesn't keep macros and there may be a few other things it doesn't support.
When Office 97 came out, it originally wasn't able to write Word 6 format. You were supposed to write it in RTF, but users didn't like that for some reason. Maybe they didn't know that RTF has essentially all the same capabilities.
If you could just teach people to send attachments as RTF instead of DOC, there'd be no problem.
What's even more frightening is what I see where I work. More than once I've heard someone complain that they need a new computer because they can't open Word/Excel documents from other people anymore. They may have systems that are still fast enough for what they need to do, but the version of Office that came bundled with the system is now a version behind that bundled with new systems. So instead of just buying an Office upgrade (at the academic price to which we're entitled), the university buys a whole new PC.
Microsoft knows what it's doing. Since Office comes bundled with every new PC we get, many people don't know (and can't understand) that it is possible to upgrade it on an existing system. Instead of buying just Office, we pay Microsoft for Windows and Office and Gateway 2000 for a PC. It means great profits for them, and higher tuition for students. Insane, really.
MS picks ad chooses which standards to support.
Few really.
Microsoft should publih its own property because
doc format has an extremly high market share and
the fact that it its having the effect of hurting competition means they must open it up.
BMW engines don't own near 100% market share.
And use of BMW engines doesn't make other engines shutdown.
Didn't you read the story?
Nothing at this point can now dislodge Microsoft.
Open source software can't even do it now.
Microsoft has been allow to monopolize this market.
We NEED the government to own the market up again.
And I hope this time around people don't act stupidly and only acccept documents in open formats now.
"...The key is that the government has to prove that consumers have been harmed in some way..." (from the first paragraph)
The customers have lost in other places besides word processing. As a programmer, I need to write for the platform that most customers use - Windows. You will never know how many hours have been lost in working around Windows bugs, reinstalling Windows, Fixing a registry by hand after a major system crash, let alone the many times I just needed to reboot.
There have been other extreamly stable operating systems that never hit the public well (such as OS2 that Microsoft forced IBM to keep quiet). If developers had a stable system like that, they could get product out the door quicker - thus reducing the cost to the customers. Sure, it may only be a couple of dollars for each application, but how many applications have been sold? On a personal note, I have about 25 (including upgrades) - meaning that it cost me (on my estamate of $2 per application) an extra $50. Along with this, I have lost many hours of work at home because of Window's crashing.
This is why I am shopping for a new OS with stability for my personal use (I have one in mind - you choose your own if you would like).
No replies to this post.
Somehow I was expecting this, being exposed to simple facts is terrible to those who don't want to see...
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Removing this clause would achieve exactly what Charles Wu wants. Hmmm. Any countries where this might not hold up? Develop there. ;)
Please review the simple facts in the post above yours.
RTF should be the standard. All new WYSIWYG word processors can read it and write it. Actually at alot of places where microsoft doc files are standard RTF files are standard too. .doc files are not compatable with all versions of ms word anyway, which is ridiculous, to say the least. Imagine sending a resume you typed on a friends wintel box in word 95 just to get a message back saying "please send ms word 97 format." Thats fscking ridiculous. OK I'll spend $100 just to send you a resume. fsck that!
Microsoft
Ideally everyone would use ASCII text format, but people and companies want their documents to look pretty.
The Author is correct in stating that the document format for Office is the key...because it is superior to other file formats in its field minus the openess. While we here at /. may debate the need for openess, the consumer will willingly buy whichever products fits their needs.
However, for once, the competition has the upper-hand. With open standards in the HTML, SGML, XML arena, Microsoft has no choice but to stop leaning on the crutch of "trade secrets."
I DO NOT BELIEVE MICROSOFT IS A BAD COMPANY
But I do belive that their method(closed-source) is not the best way for software development to take place.
But Microsoft, like the prodigal son, is continuing down its path of destruction while attempting to pollute HTML standards(eg. ActiveX, corrupted Java, non-compliant HTML rendering, etc.) to regain proprietary control of what should be an open resource.
Linux may not destroy Microsoft, but it is here to stay, and will continue to push Microsoft to develop decent products.
Mozilla will continue to push standards compliance, and in the end, Microsoft can do nothing but compete with a community of thousands bent on creating the best software for the dollar.
If Microsoft can do better than Linux and Mozilla, more power to 'em.
> And yes, you can read them in any browser on
> any platform, if you're willing to wait 10
> minutes for it to parse all of the new tags.
Of course you could always strip out all the Office specifc markup tags and still read them in any browser on any platform - although it's more of a file size advantage than a time advantage...unless your browser really sucks.
Microsft Office 2000 HTML Filter
I mostly agree with the author. However, MS's dominance extends far beyond that of mere office formats. These document formats are much overplayed. There are other products out there that support all the truely important features that Office provides, and more stability. Yet most companies stick with Office*. Most every company can survive without using the latest Office suite. They choose not to, because it
simply takes more effort to use another format.
Most document transfering is in house, and if not in house, its between customer/contracter/client. Certainly a large company of say, the size of Coca Cola or IBM can use whatever the hell they want. The strongest argument against using non-MS argument is economics. Let us not forget that most of MS's sales are tied into OEM sales. Few companies will choose to go out and spend ~100-300 dollars per employee to use another office suite, when they already have one that works 'ok'. This is a result of MS's monopoly in applications and operating systems. None of the products are strong enough to stand on their own, regardless of file format.
In other words, I believe a division of application and operating systems would do the market a great deal of good. It would not allow MS to bundle. It would make it harder for MS to force the latest and most bloated code over on the user. It would force them to compete on performance, and not on the MS proprietary standard. Futhermore, I believe most companies are starting to realize that the next office suite isn't any better than the first. These upgrades, which introduce more and more bloat force the company to upgrade machines as well. These costs are not minor. Furthermore, If the market is less willing to buy the latest MS office suite, fewer changes in file formats will make it much easier to develop code to import/export MS formats. Short of cryptography, there is damn little MS can do to prevent this. I'm convinced that these forces in combination will change the status quo for the better.
~ FallLine @ Work
1. where to find qood unix filter to put it on mail server and (or)
2. how to make win box with office automated converter (on net) for its (office) documents?
any idea welcome.
regards, dusan.
XML is a good start but it is not enough. As others have pointed out we need a few extra steps:
1. We need to be able to package multiple files (document, schema, stylesheets, graphics) into a single package.
2. We need vocabularies that are specific to office documents: spreadsheet vocabularies, word processor vocabularies, etc. HTML is a start, but it isn't rich enough.
3. These vocabularies need to be extensible. This part is harder than you think....the HTML extensibility model is too braindead to work for documents that are editable. Consider equation extensibility...
4. We need converters to convert MS Office software into our open vocabularies.
There is a lot of work ahead of us but it is doable. XML is necessary but not sufficient.
The "XML" used in Office 2000 does not conform to the XML specification and is embedded in non-conforming HTML anyhow.
No need for custom formats or archives, just use an OBJECT or IMG element with a data: URI holding base64'd content. Now if only browsers would implement it.
Now that I think of it, several HTML-centric mailers do support Content-Type: multipart/related for this sort of thing - bodies can refer to each other by Content-ID.
consider this harry:
lets say you are a software developer, and you release a word processing program. lets say your program is the best on the market. its easy to use... it produces wonderful documents... and it can be read on all platforms.
now lets also say that a corporation called microsoft also releases a word processing program. it sucks... its buggy... and it only works on winblows.
which program are people going to use?
microsoft's of course. why? hmm... maybe because it comes bundled with every personal computer running windows98.
who is going to buy your program... or even download it if you offer it for free? certainly no one but advanced computer users. why should they? they;ve already got microsofts application.
as for microsoft being more successful than others... this certainly isn't because of they're *wonderful* software. it's because of marketing.
when bill gates started out... he went and bought an operation system called DOS, renamed it MS-DOS, licenced it to IBM, and made it big off of all the ibm compatible clones.
ill bet microsoft has three times as many people marketing their products than programmers.
they're certainly much better at selling their crap than making it.
microsoft does not deserve its monopoly. and if it has a monopoly, they should at least make an operating system that doesn;'t totally suck my balls. but, i guess they make more *money* this way. bill gates is an asshole.
-keith
Hey IntlHarvester!,
You must be extremely intelligent and well respected. A quick glance at your user info shows that ALL your comments are scored up to +2. Or maybe you have the hook up with Rob and his crew?
I think it did
Again I remind you: the Government mandated POSIX compliance and Microsoft got around that.
Sounds to me like you have a case of macro virus.
Try Thunderbyte/Shark or WinShield.
So, back on the original subject, doesn't it seem that the fact that vi and emacs both edit the same, open file format (ASCII) has insured their continuing longevity as competitors, rather than forcing a positive feedback cycle creating a winner-take-all scenario (a la Word/WordPerfect)?
A Microsoft-allied company (Visio) owns the company pushing for more openness of Autocad file formats
An article here from 1994 shows the peril in blandly assuming "marketplace forces" will fix everything. Sometimes lint will snowball ('dust puppy'?) into a dominant position, even if it's not the best on merit.
Scientific American printed this article or a similar one about the same time,IIRC.
Very well written essay. I particularly agree with the part about people using office document formats as if they were generic, standardized formats.
For instance, I was recently asking a couple ISPs in our area for price quotes on co-location. Sure enough, one of them sent me a word document, and I sent it right back. This isn't the first time people have somehow expected me to automatically have windows or MacOS and Office on my computer.
Personally I never accept email attachments in word format. Whenever I receive a Word document I immediately sent it right back to them and ask that they send it in a standard format, even if I do have access to office where I am at at that time (and of course, they usually end up saying something like "Ok, I saved it as a '.TXT' file, does that work?). I hope buisnesspeople who do this feel embarrassed, and I hope people will eventually get the idea that the world doesn't run on windows or office.
The author's suggested remedies sounded pretty good at first. Then I
got to thinking. I came to the conclusion that his solutions will
not have the desired effect: that of freeing the computing industry
from an unhealthy dominance by one particular manufacturer.
Let us say, for the sake of the argument, that Microsoft is forced to
publish the specifications for its office productivity tools in
advance. What's to prevent them from specifying something be
embedded in the file format that is Ms-Windows specific, for
example?
I suggest that it would be unwise to underestimate Microsoft's
determination to have and hold dominance in the computer industry.
If you give them even a teeny, tiny hole they will exploit it to the
utmost.
History is our teacher.
All one need do is look at the example of what happened with the
U.S. Government's requirement that all operating systems be POSIX
compliant. Oh yes, Microsoft Windows NT is "POSIX compliant" all
right. Problem is: every last Microsoft application, and most all of
the third-party applications, run only under the Win32 API rather
than the POSIX API. But a little loophole in the Federal
guidelines--no requirement that the POSIX API actually be *used*,
let MS push their proprietary solutions into Government
facilities anyway.
Where Microsoft is concerned, one can *never* be too careful!
http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan/docs/MSWordView.html
Man, You guys are really missing the boat on XML. XML is what HTML SHOULD be: a logically defined set of tags that can later be seen by a database, programming language, etc. Essentially, XML **IS** a database. Go look at www.xml.org to see the benefits.
ANd yes, XML is getting a bad name because of Office2000. The point is that the DOJ could make MS use a CERTAIN set of standard DTDs for their documents.... kinda like saying they could only use OPEN standards like HTML, maybe one for spreadsheets (for excel), etc.
So yes, you CAN embrace and extend XML, just like HTML, but the DOJ could order them NOT to do that.
But XML is very, very cool.... I just wish I could convey to you in this little space how easy it makes web development. (see also scripting.com
Sure, its "just a way to organize data", but then so is a database, or this web page.
XML is an open standard which defines the rules and syntax of a set of data (the DTD), and an interchange medium (a well formed document).
To quote:
The scenario you describe is exactly the kind of situation that XML (and it's parent SGML) were designed to address.
Try getting a clue first: http://www.xml.org/
When Windows 95 was released, there was really only one set of apps which took advantage of the newer OS features. The market share data for Word/Excel/PP vs WordPerfect/1-2-3/Harvard Graphics from before Aug 95 and after are quite telling.
There was some talk back then that MS hadn't given the full APIs to other companies, but I don't know if that is true (I would believe it, though). I do know that Lotus, etc. didn't have Windows 95 ready versions out soon enough, and MS took advantage of that lapse in releases.
I think that [competition in the app space bullied by Windows 95] is a better focus for the anti-trust trial than the browser, and I agree that document format is a problem (force people to upgrade to Office97 for compatibiltiy...).
I'm no fan of Microsoft (I run Linux and SunOS at home, and I'm looking into getting NetBSD/Alpha and IRIX systems, just for the heck of it) but to claim that Microsoft is holding your data hostage against your will is ridiculous.
One of the saddest things in the high-tech (particular software) community is that there are very few people apart from Microsofties who understand the power of this concept.
And voila, you have a very defensible product, i.e. high barriers to entry for competitors and even higher barriers to exit for existing customers. And BTW, for those of us who are trying to build high-tech companies with high valuations (don't try to talk to a VC if this isn't your highest priority), it is an excellent road to succeed. Which makes it so sad ...
Where this becomes problematic, of course, is when you have reached the size and macroeconomic importance of Microsoft. And if one talks about breaking this monopoly apart (note that there are very few outcomes, if you use this approach, that do not end in a monopoly of some sort for your product at least in some market segments), one needs to take away a critical mass of the fundaments of this defensible position, which are proprietary core (thus the discussion about opening up file formats) and the lack of competition for the same open interfaces that are being used to "tie in" stuff. APIs are a big part of this but not the only ones. And the interface part that, sadly, sadly, is commonly ignored. No one needs the Windows source code to compete against it, only a guarantee that they aren't being chased to death following monthly API changes. (In fact, if you decided to build a Windows competitor, would you start with the Windows source code? Or would you really want to build a Word competitor from the Word file format if you could avoid it?)
To finish the soap box: the tie-in is more valuable and anti-competitive than anything else, create competition there first: freeze the APIs, require that they be documented completely (expensive I know) so other people's work does not reinforce the monopoly. And then the file format is (almost) irrelevant ...
I'm not sure that XML should be denigrated so much. Combined with XSL or other style sheets, it can do virtually anything with regular documents that you might need. If you really want to get some fancy stylistic flourishes run a desktop publishing programs. However, for most document production, particularly for business, an XML-based processor would probably be best.
2.1 b. In addition, for the MSDN Library, this EULA grants you, as an individual, a personal, nonexclusive license to make and use an unlimited number of copies of any documentary material ("Documentation"), provided that such copies shall be used only for personal purposes and are not to be republished or distributed (either in hard copy or electronic form) beyond the user's premises and with the following exception: You may use Documentation identified in the MSDN Library as the file format specification for Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, and/or Microsoft PowerPoint ("File Format Documentation") solely in connection with your development of software product(s) that operate in conjunction with Windows or Windows NT that are not general-purpose word-processing, spreadsheet, or database management software products or an integrated work or product suite whose components include one or more general-purpose word-processing, spreadsheet, or database management software products. Note: A product that includes limited word-processing, spreadsheet, or database components along with other components that provide significant and primary value, such as an accounting product with limited spreadsheet capability, is not considered to be a "general-purpose" product.
Every computer company, whether hardware vendor or software vendor, plays the "customer lock-in" game. The object is to foster customer dependence on technology that only one company can deliver, and then take the customers to the proverbial cleaners because the customer has no alternatives.
Open standards for computer networking protocols, and for file formats, serve to mitigate or prevent customer lock-in, and this is why more open standards are a good thing, rather than a bad thing. Unfortunately, it appears that this seemingly obvious truth is lost on the majority of Information Systems (IS) professionals in the business world.
Open standards of this type are the central message of the Internet. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) requires demonstrated "interoperability", i.e. disparate computers and software successfully communicating, as the primary requirement for any standard specification to be advanced in their process.
A ScenarioImagine this scenario: you're the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of a major corporation. You, in order to promote the efficient flow of information through the company, issue an edict to the effect that Microsoft Word (or WordPerfect, or whatever) shall be the standard software package for producing and exchanging documents throughout the company.
While this should work fine provided that there is a version of that software for every computer in your enterprise - an iffy proposition these days; there are two unhappy outcomes from this kind of "standard":
It is very difficult for a single software package to fully meet the needs and working styles of every person or group in a medium or large company, aside from the issue of finding a version of that single software for every computer your enterprise owns & operates.
Some people and departments will be very unhappy with your order, and will likely defy it, by using a different and probably incompatible software package that better fits their department's business needs. This will cause problems when they try to exchange documents.
You've just locked your company's document destiny to this one software vendor, and they can bleed you dry if they so choose. Or, worse, if they go out of business, you're stuck.
What's worse is that converting from one document format to another is usually difficult because of semantic information loss - different document representations have different assumptions, and it's usually not possible to cleanly translate from one set to another. This is the "lock-in." In strict terms, the software vendor can't charge you more than it could cost you to convert your documents to another format, but who has that particular price at his fingertips at any given moment?
A Different ScenarioNow, let's change the scenario a bit: instread of standardizing on a particular word processing software package, you order that all documents shall be in a standard file format, e.g. SGML with a particular DTD.
In this world, your company makes it clear to all software vendors that this is your chosen corporate document standard and that if they wish your business, their software must implement appropriate interpretation and manipulation of that file format.
This puts those software vendors into competition with each other for your business; presumably the one who can produce the best results with the most pleasant and efficient user interface will win your dollars.
This also gives the various different groups inside your company the freedom to pick the software that best suits their working style, so long as it produces the standard document file format. Everybody wins.
If we take this scenario further - you contact your fellow CIO's in other companies and promote this idea, then even more people and organizations win. Just by doing the right kind of standard.
How the Internet fitsThis is precisely what the Internet is about: standards for networking protocols, for E-mail & messaging, for file transfer, for remote access, and file formats like HTML. The Universities and Research Institutions that initially designed the Internet had exactly this result in mind: no one vendor in control, all competing on a level playing field for the business, with the best results for the customers.
Of course, the big companies will fight this kind of initiative because it requires them to compete harder - they can't rest on their laurels. Small companies will welcome this kind of initiative, because it gives them a foot-in-the-door with potentially big accounts, for (relative to their size) lots of money.
Some vendors will counter with "standards" of their own. Of these, some will be honest attempts to extend an existing public standard in a useful way, and some will be an attempt to stymie the process. The things to watch out for are:
no published specification (or an insufficiently published specification that cannot be independently implemented for lack of particular details).
onerous license or patent restrictions.
No alternative vendors of software for that "standard."
All of these end in customer lock-in to a proprietary "standard" - a situation which is not to the customer's benefit in the long run.
Open, public standards for file formats, and computer networking protocols are the right thing for everybody.
Another essay on this issue can be found at the Best Viewed With Any Browser campaign site.
This article is at http://www.clock.org/~fair/opinion/open-standards. html
XML is better than HTML for a word processing format because it is much more flexible and extensible. On the other hand, XML is more a process than a standard. If MS Office writes its documents in XML, and my word processor writes its documents in XML, those documents can be completely incompatible. It should be easier to translate between XML documents than the current mess. On the other hand, I'm sure Microsoft, with their "embrace and extend" philosophy, can come up with an XML DTD so obscure and awkward, with non-standard constructs, that you might as well be looking at a proprietary binary format.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
A very interesting piece, but there are some points I dispute.
... It would be ridiculous if you had to buy paper that required you to use a special pen to write on it, but that is exactly what happens today.
It is not economic losses that the public has suffered, but loss of choice.
Later on in the article, Mr. Wu describes how, in addition to the two computers he uses to get his work done, he keeps a third machine with Windows and MS Office installed just because of Microsoft's monopolistic trade practices. I'd say this counts as an economic loss. Another economic loss is all the downtime and lost productivity due to Windows crashes.
Microsoft's domination has limited the axes of competition to one variable, the ability to work with others on the creation of documents. It has not achieved this from a monopoly in operating systems but a monopoly in application file formats.
I agree that their dominance in the field of file formats is troubling, but in my experience their OS monopoly can't be discounted either. It's both.
With this understanding, it makes the charges of Microsoft abusing it's monopoly position in the browser market irrelevant.
Nobody is accusing Microsoft of having a browser monopoly, much less abusing it. They are accused of using their OS Monopoly to get anti-competitive OEM bundling agreements, and using both of those to unfairly increase their browser's market share (among other things).
This is the sole reason I continue to have in my possession a Windows machine.
See! Economic loss.
The major application of computers is word processing.
No, the major application of computers is database processing. The major application of desktop computers is word processing.
To further emphasize how important paper was in our conception of documents, the importance of the Graphical User Interface or GUI was not ease of use, but in the fact that the computer screen
was true to its eventual appearance on paper. WYSIWYG -- "What You See is What You Get" should have really been called WYSIWYGOP, "What You See is What You Get On Paper." It was this fidelity in desktop publishing that gave the Macintosh its foothold into the prepress business.
There's a great quote, attributed to Brian Kernighan (of C fame), "The trouble with WYSIWYG is that what you see is all you get".
Paper has been replaced by the computer data file, but more specifically the Microsoft Office document.
Agreed, while some offices have rejected the Office document as a standard, too many have not. As long as a significant portion of the people you deal with use a document format, you've got to have a way of using it.
The first step [the government should impose] requires Microsoft to open up their document formats in sufficient detail such that others can create applications which can read Office documents flawlessly.
While I'd love to see such documentation, I disagree that the courts should require it. First off, I think the Justice department should be focusing on addressing Microsoft's direct restraint of trade and other anticompetitive business practices. It's hard to effectively do what you describe from the courts.
Secondly, it is easy for the government to achieve the same goal, without invoking the judiciary, and with a better (IMHO) result. The President should have his technology advisor draft an executive order specifying that by June, 2000, all electronic documents handled within government offices, and transmitted to and from government offices, must follow an attached standard. Then it should go ahead and specify the general standard (XML or whatever), and the specific formats for government word processing documents, spreadsheet documents, etc. The US Government is such a huge consumer of Microsoft products, MS would be foolish to not support such standards. All of us can then use such standards too, whether as a native file format, or merely a standard interchange format. Assuming the government makes their standard flexible and extensible (easy to do with things like XML) it should work well.
I think this is a better way to fix the document issue than to order Microsoft to do something that really can't be enforced.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
M$ can't even keep their own format consistent or compatible between versions of Word, and they have little motivation to do so. Who wants to get stuck with an old version of Word when it can't read the docs your coworkers with the latest Word are sending you? Just another way to force people to pay the upgrade tax.
"MS Word does not, after all, go off on its own and find other files on your system and convert them to Word format without your permission. Your data gets into a Microsoft format only because you put it there." .asp and the original scripts are nowhere to be seen, and the whole site has to be basically rebuilt from scratch.
Don't speak too soon, AC. Microsoft products go off and seize control of certain file types when installed on Windows (which has only one default for each type). On the Mac, Microsoft products seize control of the file typing apparatus so that all _future_ downloads of said types are assigned to the Microsoft application. Lastly, Microsoft products can be unsafe to 'try out' because they import other data and silently change important things to a proprietary MS way, literally destroying the original data and taking the new data captive. This last behavior is well known to Web designers experimenting with big cgi-laden sites and trying out Frontpage- suddenly it's all
All it would take is for one of these products to go looking for likely candidates for importing, in much the same way that Windows installers might look for likely unrecognized disk space for formatting.
You are very naive if you think Microsoft products do not actively try to seize and hold control. The only thing stopping them from exhibiting no limits at all, is public outrage. And the public gets tired and cynical after a while...
Posted by astro/geek:
I was hopeful about this too, but according to the reports at Office 2000's debut, it writes XML which doesn't conform to spec and includes lots of illegal tags which can only be rendered by (surprise!) MS Office 2000 or IE5. I'd call that "Embrace and Stifle."
Posted by wccwcc:
Matthew,
I take your points to be valid, as I wrote this article to target the largest audience and felt necessary to explain things to that some readers might not be familiar with. Those readers are assuredly not slashdot readers. This seemed a better alternative to submitting multiple versions for different audiences.
I also took a meditative tone of voice to bring the issue of operating system and application choice away from an abstract position, to a more personal perspective. As for footnotes, I find them to be annoying[1], but can agree with your position. Personal choice and preference rears its ugly head again.
So I took the risk of explaining too much at the risk of offense.
Charles Wu
1. and distracting.
Posted by EZ E:
Isn't the whole idea of publishing and producing a document going to need to be overhauled?
Here's a scenario: We all get so interconnected with the convergence of email, voice, networking, chat, web, and whatever else the global data network can put forth that information flow becomes a stream, rather than a granular flow. Where do documents fit in here? Why do we need a document?
Posted by wccwcc:
In the cases you mention, I would consider those sites as not using HTML, but the languages you describe. HTTP would just be used as a delivery mechanism for those languages. Granted one can come up with degenerate cases where HTML document is unusable (e.g. a doc composed of one image encoded in a new image format), but the gist of my point I believe is still valid.
Charles Wu
Is it just me, or is the target audience of these features rapidly decreasing in intelligence?
Is the Slashdot audience the audience that needs the author's interpretation and sugar coating of the history of Microsoft gaining dominance, in order for us to understand the article? Is the Slashdot audience the audience that needs HTML explained?
Do we represent the people that need small words and short sentences so that we can understand things? I felt like the point in this article was very difficult to get to, because of the assumption that every second word or concept needed to be explained[1].
I actually got the feeling that, in fact, the author was as unfamiliar with this topic as he took his audience to be. This is a mistake, in my opinion -- but my opinion is that the people that know something the rest of us don't are the ones that share in public forums.
I find myself turning rapidly into an old curmudgeon, and while I apologize for it, these are still my views.
1. Footnotes are good for explaining things that some people might need explained, but the majority will not.
--Matthew
Godamnnnnnnn!!! ...some people just don't know
when to stop typing!! -- just state your point
and shut up! We didn't need the full history
of desktop publishing and web browser, and that
whole paragraph describing why you use three
machines or whatever -- just get to point!
I don't agree with the author's proposals to
open the MS Office file formats -- that
would only lead to even stronger support
of MS Office which we don't want -- we want
MS Office file format to die and go away not
become even more common.
Web documents should be the next standard,
not MS Office.
Think about all the proprietaray crap embedded
in each Word and Excel doc -- Windows-specific
fonts, OLE objects, backslased directory names,
ActiveX controls, VBA macros, etc, etc -- you
expect us to adopt all that stuff into other
platforms just so you won't be incovenienced??!!
We want Microsoft to keep doing what it's doing
-- go ahead and make MS Office as incompatible
as possible and slowly and surely people will
throw more support into cleaning up web
document standards and forget about using MS
Office formats.
Support web standards, not M$ standards.
Everyone should stop whining about MS not making the Office formats available. They have been available for quite some time (not long after Office 97 was released IIRC). To get them (instructions copied from the MSWordView homepage):
As someone who is currently working on MSWordView as well as the Word importer for Abiword, I can tell you that the Word file format is a sick joke, and that documentation you reference contains about 80% of what you need to do it, and only 60% of it is actually right. And then, that insane mess of unnecessarily complex data is wrapped inside an OLE2 structured storage object (ie. another poorly documented proprietary creation of Microsoft).
Please, download those docs, and skim through the 500K of documentation. By the end, you will agree the Word file format was created by either a) a company intending for no one else to ever successfully write a perfect Word importer, or b) by sadistic programmers obviously under the heavy influence of one or more narcotics.
And as for their supposed conversion to XML, I'll bet anyone a $1000 that it's non-compliant XML wrapped around arcane, poorly documented (if at all) binary data.
What's most amusing, however, is that you defend Microsoft on this. The documentation on MSDN is a joke. If you want to make use of it, expect lots of reverse engineering, too (as work on WINE will clearly demonstrate). They put that stuff there so suckers like you would think Microsoft is playing nice. They're not. They are bad for this industry. And anyone who tries to tell you the effect of their "standardization" has been good is buying into the MS PR BS, too. Interoperability is easy and reduces costs by increasing competition, and it would be considerably easier if not for Microsoft's anticompetitive, predatory practices. My solution to this antitrust trial? The DOJ shold call up the DOD and have Redmond wiped off the of the planet.
Even if Micorosoft is using XML, they can add all sorts of proprietary tags to it can't they? As I understand it, XML lets you define your own standard, but if everyone doesn't go by it, then it's worthless. It should be easier to make other products that can read those files, but it wouldn't mean it was a good format? Am I missing something here? I think I need to read a bit more about XML.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
As I roll through the comments it is so obvious which are "astroturf" because the structure of the comment is quite distinct.
I'm sure a talented person could make a filter for this :o).
CC
"Pray arm me further by your reply" Winston Churchill
Of course, this will take years. MS will draw out the process of settling on a common format as long as possible. In the meantime, there are interchange languages. I use them all the time. It is a little inconvenient, mostly because people expect you to have MS Word, but after returning their mail enough and telling them to save it in RTF, they get the point.
HTML itself will become more and more important as companies use intranet webservers to publish internal data. People will realize that saving a document in HTML means it can go up on the web and be viewed by anyone who needs to view it. The web will become the prevalent means of distributed authoring, with things like DAV leading the way.
Still, I think it would be a good idea to force MS to open up it's file formats. It would hurt them worse than almost anything else. Unfortunately, it is far outside the scope of the current trial, and therefore unlikely to be considered.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The Office formats have no concept of expandability and are neither forward nor backward compatible because Microsoft always intends to replace the format with something incompatible in the next release to force users to upgrade. The Office file formats have no concept of interoperability because Microsoft's primary concern is forcing people to use Microsoft Office on Microsoft Windows. The Office file formats are not easy to implement or understand because part of their purpose is to delay competitors from reverse engineering them.
Your point also falls flat because the cost of completely replacing Office on every machine is realized everytime a new version of Office comes out. No one is still using an old version of Office.
Imagine you have currently have a network with 100 systems running Microsoft Office 2.0 on Windows 3.1 for Workgroups over 386SX machines and you now need to hire a new employee. You cannot buy a copy of MS Office 2.0 because they are no longer available and you can't upgrade just one computer because it won't be compatible with the others. You are therefore forced to replace all 100 systems with Pentiums running the latest Office on Win98 or WinNT4. You don't need any new features of the new systems and in fact now have to change all existing documents to the new format, but Microsoft's upgrade methods force you to do it. Very Good for Microsoft; Very Bad for you. If you buy a system from a company with this sort of history you should anticipate the expense of redoing all your documentation later when Microsoft chooses obsolete the format and force you to upgrade.
Indeed, I just this February 1999 upgraded from Word 1.1 and Excel 3.0 to Word 6.0 and Excel 5.0
also having upgraded from Win 3.10a and a 386 to Win98 and a P-133. However I still cannot read lots of documents people send me because I am still not "current" with everything. This is the upgrade cycle that is much more of a problem than the OS part. Upgrading the office suite forces the OS to be upgraded, not the other way around, and I am forced to upgrade the office suite when the rest of the world upgrades and sends me documents with newer versions of software than I currently own.
Hal Duston
hald@sound.net
>If anything, the document compatibility problem
> is worse, because you have perfectly reasonable
> unix solutions (I used framemaker at one
> company), trying to mesh with the windows
> machines that management is using.
What makes the (propritary) framemaker format any more reasonable thatn the (proprietary) MSWord format?
Microsoft isn't different becuase they use proprietary formats, their only different becuase they've been more successful than others! Why do people want to penalize them for this?
-harry
This article (and a good % of the comments) are really indicative of the typical "Linux is perfect/Microsoft is Evil" bias. And let's face it...this bias seems to be getting worse daily...
.doc files.
A couple of points against the article:
1) MSOffice Document specifications are ALREADY open. Anyone who wants to can implement an viewer/editor and many already have. I can think of at least half a dozen non-microsoft products that can at least Read
2) The author fails to acknowledge that MANY other (non-Microsoft) products use proprietary formats. He doesn't seem to have a problem with them...why is that? Probobly becuase they aren't as succesful/defact standard formats. If this is the case than we must concluse that the author only has a problem with successful file formats....this semes rather rediculous doesn't it?
3) The author proposes no alternate document format. Let's face it. Comming up with a format to save all the information in a modern Word Processing document (which might even included embedded graphics, or other documents) is a HARD thing to do. Microsoft came up with one that works pretty well (for the millions of people who use it everyday anyways). If there was a public open solution to this problem, Microsoft might have used it, but since no such solution was avaliable, what choice did they have?
4) As soon as a possibly viable alternate solution arrived (XML), Microsoft began releasing a product the conformed to this spec. True, their are problems now but most of them are due to the fact that XML is VERY new, and there are almost no (possible 0?) products that implement it fully.
I really wish the Slashdot audience would be a little more open/thoughtful before the MicrosoftBashing that is common practice around here.
-Harry
that's crazy! why would it matter if you use the program of your choice to manipulate it. the money goes to your favorite software company not microsoft! that's assuming software is still going to be sold. even in the service model opening up document specs is a good idea.
"The lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths."
--
And Justice for None
i fully agree with "Plain Vanilla ASCII" as only text format which guarantee portability and interoperability in almost 99% of cases including future and far future.
hany
Yes, word processors can create incompatible XML in the sense that they won't necessarily be able to understand each others tags, or display them in an identical fashion.
The real advantage of XML and, SGML as well, is in large scale document publishing. The advantage of XML is that it decouples content creation from formatting. Think about how mch time is wasted deciding whether something should be bold or bold-italics etc... Especially since the formatting says nothing about the content. For example: Currently, a serial number in a document might be tagged as or the equivalent proprietary tag. In XML the serial number could be tagged as , which tells us what the data is not what it looks like. A DTD tells the writer what tags he can use and the DTD can be customized.
In parallel, some one else (myself) is writing style sheets for formatting the tags for display in a browser, or conversion to html, rtf, pdf, etc. But, the key is that now writers will be able to concentrate on content creation, while some one else deals with formatting. It also enforces consistent formatting across writers.
The other advantage of XML is that cusomized tags give information about the content that can make search engines much smarter.
To relate this back to proprietary file formats, XML is only cross-platform WYSIWYG when the DTD and style sheet is either sent with the document or known to all. A word processor can very easily use obfuscated tags, and an internal style sheet. Which while the file may be saved as XML, and the content is available to anyone. No one without the same program can accurately reproduce the document.
Dastardly
P.S. XML does not require a DTD, but does require a style sheet of some sort for accurate reproduction. A DTD is mostly useful for document creation.
Oops, fell into an html trap.
Currently, a serial number in a document might be tagged as or the equivalent proprietary tag. In XML the serial number could be tagged as , which tells us what the data is not what it looks like. A DTD tells the writer what tags he can use and the DTD can be customized.
This should read:
Currently, a serial number in a document might be tagged as "italics" or the equivalent proprietary tag. In XML the serial number could be tagged as "serialnumber" , which tells us what the data is, not just what it looks like.
One way the Government can deal with Microsoft is to stipulate it's own standards for document types. If the government agencies would dictate what standard types were involved with a text document, (tabs, tables, columns) then anyone could create files in this format and sell to the government.
It's easy to see why the public is stuck with proprietary standards in this regard when we our government doesn't dictate what formats are acceptable.
Even stating that RTF (rich text format) was the standard format for memo's and communication would relieve many problems.
If they don't meet the standard then some other company will. Clearly Microsoft loses when it can't dictate the standard. It's a document standard and if Microsoft tries to extend to change it, then they wont get the goverment contract.
Hmm... HTML...
one of the things you CAN'T do well, if at all, in HTML is page headers & footers (and page numbers). Yes, it's because it has no concept in a web browser, but ever print out pages where the page is split in the middle of a text line?
Sure, probably browser problem, but there is nothing in HTML to say, "Hey, browser, break the page if you're printing at this line!".
Frames work (for one-page items), but IE & NS let you choose different options for printing frames, neither of which is, "repeat top frame at top of each page, with trailing frames suitably shown on the printed page").
No knowledge of intended paper format, etc...
All things HTML has no concept of.
But I get this distinct impression that while a Word XML "document" will pass thorugh XML checkers, etc., they won't be very viewable on anything besides IE4/5, due to the use of ActiveX controls for various functionalities in them...
I do not know tex, but isn't this regarded as the ultimate document format? What is wrong with thst as a standard? I know there are several efforts to make document processesors based on it (klyx, lyx).
Is XML suitable for printing? HTML definitely is not.
support gun control: take guns from cops
Your car analogy does not hold at all; it isn't even remotely analogous to the software situation. Please rethink.
File Formats are the real issue. Not OS, not the app, the file format - period. That is why everyone uses MS Office in the first place - not because it is so "good".
To say that file formats are irrelevant is absurd. Tell that to all the companies who go through the torture of new MS Office releases and new incompatible file formats. The situation is out of hand and now that Micros~1 has "won" they are actively engaging in price gouging.
support gun control: take guns from cops
In "The Microsoft Files", the author relates a story about when Bill Gates first discovered the internet. After a while, he became furious, and was stamping his feet and screaming ... nothing on the internet was in Micros~1 file formats.
Looks like he's getting his way. God I hate that fucker.
support gun control: take guns from cops
The question here is not the quality of the product. What we are dealing with here is the philosophy of free enterprise.
BMW or Yugo, they have the same rights under free enterprise. And at those times the government decides it needs to limit free enterprise in a specific instance to encourage free-er enterprise on a general scale, then both BMW and Yugo would have the same responsibilities.
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
My first thought while reading the article is that
the author had not ran across any Javascript/Java/Shockwave/etc. web sites. People using browsers with Java/Javascript turned off, or without support for 'the latest' version, etc. find a number of sites are unusable. Certainly if one is browsing non-scripted HTML one gets the
text as expected.
URL: http://xanga.com/lvirden > Quote: Saving the world before bedtime. Even if explicitly stated to the contrary, n
Please don't use java! Use a well suported windowing library and c/c++ so that it will be portable but not suck...
Oh wait.. we already have abi-word and go and gnumeric and etc., and star-office for for ms compatability....
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
"SPOOOOOOOOON!" - The Tick, The Tick
One thing we can all do is try and refuse MS Doc format. I was recently in the enviable position vis a vis a bunch of lawyers that they wanted something from me. I refused all documents in MS format and as expected it was suddenly no problem for them to switch to RFT.
Help fight continental drift.
If, as most expect, the judge declares M$ a monopoly, the US Govt should simply declare that for 5 years, starting one year later, they will not buy any M$ products.
The 5 year period guarantees a decent market for competitors. The one year delay gives them a chance to develop products.
No standing body to watchdog M$, no long nvloved appeals process, no messy quibbling about how to break up M$, or how big a fine, or oversight of APIs. A nice simple solution.
And there is precedence of a sort. Several defense contractors were barred from doing business with the govt because of overcharges. I think (but would not bet on it) that they were barred without even having been convicted of anything.
--
Infuriate left and right
Good essay. Why not make the document format a standard, and have a committee oversee changes?
A similar suggestion for OS's, set up standards that must be met. And let developers and companies duke it out.
-brindle
I was under the impression that XML was just a way to organize data (using the user defined tags). How does that constitute a Word Proc format? MS could change the meaning of the tags every couple years. No difference, just with XML the files will be bigger (ascii instead of binary).
Joe
Joe Batt Solid Design
XML specifies how to store information. It does not specify the meaning of that information. Microsoft could simply not publish Office DTDs and competitors would be unable to determine what constitutes valid formatting and what is completely useless.
One can use custom tags in XML, thus the markups do not have to have any standard logic behind them. A markup tag such as ``MSXML_FFT'' would be very difficult to understand if not properly documented and would require extensive reverse-engineering, which may be illegal, in order to successfully understand its use.
If one truly wanted to be diabolical then one could simply bypass the tags for certain, critical functionality. Dropping in a UUENCODED binary formatting section would definitely add some complexity to a document.
Basically, in order for XML documents to offer a means to opening the doors for competition, the XML document tags must be fully documented. Without a medical dictionary a layperson might have a difficult time reading an advanced medial journal; and without some sort of ``dictionary,'' a programmer not working on MS Office products would probably have a difficult time understanding how the document formatting works.
Actually, I do not know anything about how Office 2000's XML documents are designed. I have not tried Office 2000 or seen any files produced with it. I also do not see anything that even meantions Office 2000 in the April 1999 MSDN library (although some information might exist on Microsoft's site). However, there is some information on the binary formats for Office 97. Unfortunately they are (IMHO) not very good.
Thank you ever so kindly for your insight. Now, if you would be so nice as to actually write something capable of reading something described by that tangled mess, please do so. I think you will find that, as has been demonstrated by other attempts, it is extremely difficult.
I don't think Microsoft opening up its document format standards is such an excellent idea, mostly because I don't think it will matter whether or not they're open.
Standards bodies around the world have often demonstrated how to make biased or impossible to implement standards. In my darker moments I think of my favorite (only a slight touch of sarcasm is meant there) language, C++. :-)
I think the current trend towards XML and XSL is a much better way to beat back this particular head of the Microsoft monopoly hydra.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I've know people in the publishing industry, and almost all manuscripts come in as either Word or WordPerfect.
LaTeX, etc is often used for the actual type setting, true, but that's different that the actual processing of words.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Well, doesn't "open" XML rely on an "open" DTD (document type description?)? If the MS Word 2000 DTD is only embedded in IE5 and MS Word, what good is it? I guess I see MS Word XML as a bunch of buzz-word crap until I someone demonstrates differently.
Word has had an "open" (docs available) tag markup language for at least 10 years. It's called RTF, and it doesn't do anyone any good if you have to "Save As" to get it. I imagine Word 2000 works the same way (File+Save As Web Page).
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Some of us may remember a time when WordPerfect/DOS had about 80% market share. Within a year or two, Microsoft WinWord demolished it. This was despite the fact that WinWord lacked certain features and had a fairly crappy WordPerfect importer.
Microsoft Word had been development for sometime on Macintoshes, and was by far the most mature PC GUI word processor at the time. People and corporations just took to it - it gave them something close to WYSIWYG, and had substantially lower training and licencing costs. And, contrary to popular belief around here, MS Word and Excel drove MS Windows sales, not visa-versa.
So, if WordPerfect could lose most of their market share even with their proprietary file format, what's to prevent Micrsoft Word from doing the same?
Admittedly, the problem is more pronounced now with e-mail and the like, but if someone invented a word processor that was clearly better than MS Word, and could do a decent job of importing most Word files, Microsoft's market could collapse in an instant.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I mostly agree with the author. However, MS's dominance extends far beyond that of mere office formats. These document formats are much overplayed. There are other products out there that support all the truely important features that Office provides, and more stability. Yet most companies stick with Office*. Most every company can survive without using the latest Office suite. They choose not to, because it simply takes more effort to use another format. Most document transfering is in house, and if not in house, its between customer/contracter/client. Certainly a large company of say, the size of Coca Cola or IBM can use whatever the hell they want.
The strongest argument against using non-MS argument is economics. Let us not forget that most of MS's sales are tied into OEM sales. Few companies will choose to go out and spend ~100-300 dollars per employee to use another office suite, when they already have one that works 'ok'. This is a result of MS's monopoly in applications and operating systems. None of the products are strong enough to stand on their own, regardless of file format. They use their applications to bolster their OS, and their OS to bolster their Applications. While a browser may sound irrelevant, and it certainly is in terms of raw dollar sums to MS, it is not. A truely cross platform browser is what threatens MS. This is the same reason as why they don't have Office* for Unix, and other OSes. All of these things marginalize 95/NT's position in the market. Put simply, they make it very replaceable. If external forces are able to break this bond, the entire organization will crumble like a house of cards.
In other words, I believe a division of application and operating systems would do the market a great deal of good. It would not allow MS to bundle. It would make it harder for MS to force the latest and most bloated code over on the user. It would force them to compete on performance, and not on the MS proprietary standard. Futhermore, I believe most companies are starting to realize that the next office suite isn't any better than the first. These upgrades, which introduce more and more bloat force the company to upgrade machines as well. These costs are not minor. Furthermore, If the market is less willing to buy the latest MS office suite, fewer changes in file formats will be made, and that will make it much easier to develop code to import/export MS formats. Short of cryptography, there is damn little MS can do to prevent this. I'm convinced that these forces in combination will change the status quo for the better.
"Deleting email that's from your not-too-computer-literate but beloved (or rich) aunt, your boss's boss, or a (potential) big customer may not always be in your best interest."
Absolutely right. It drives me nuts.
User: "Hey, I got this attachment I couldn't open."
Me: "Forward it to me. I'll see if I can help."
User: "I deleted it."
Me: "Uh...I'll get right on that."
...click...
The office where I work is all Mac on the client side. We frequently exchange Word and Excel docs with other companies without difficulty. We do use Office 98 for the Mac, so this helps things, but my computer at home does not have Office and I have no trouble converting, reading, or creating Windows friendly files. (BTW, the Mac version of Office blows chunks just as much as the Windows version, so don't accuse MS of cheating us out of bloatware.)
My users at work double click files they are sent. If they don't open right up, the email is deleted and forgotten. I think most Windows users are the same. It's a matter of convenience, not capability. To own a Windows computer (or even a copy of Office) for the sole purpose of opening the files is a little silly. I don't know what tools are available for Linux, but there are plenty of options for Mac users.
The proposed solution: have the government intervene and force MS to open up their format.
It may take diligence to live in a Microsoft free computing environment, but it is not impossible. I don't think we need Janet Reno to help us open documents.
Every time these debates begin, I warn people that government involvement only grows. There will never be a time when the DOJ does not want to have their hands in the computer pie. Don't scream against the CDA and cheer at the same time for lawsuits that stick it to Bill Gates; they are two sides of the same coin.
It can be tough not to have a government babysitter, ready to make sure your docs open up and your OS is priced fairly, but at least you can stay up past 9:00.
We want Microsoft to keep doing what it's doing -- go ahead and make MS Office as incompatible as possible and slowly and surely people will throw more support into cleaning up web document standards and forget about using MS Office formats.
Proprietary formats make it increasingly difficult for historians and people in general. Have you ever wanted to read your term paper you wrote in 1986 on MacWrite? Chances are you threw out the paper copy knowing you'd have the file on hand.
Project Gutenberg (for those who aren't aware, it is an effort to make copyright free texts such as Edgar Allan Poe's writings freely available) has considered the implications of any format into consideration.
Excerpt from Project Gutenberg:
"Suggestions to make them less readily available are not to be treated lightly. Therefore, Project Gutenberg Etexts are made available in what has become known as "Plain Vanilla ASCII," meaning the low set of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange: ie the same kind of character you read on a normal printed page-- italics, underlines, and bolds have been capitalized.
The reason for this is that 99% of the hardware and software a person is likely to run into can read and search these files.
Any other system of etext storage is going to fall short of an audience of 99%.
This does not mean there are not other valid mean of doing the etext business. . .after all, over half the computers are DOS, so one could address a wide audience by just doing DOS. Plain Vanilla ASCII, however, addresses the audience with Apples and Ataris all the way to the old homebrew Z80 computers, while an audience of Mac, UNIX and mainframers is still included.
Even an open standard poses a problem in regards to usability -- especially in the future -- more devices, programs, and a loss of backwards compatibility. What will ever be as universal as plain old text on paper?
And from a historian's point of view, reading what people wrote 15 years ago is becoming increasingly difficult.
I think I've opened a big can of worms...with a few more tangents which could be addressed.
_________________________________ he who laughs last is at 300 baud
The folks at abisource are doing a heroic job of trying to deal with the Word97 format. I initially wondered why they would read Word97, but wouldn't write it, but now I'm convinced it was an important strategic move.
I'm sorry to say that, at the moment, they're not yet production quality. 80% of the Word97 documents I've gotten have been legible or better, but one or two have not, and one blew up the Gnome session manager -- logged me out, and I had to kill off X several times (as root from a character cell console) before I could log back in. That last can't be blamed on abisource: Gnome should be impervious to such nonsense regardless of app misbehavior. If any software maintainer would care to contact me, I'll be happy to explain the details of the environment in which this happened (and send the nasty file).
I don't have O2K, but one of the new features is supposed to be Save As XML. With good open-source XML capable Word Processors, etc., we'll be okay:
Somebody sends you an O2K file you can't read, kindly ask them to resend but this time in XML, and let them know that they should always send documents as XML (no macro virus worries, ASCII text, OS interoperability, no vendor lock-in). They can always read it as XML and so could you.
Now, just need that awesome XML "Office"-type program for Linux/Be. If you decide to write one now, please use Java and let me know.
David
The ubiquity of Microsoft Word means that you can choose to share your files in just about any format you want. After all, Word can read almost anything with it's built-in converters.
I'm not sure what format to go with, though. WordPerfect? That's still a proprietary format, even though it runs on Linux. RTF has a bad reputation, and ironically, Microsoft got in big trouble with the press and public when it used RTF instead of the Word 6 native format to share files from Word 97.
The HTML/XML format that Word 2000 produces contains all of the formatting of the native file format. And yes, you can read them in any browser on any platform, if you're willing to wait 10 minutes for it to parse all of the new tags.
Personally I'll stick with ASCII. Sure it's limited, but we all use it all day for email anyway. We all need to worry more about grammar and spelling than special formatting anyway.
Unfortunately, I have had similar problems not only going between Mac and Win Office, but between different machines running Office 97 on Windows.
...
Interesting how that doesn't happen with most other file types
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
I think it would be an exceedingly unusual person, however, who couldn't be persuaded to switch WP programs for some sum of money.
You've never seen a full-blown vi vs. emacs war, have you?
I knee-jerk reaction was to say "Just get Office98 for the Mac!" but I recalled several problems I've had with moving files between MacOffice98 to WinOffice97. Tables get lost or scrambled, imported charts and graphs become unintelligible too often to be reliable. This is especially bad when I send files back and forth from Japan.
Lets put aside the fact that OFFICE 2000 uses XML or whatever,
More like whatever. Microsoft's XML/HTML implementation in MS-O2K is not getting the best reviews as being very standardized.
and MS do use standards where good standards exist like TCP/IP.
Again, Microsoft's adherence to the TCP/IP standards have been pretty spotty. They were also slow to embrace TCP/IP (can anyone say NetBIOS), and it appears that they are intending to 'embrace and extend' with proprietarized prototols if they can get away with it.
Why should Microsoft publish its own property ?
That's what entities which are serious about standards do.
Are the US government then going to force BMW to release its engines specs so we can all manaufacture cars with great engine ?
Not an accurate comparison for a couple of reasons. First, 'hard' manufactured goods are much easier to reverse engineer. You can buy a BMW, take it apart and measure all the parts. Microsoft on the other hand, licenses their products with the restriction that you can't look under the hood and take it apart to figure out how it works inside. Secondly, for the user, a person who knows how to drive a Ford can probably drive a BMW without too many problems. The same gas that runs a BMW will run a Ford, the same oil that works in a BMW works in a Ford. BMW's and Fords can run on the same roads. But Microsoft makes applications with proprietary file formats, and all the competing programs have to deal with reverse engineering them.
Secondly, car manufacturers have in fact been forced by the U.S. government (and also pressured by the insurance industry) to allow 3rd party 'compatible' parts vendors to build replacement parts.
I am afraid the only thing that can tumble MS is a competitive product,
I'd prefer if strictly market pressures could eliminate monopolies, but sometimes it doesn't work the way it is supposed to. Mainly when said monopoly exercises dishonest tactics in order to maintain their position. When a monopoly power is allowed to do that, even superior products will fail (or be bought up).
any else means americans don't have freedom at all, like being free to be successful.
Being free to be successful and being free to use dishonest tactics to succeed are not necessarily the same thing.
Are we free to be successful if any well funded competitor can squash us through whatever means they want even if we come up with a competitive product?
Nobody *HAS* to force BMW to release it's engine specs. If I want to know how they did it, I'll pull the engine out, put it on a stand, tear it down, measure everything, send chips of metal off to the labs to figure out what it is, etc. etc. They can't stop me from doing that. That and a (i.e.) 350ci V-8 is pretty much a 350. A V-8 is a V-8 is a V-8 (on the lowest level...) You could even build from scratch an exact clone of the latest BMW engine after you've done all that...but why? Now if they (to use the analogy) welded the hood shut and said "We're not going to tell you what's under there...just turn the key and drive!....and if you do otherwise you're violating our terms of sale!"..that's different.
Herein lies the problem with propietary file formats. Yes you *can* do essentially the same thing (go in an examine the files byte-by-byte with a hex editor to view all the little goodies that make it what it is) and really nobody can stop you. But what a royal PAIN.
The 'good point' is that Microsoft has built this grip on our information, and really the only way to break it is to turn these formats *into* "standards." release *all* the specs, all the tags, all the formatting characters, etc. etc. And let anyone build their own V-8. Stop them from 'extending' the standard unless the additions are widely approved by a standards body, like the w3c and ietf....or even sae.
Blech. Signatures.
I've contemplated writing an editorial before, and I'm currently running a site that is, in essense, one big editorial, with a few technical solutions thrown in.
While it is tempting to ask writers to keep things short, the simple fact of the matter is that most concepts cannot be communicated in one or two, or even 10, paragraphs. And when the concepts aren't communicated, two big things happen: One, you failed to accomplish your primary goal, which was to communicate your concept, and two, you will be the recipient of ENDLESS STREAMS of e-mail (or slashdot posts) taking you to task (or flaming!) you for statements you never made, interpretations you never meant (and could have corrected in another paragraph), or berating you for missing a point that you did not miss, but cut in the interests of space.
Keeping things short is not the best solution. Writing in a newspaper style is ("inverted pyramid").
Anybody can signup for MSDN and obtain the specs for file formats. But simply adhering to these specs doesn't make a "competing" office suite usable in a MS-centric environment. If my personal experience with StarOffice is an indicator, only primitive files are rendered correctly. IMVHO one problem is OLE. There's a GPL'd OLE library, but I'm not sure how well it (and OLE in general) works outside of MS-Win environment. Apparently StarDivision couldn't get it to work (and I tried StarOffice for both Linux and Win32!)
;-( It all boils down to a business decision: spend money on MS software or forego some of the clientele.
Even if we implement a "Chinese Wall"-style system between OS and Office divisions of MS (same way as SEC mandates strict information barrier between investment and trading divisions of the same company), I wouldn't bet on a 100% compatible office suite for a non-Win32 OS...
Well, I guess, the situation described by Charles Wu gives yet another meaning to the term "network computer"...
What mystifies me is why so many people have to have the multiple computers at their desktop -
instead of having a Windows '95 or '98 machine at each users
desk you can have a single NT box, run VNC on it, have users display
the NT desktop to their X window system under linux and support
a dozen or more people who have occasional Word documents to process.
Or you can automate it using OLE - we have a perl/Apache-based
system that allows our UNIX users (about a hundred people)
to send the occasional Word documents they receive to the back-end
NT machine and get a PostScript or PDF file back just by running
"word2pdf" on the command line. We may even make this available
public domain - it's out to some external testers on a pre-alpha
basis right now.
There are better solutions than forcing everybody in the organization
to have an extra computer on their desktops.
Energy: time to change the picture.
The solution taken by the The OpenDWG Alliance is interesting.
Perhaps we need a OpenDOC Alliance?
There is a background paper here:
http://www.opendwg.org/bac kground/wtpaprs/allwtpapr.html
I've used StarOffice in both LINUX and Windows NT4 without a hitch. I love the interface and the fact that I don't have to "import/export" MS office documents. I have only experienced a few MS documents that StarOffice wouldn't open properly. The problem documents contained special routines and features not commonly found in a Word document.
You make excellent point and a few things I'd never thought of before but the fact remains that I'm pretty much able to read most any MS office document that comes my way in StarOffice --for free!
I consider myself lucky that I am not in a position
:/
where I'm required by a job or somesuch to HAVE to
use M$ products.
I don't know about anyone else.. but I send a polite reply to anyone that sends me e-mail in M$ only format, letting them know that I do not accept any e-mail or correspondance that's not
in STANDARD format.
Granted I may have missed a few things of importance
but since I never read the junk... I wouldn't know.
Yes.. I have translators.. but that's not my job.
Anyone using the internet should use the standard
protocals... If you can't figure out how to make
Outlook Express send e-mail in ascii/mime format.
You probably don't have anything to say that I care
to hear. *shrug*
M$ has screwed the public by crippling communications without
using _their_ products.
And what's this crap I hear about having to re-boot after installing
a new driver? *sheesh* How'd they buffalo
the public into accepting that crud?
Oh yeah... the microshaft way IS the way computers
are supposed to run.. *sigh* Sheeple.. a WHOLE bunch
of sheeple...
I DO use M$ on occasion.. but only when I'm forced to because of some
proprietary M$ crap. Usually only once a month
though.. so it's not really THAT painful...
I like the quote I saw recently....
'A computer without a Microsoft OS on it? Gee...
that's like a choklit cake without mustard.'
(yes.. I know I misspelled chocholate)
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
I work in an IS shop as part of the Electronic Commerce team. We're a Unix shop (at least until the Windows-heads drive the us away), but more importantly WE ARE A WEB SHOP. We use a web server to serve up standards compliant content.
Almost every day I get requests to put MSWord and MSExcel content "on the web." I fight this tooth and nail. We have an extranet web reporting system which collects data from all over the Enterprise. One of my jobs is to get this data into a somewhat coherent form in an Oracle database so our reporting CGIs can generate on-the-fly reports and graphs. I get data in a number of file formats. The best stuff comes from the mainframe folks (from SAS and MUMPS on VAX equipment). These folks understand extracts and data integrety. The worst stuff comes to me in Excel spreadsheets.
The first most obvious evil is file size. Positional or delimited extracts from the mainframe folks are clear, well organized, consistent and compact. On the Excel side I had one file, 750 records, 12 columns. File size? 1,387,000 bytes! Why? A similar file from the mainframe folks is about 110,000 bytes.
The next evil is data integrety. I have to explain over and over again to the Excel folks why they should use unique ids for each reporting unit, that they should use the same id for the same reportin unit across files. They tell me th names are on the spreadsheets, so why do I need that? I try to explain that there are spelling, capitalization, and punctuation differences between the names in each of the file depending on who types them. I try to explain that ID numbers are harder to mistype and that they are more efficient to search on.
They don't get it.
Microsoft has put computing power into the hands of people who don't know how to use it. I know that sounds techno-elitist of me, but it is TRUE! There is so much corruption of data going on out there because everyone has a PC on his or her desk. I wouldn't care if it were not for the fact that these people then come back to IS and say "make this all work together." That's where I get upset.
You see, I am all in favor of "power to the people" when it comes to information, but to me this is like studying taxidermy and thinking that makes you an open-heart surgeon.
Getting back to the web, that's the final evil. Try to explain to these people that some of our clients use Macs or that it might be unreasonable to assume that all of our customers have to buy Office and they just don't get it. Show them the difference in performance between downloading an HTML table and an Excel spreadsheet with the same content, and then tell them how much worse it would be on a 28.8 modem instead of a T1 and maybe they get it, but its a hard sell.
My Linux bigotry comes not from an inherent hatred of Windows per se. It comes from the fact that Linux embraces standards, and Windows makes it up as it goes along.
I'm afraid I'd have to side with the folks who say these formats should die. Even if enerything in the world interoperated with them, they stink as network delivery formats for pure bandwidth reasons. Their signal to noise ratio is too low.
How many times do you get a document soley to read it? I often get docs and am required to mark it up, make changes, etc... Can't do that with a viewer. Maybe if non-MS word processing packages had "file format plugins" the makers could release a Word00 filter at the same time Word00 is released, and not have to wait till the next version of their software. If, that is, Microsoft is forth-coming with their file format info. And offer 100% of the info...not just a subset to ensure their monopoly...
Blar.
Any solution that begins with 'require Microsoft to...' is inherently unworkable. This would require the creation of a government watchdog group tasked with keeping an eye on Microsoft to make sure they follow the decree. Besides, there are bound to be loopholes and we all know how adept MS is at slipping through those.
I'd just point out that emerging standards such as XSL and XLL may make XML very capable as a document format. If these standards succeed as well as HTML has, even Microsoft will have to support them. Of course, MS is playing a large role in the development of these standards, so one might expect them to use their marketing prowess to cash in early. They shouldn't, however, be able to establish a monopoly.
WALSTIB!
Folks,
... one thing that has aggravated me is all the software products and updates that have left me with little/no-way to read some of those old historical files. So, standard internet formats (or something else) may provide a backwards compatibility for the next century of software products. I can hope ... html, ASCII, Txt, gif, jpg, wav, ... whatever. Data transfers should be as basic as possible, and local applications should provide (user a/o group selectable) formats, enhancements, display, ... subdued/hidden could provide required formatting information.
... Collaboration, Sharing, Recording real-time WISE-YES for additional repetitive task ... Personal avatar generation for calendar/schedule/PIM/... non-critical and repetitive task. There are still many file formats and requirements in the future that may provide me further aggravations before I drop dead in the next millennium. The again maybe companies and countries will work together to make all consumers happy with standard formats for everything including language translations.
... and other big CEO boys) made in the "70s/80s". The big mistake is trying to dictate to the customer. I see Sun, Lotus, ... others making the same mistake. Customer control (by local IT/IM/ADP/... and/or product/service provider companies) is stupid and piss-poor business practices. Business and people who try to control and dictate will eventually burn themselves and blame the changing economy. Consumers may not be tech literate, but consumers are not stupid; however, business/managers sometimes prove to be ....
...) upheavals due to the "Technology Corporates' Desire/Nature to Rule a Market", "Consumers desire/nature to collaborate/share ...", and most "Corporates and Consumers desire/nature to avoid Technology Application knowledge". So why the upheavals, because companies are institutions and all to frequently CEOs, CIOs, Management, ... will cop an elitist attitude that ignores customers' expertise. The customers' expertise is the knowledge of what makes them happy or aggravated, and what they need for day to day living. Happy customers with a need will always build a strong marketable product line and loyal customers. Most customers are smarter than any CEO, CIO, ... at what they want and need.
... Linux, Win98, WinNT, and Win2K-beta3 (everything paid for and legal).
....
Y'all did cover all the ground on the issue. I side with you people that just want to share and provide usable information. I work as a US-CS. I have used email almost daily sense August 1984. I have used mainframe computers that had transistor processor cards, core memory, and harddisc with multiple (more than 20) fixed RW heads (I'm a little older than some of you.). I'm just an old make-it-work TEK (Technology Experience and Knowledge). I'm a little out of date, due to US-CS, but I still get tagged to learn and teach the newer stuff (like Linux) as technology things (very slowly) come along to US-CS.
As a customer of technology products for two decades now with multiple format data-file archives dating back more than a decade
In the future we all want a direct "What I See Experience - You Experience See (WISE-YES)" now, later, a/o whenever archived for the future archaeologist/anthropologist/.... The end of lost history. Voice file formats for task and communications are important
I say forget MS, because MS (I believe) is making some of the same mistakes IBM, GM,
I expect that there will, over the next 5 to 20 years, be major business (all non-tech, banking, telco,
I hope one day that management, IT/IM/..., and companies will ask what do I want to use on my desk for productivity, but until all data is transferred without problems within/without the internet, companies, and customers (I guess) others will dictate/control what is on my desk at work (currently old hardware one "1995" laptop P1 with win98 [approved by IT/IM], and a "1996" p1 desktop with linux and winNT [hidden from IT/IM], both on the net with 253/254 IPs). At home I'm much better off, "1996" and "1999"
Anyway, I know it'll get better, but it has been a big problem for many years (maybe another decade)
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
...If you tell Joe Manager to send the document in RTF, or plain ASCII, he will probably not be able to "save as..." and understand what he's doing.
Hugo
There are only a handful of companies -- maybe even as low as two -- that have the resources to render HTML completely enough to be considered major players in the marketplace. The Word doc format is about an order of magnitude more complex than HTML, and you don't even have the luxury of a sample implementation (or even a stable file format!) So it's unrealistic to expect any other vendor to implement the complexities and vagrancies of the format well enough to compete with Microsoft.
, and a freely available implementation good enough to justify moving away from Word. A tough order to fill. And please don't say "LaTex" ;-)
What's needed is an open standard for document editing/formatting/publishing/revisioning/sharing
Still, as long as vendors bundle Office with every computer sold, it won't even matter what else is out there...
Loss of choice=loss of value, not necessarily loss of money. Everyone wins if some other, better suite is an option, even if the price is the same as MS office.
Disclaimer:
:) )
Let me say first that I agree with every argument presented here about the threat of proprietary word processing formats. I agree that forcing MS to share the format, AND encouraging the writers of word processing applications to adopt an open standard are crucial.
I'm a graduate student studying English literture, and I've taught composition and literature courses. I'm also a dedicated linux user, amateur programmer and part-time geek. I use Linux for many of the same reasons that other Linux users do: it's an elegent OS, it's stable, and I love to tinker with the source and to be able to solve problems myself without having to rely on a corporate body that doesn't have my interest at heart. I also support Linux because I believe that for technology to be used democratically, we will need to have an open, 'free,' stable, and efficient OS, desktop environment and office suite available to users. (This seems more important in the 'Third World'/lesser-developed-countries than it is in the industrial world, but nevertheless, part of my commitment to Linux is political.)
And yes, Microsoft's handling of file formats for their office suite is ridiculous, unnecessary, and obviously designed to force users to upgrade.
Having said this, we have to acknowledge that this is only part of the problem! MS Word is a very good word processor. Linux is designed by and for geeks who are not, by and large, using their word processors to create the kind of documents, with the same regularity, that other users MUST create. English professors and graduate students are amazingly daft when it comes to using the OS on their computers, but they aren't stupid, and they recognize a useful tool when they see then. MS Word is simply more intuitive, has a better "look-and-feel," better features, and is, in many cases, faster and as stable as StarOffice5.1, WordPerfect 8 and Applixware. (I've never had Word from Office 97 crash in windows. I have, of course, had Explorer crash, and had it take down my entire computer and Word with it.
I say all of this because I believe that Linux and open-source developers are up to the task of writing a really good word processor, and one that will surpass Office97 (Office2000 sounds like hideous bloat-ware). BUT, linux developers need to continue to improve their understanding of GUIs and the needs of users who don't feel like writing dissertations (or long business documents) in TeX.
This will, by necessity, include an open file format, but it hardly seems as if that should be our primary concern at the moment.
Actually, isn't the next incarnation of MS Office going to use XML as the underlying file format?
I hate to say it, but MS has a good idea there.
Personally, I still use LaTeX for all typing of any great length. Who the hell uses MS Word for writing books anyway?
I suspect that even if M$ opened the Office file formats, we wouldn't want them.
The Office file formats keep changing because they very closely follow the object implementations within the applications themselves.
This means that these files tend to mix the distinctions between the actual content, the formatting, and the representation used by the application.
Maintaining this distinction was part of the early appeal of HTML (before it got corrupted with format oriented stuff). XML, with it's explicit separation of content-representation, and formatting (style sheets), has much more promise.
Each successive version of the MS Office formats (and HTML for that matter) places more and more constraints on the internal model that any application using them may use.
if all those cool games would run on some other operating system, it would be bye bye windows for me...
Microsoft's initial aggressive marketing, bundling and discounting of its Office Suite led to a clear dominant position. This path dependency lead to dominance. Microsoft did in fact earn its riches through old fashion solid marketing, and has benefited from the spoils.
In other words, Micorosft is smarter than the rest of us. If, by this statement, he means "Microsoft lied, cheated, and stole to get where they are now ... that's fine, and I agree with that; but he didn't say that [if anyone else thinks he alluded more than I give him credit for, please accept my apology].
I'm sorry to debate a minor issue in an otherwise well-written essay, but this needs to be said, I believe. The issue is no longer minor in the big picture ... why isn't it a bigger deal?
Well written, yes -- but in disagreement elsewhere, also:
Microsoft does not dominate the market because in every other segment, the medium of interoperability is different.
Why single out out Microsoft here, when nearly in the same breath he mentions Acrobat Reader? I mean, if AR were a superior product AND no one used it, he would have an incredibly valid point. As it stands, however, the guy doesn't like Microsoft, and he's using his finesse to hide his bias (rather well, at that, if I may say).
Micorosft got where they are in part because of their low-price software (not to be construed in any fasion with the quality of that software, and the open-liscensing agreements with third-party vendors. This is not the source of their evil.
"He who questions training trains himself at asking questions." - The Sphinx, Mystery Men (1999)
Loss of choice is an economic loss, insofar as you would accept some amount of money as compensation for loss of choice (among word processors, etc.(*)).
Perhaps a better way of putting this is that any consumer losses are not directly measurable losses such as losses due to higher prices for particular commodities, but instead are losses arising out of indirect economic harm. (E.g., I'm forced to choose between (a) the inconvenience of not using my preferred WP, causing me to expend extra labor, and (b) the prospect of losing customers at my printing business because I can't read their documents).
(* To stave off the anti-M$ troops: Clearly some "losses of choice" are not compensable in money -- e.g., loss of freedom of religion. I think it would be an exceedingly unusual person, however, who couldn't be persuaded to switch WP programs for some sum of money.)
Supposedly, the next version of Office is going to make use of XML as a major part of the file formats. So, I guess it is sortof opening up the file format in an "Embrace and Extend" kind of way.
I understand the need to be able to read what someone else has written but I don't agree that buying Micro$oft products is the answer (not now or in the future). I think it would be great to force them to publish their file formats but I seem to get along fine without that. When someone sends me a document that I cannot read then I reply and tell them that they will need to send me something in a format that I can read. I have started using LaTeX when I feel the need to get something done right. My guess is that the way that an individual has formatted their particular document is probably useless anyhow. I care about the content and not the typesetting (which is probably done incorrectly anyhow) so they can give me something simple and if I want it to look pretty I cut and paste into a LaTeX file and it looks better than the original author could ever hope for.
All that I ask is that a person give me something that I can read whether it is in a compatible format, plain text, or LaTeX (or something else that will work). If a person doesn't give me that on the first try then I tell them what I want and make them do the work to make it readable to me.
In general I adhere to the philosophy the government that governs best governs least.
The best way to beat M$ would be to focus on an open document/office suite format (Does Gnome or KDE has their own formats already?) and get applications for these working as many platforms as possible
Novell has their own network standards, M$ has theirs, Mac has theirs as well. IMO, the best things about computing have come from open standards agreed upon by large and varied groups. Software, hardware, etc. DON'T NEED to be based on proprietary standards. I don't even completely care about Open Source code as long as everyone plays by the same basic rules.
To illustrate,
My car has wheels, tires, brakes, steering wheel, etc. All the basic parts to make a car. From that a company called Mazda was able to build a proprietary engine (based on the wankel rotary), and suspension, etc. to make the RX-7 I bought. I love my 7. Mazda had the advantage of being able to exist in a marketplace where other companies didn't have a monopoly over all the parts providers. Ford, GM, none of them could go to a tire manufacturer and say "Don't sell tires for Mazda cars or we'll not allow you to sell tires for ours."
So where does this leave us with computers? We need to have manufacturers able to make machines that can perform the basic functionality of a computer. Some would make machines better for games (kinda like a sports car) while others would make them better for file serving (kind like a truck). You don't ask one type to do everything.
Anyway, I just wanted to vent.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
Later as a support person I see this with each Office update. As soon as an attachment is recieved the user cannot read the push for an upgrade start. And of course once this user has the lates version they will readily send out all there attachments in a form that will leave the other party unable to read without an upgrade.
I think Office documents should be put through a Standards process similiar to that of HTML. A format is set that all Software could readily follow. The Government could support such a change by only distributing and accepting documents that follow the guidelines of this standard document type. This type could be based on HTML, XML or a binary format but what matters is that is a standard and that it is set by a standards organization and not a single software publisher.
Before you flame:
Even though I can't wait till the day that people say, "Word, ha!, get with the program buddy", the fundimental problem that we are facing is that it is too deeply entrenched. The company I work at just spent a lot of time, effort and money to upgrade the documentation system to word97. Which was not a simple task, it took a number of months. Something like that will not happen again for a couple of years.
How could you transfer existing documents of a large company (literally thousands of documents) from word to _____ in a cost effective solution without having open source standards to tell how the document is produced. Otherwise there will be loss of data && formatting. etc. It was hard going from one version of MS to the next (which is suppoed to be compatable) imagine going to another program, on a diffrent platform! IT would want people to die horrible deaths.
How do you explain to your clients when they try to download some document to read and have no idea how to look at it. IMHO most documentation can be written in emacs without a Word Processor. If the content isn't there nothing will beef it up.
But I do agree that web standards would be good, for example the how-to's have a great system going for them. I fully support platform independent, web based documentation standards but it's just too good of an idea for someone to implement ~it would make too much sence~.
But the thing here is...if I get a file from my brother, and he uses Word, there's no way for me to open it, unless I have Word...and that's what the article says...and that is the REAL problem. Why should I be forced to use Word to look at the stuff others send me? I normally reply with "send it in a reasonable and usable format like RTF or HTML", but it isn't the real solution...the real solution is to have a standard to which ALL wordprocessors adhere, in which we can exchange information, no matter what program we choose to use.
This is like if you couldn't get a phonecall from a friend or family unless you were in the same phone company or using the same brand of phones...totally stupid idea.
Vox
Pain is the gift of the gods, and I'm the one they chose as their messanger...
An interesting article. File formats are important. MS changed the Word97 format from Word95 to both break compatibility with other office programs who had created decent Word95 filters and to create an artificial reason for Word95 users to upgrade. However, even MS felt the heat on this and had to create a Word97 to Word95 filter for teed-off corporate users. Would a regulated environment help? Would other software developers actually want to standardize around another MS-controlled format?
I think government control of file formats is going a bit far. JPEG, for example, became a standard because it was freely-published, worked well, and was supported by an industry. If interoperability were really a big issue, Corel, Lotus, Applix, StarOffice and whoever else would have created an open and comprehensive common file format long ago to challenge MS. They have not done this because they think their proprietary formats give them a competitive advantage.
Also, while everyone makes a VHS recorder, the patent is owned by someone (JVC?) and they get a royalty on every one built. Should MS get a royalty for their file format?
FInally, in all the famous antitrust trials of the last century (ex. Standard Oil) the cost to consumers decreased from year to year as SO undercut the competition (and supplied better quality). They were broken up anyway.
Good thoughts, though.
Sig? I don't need no stinkin' sig!
Use HTML, Tex/Latex to do typesetting after you've done the writing.
Use WP or that Operating System and Office in one wannabe StarOffice. They're quite well done.
Or wait for KOffice.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
I think probably the best solution is to require any provider of software to the government to 'open-source' their document format so that free competition could therefore result. Microsoft is not directly compelled to open their format, but would be induced to do so as noted above, by the loss of government revenue.
It is unconscionable that my tax dollars are used to support a file format that is basically gibberish.
But Microsoft should still be separated into multiple companies, anyway.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
When I read the intro, I wondered if I were on my way to fantasyland.
But, I have to agree with Charles Wu. Publishing the file formats 6 months before actual release of the software is not a bad idea. One thing we might actually see is a reduction in the number of file-format changes. Do we really need different file formats for different versions of Office?
I am not a M$ advocate. My personal belief is that M$ has held the computing industry back. But, how do you punish a company for being successful. I own my own (incredibly small) company. If I trip over a new inovative idea will I also have to answer to the DOJ for my success?
I would like to see the publishing of file-formats. Then I could choose my office applications on the benefits of the software, not because I need an ability to read/write a certain format.
There has been no change in all the standard office apps formats. (Ms was burned last time they changed them) What is new is the ability to save your document in html in such a way that you can reconstruct the original propritary format documents features. The use of XML is sprinkled around the document to store much of the metadata of the document and to build style sheet like stuff inside the html.
It's not really saving any document in xml, which is what I'd like to see some day.
The biggest problem to this seems to be embedded documents which always use some form of distributed object technology ( like COM, KOM/OpenParts, serialized java objects, etc... ) I guess one would have to convince everyone in the world that there is at least one right way to store these "flattened" or linked objcts which by observation of the number of different methodolgies right now, the technology is still premature.
Seriously, patents are granted "to promote knowledge and invention for the public good" (or words to that effect, in the US Constitution).
So, just revoke all patents as they apply to any document formats and force Microsoft to publish the full and complete specs on the Net.
And, while we're at it, force them to publish all details of all contracts with software companies in terms of price, placement, and competition restrictions. In full.
Will in Seattle
it's economics, baby!
Will in Seattle
Having examined Word's internal file for myself with my trusty hex viewer, I've concluded that even M$ doesn't really know what's in there anymore -- their own inability to write a correct ASCII export filter should demonstrate that. (All Word does is strip off the binary header and footer, and leaves all the control codes in the supposedly-plain-ASCII export. This is a known bug of several versions' standing.) And it's hard to consider it a "standard" when the file format changes with every version of Word (I believe that is a conscious decision to enforce upgrades -- WordPerfect has managed to maintain the same internal file format thru 4 versions now, with full compatibility, so what's Word's problem?) Additionally, it's a security nightmare because of the junk data that is commonly included as padding in the file (never mind macro viruses) -- it can be anything from memory or your swapfile. Furthermore, the file format limits Word's capabilities. (Try doing a floating flush right. Word can't do it, and the reason is the internal document structure.)
I don't remember where I was going with this, except to point out that there are inherent reasons why regarding Word as a "standardized document format" is a bit shortsighted.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Great insight as to the path dependency causes of Microsoft's monopoly. However, I do have a probem with the reccommendations.
Reccomentation 1: Microsoft does publish most of their document formats. co the book "Microsoft {Word|Excel} Developer's Handbook" (ISBN's and 1-57231-359-5 for the excel one). These books contain detailed descriptions of their file formats.
Reccomendation 2: The requirement to publish their formats six months in advance would complicate and slow down the software development process and set bad precedents for the industry
Reccomentation 3: There is a requirement for any comany to not sell below cost. Unfortunately, the marginal cost of software is practically nil. What about Corel and Star Division giving away their product free for personal use? This can be vewed as predatory.
We all want to get Microsoft, but we must be careful to avoid hurting the rest of the industry.
Using the DOJ to unwittingly set bad precedents is one way of doing it.
___ This sig is in boldface to emphasize its importance!
I think all the points you made are valid, but I think that the issue here is the acceptance of Office products as the de facto standard rather than the incompatable file types.
For an example, let's use two automotive manufacturers (comparison to automobiles is frequent in this industry). Let's say, for example, that both Ford and GM released their first car in 1980. They are doing pretty well for a while, then GM really starts taking off. They make their own standards on engine types, and many other parts of the car, even down to the cassette player. Since GM is now way ahead of Ford, they can afford to only let thier car play GM tapes, even though they are usually really bad quality. Now, the main problem here is not going to be solved by opening up the tape standard to Ford. The problem here is that GM us using their cars to push other standards and products onto the consumer market. Incompatable formats are only a by-product.
Browsers do matter, also. MS wanted IE to be greatly accepted, so they can control the standards on the Internet. They wanted to do away with Java and Javascript and use VBScript, ActiveX and ASP instead. The Internet contains a lot more than just HTML.
+--
Given infinite time, 100 monkeys could type out the complete works of Shakespeare.
+-- (Score:-1, Moderator on Power Trip)
The author has got to the crux of the matter - the sole reason to buy Windows is to run Office. Office is what makes Microsoft its billions, not NT or Wing Commander. And the only reason to run Office is because everyone else does, and ignorant people send you email in Office formats instead of "standard" ones.
The point of the browser war is the issue of "portalising" surfers, and Microsoft has a valid claim that the AOL/Netscape alliance has a big captive market there too. The DoJ could lose that one on those grounds.
What had Microsoft running scared to cause them to pour so much effort into IE was the vision of the future where "the browser is the computer" - if you have web-based word processing, what place for Office? They've certainly covered their rear well for this risk, with WinCE and WebTV looking after the other potential competitors.
And yes, I too hate that fscking paperclip, and all of Word's other wonderful design flaws - try deleting ACTORS.DLL, it doesn't seem to impact the small, useful subset of Word's features.
I agree with this, but man, keep it short next time!!! One of the worst trends I am noticing in online editorials is that they so often get a point across and just keep going, and going, and... perhaps we "nerds" would be better at getting the point across to the rest of the world if it was short and sweet.
Anyway, I must again sasy that I wholeheartedly agree with this. In recently looking for jobs I got entirely sick of seeing "proficient with MS Office 97" as a requirement for a job. I will admit I do use MS Office 2000 on my Windows box, and only because I need the compatibility it provides... Grrr.....
I'll shut up now...
I have felt the effects of this first hand many times. For instance, the University I attend uses word doc's for presentation of some projects. I also have a roommate who wanted to install linux, but didn't because the office support wasn't there. While there were perfectly good alternative office programs for Gnome, they weren't able to read M$ files, and that's important. Luckily, things are improving in this area somewhat. For instance, Gnumeric can now import Excel files, although I don't know how much support is available. I for one think it would be excellent if M$ had to open up the office file formats... it would be a huge win for the OSS community. For the time being, though, I will still keep windoze on my laptop, just for those times when I am required to read Office docs.
Tell a man that there are 400 Billion stars and he'll believe you
The new StarOffice opens all common Word file formats including 97. It even does a pretty accurate conversion.
Everyone should stop whining about MS not making the Office formats available. They have been available for quite some time (not long after Office 97 was released IIRC). To get them (instructions copied from the MSWordView homepage):
How to Obtain Microsoft Office File Formats
The MS Office file formats (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Office Binder and Office Drawing) are all freely available from the MS web site provided you are a member of the MS Developer Network (MSDN). Joining MSDN is free to gain access to these specifications
Simply go to the following address:
http://msdn.microsoft.com
From the list on the left of the screen select MSDN library online
If you are not a member of the MS Developer Network you will need to join - it's free.
Once you have subscribed to the MSDN, you can obtain online copies of the file formats. To do this, follow these steps:
1.On the MSDN World Wide Web site, click MSDN Library Online.
2.Under Member Area, click the Library Online tab.
3.Double-click Microsoft Office Development.
4.Double-click Office.
5.Double-click Microsoft Office 97 Binary File Formats.
6.Select the format you are interested in (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.)
...the market niche of programmers and system administrators. These people tend to work independently and do not need to create documents in Microsoft Office and hence have no need to have a Windows machine.
Ha! Maybe network administrators, but programmers working independantly? At any major software development firm, programmers are going to be collaborating like crazy. These people certainly have to write formated documents (requirements, functional specs, etc).
If anything, the document compatibility problem is worse, because you have perfectly reasonable unix solutions (I used framemaker at one company), trying to mesh with the windows machines that management is using.
On the other hand, with Corel releasing linux versions of WordPerfect, it seems that everyone can co-exist in harmony!
Having just been to a MS Office 2000 marketing sesison earlier this week (It was free), I think that you're totally off base. Here's why:
1) Microsoft is still working very hard to co-opt the web. And, with Office 2000, they're doing that very well with their funky Captive-X controls. What does that mean to the consumer? You'll soon be seeing a lot more Windows/IE-only areas on the web.
2) They have made HTML the "sister file format" of Office 2000. The theory being that you can now save your file to HTML and have it be functionally/visually identical to saving it in the Word/Excel/Powerpoint/etc file format. Why are they doing this? Because it lets them tie into #1. All of these Office 2000 generated Web pages use Microsoft's 'embrace and extend'ed web technologies.
So, a year from now, when you're no longer recieving Office documents, but URLs to web-documents which can only be viewed/edited using IE5 for Windows, which of your 3 machines will you be using to browse the web?
Oh, and that stupid paperclip is now 3-D looking! Like I didn't have enough CPU cycles to burn...I swear, someone should put together an Office Assistant theme pack for Q3...Fragging the clip would be such a rewarding experience!
Ultimately, what will doom Office are the new, ever-more-destructive OTDs (Outlook/Office Transmitted Diseases) like worm.explorer.zip and Melissa or the raft of Word Macro Virii out there which target the "integrated" Office platform. You thought they were bad before...just wait until they find a way to target the executable code that handles the "self-repairing" and "install on demand" functions of 2000...
Well done.
It has long been contested that Americans don't have freedom. The constitution of America enshrines a number of concepts - freedom of speech, freedom to bear arms - in such a way as to effectively prevent actual freedom on a day to day basis.
Five words for you:
Microsoft Word viewer is free.
I've got another comment on file formats, see
elsewhere.
Do anal-retentive people hyphenate 'anal retentive'?
Here's what we should do:
Let's get the government to force Microsoft to
put together a forum for people who want to
look at the guts behind MS technologies. Call
it the Network of Microsoft Developers. Put references to their proprietary file formats up for all to see.
Oh, wait. I guess it's been done. Does anybody here even check the facts before speaking out their @$$? MS Office 97 file formats have been available for years on MSDN. If you don't want to actually "stain" your NetScrape browser, go to www.wotsit.org.
Gee, this proprietary bohemeth which seeks to lock up your data is just so mean and evil that they will _GIVE_ you the spec for free. What a bad company.
Do anal-retentive people hyphenate 'anal retentive'?
What's with all the AC's and XML?
Are they Micros~1 lurkers or what??
"once MS starts creating well-formed XML from MS Word, i'll be happy. XML is the standard."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the 'ML' in 'XML' stand for markup language?
So what's so special about it? HTML can put out some very nicely 'formatted' docs. Who needs M$?
We all know that Micros~1 will take XML and 'enhance' it to the point of no return. W3C or no, you think Microsoft really gives a shit about them, or GNU (GPL), or OSS in general for that matter??
M$ takes existing standards, fucks them all up, and all that happens is we get screwed in the end, and they (Gates) get richer.
I have heard it said that MS isn't the problem, just the symptom, but if they are the fever in our closed source cold, hey a fever can kill you too, if it gets high (powerful) enough. The only way to recover is to remove the symptom, or lessen it to a manageable level, then deal with the underlying problem.
I believe the author to have made an excellent case, however I do feel that the case is fundamentally incorrect. Microsoft's handling of Office is definitely indicitive of monopoly power but it is not their only measure, and is not the most important.
The core of the anti-trust litigation is whether the consumer has been harmed. Windows runs on over 90% of the world's PCs and it is difficult to purchase a system from an OEM without it preloaded. As a result of this power, Microsoft has ensured that OS/2, DOS(MS as well as others), Intel Unixes(including Linux), and others all have to fight for less than 10% of the market. With the price of computers constantly decreasing, Windows prices have skyrocketed exponentially and continue to do so.
"if there is one thing to be learned from what happened to internet browsers is that Microsoft is willing to engage in predatory pricing to drive out competitors."
This notion seems to contradict the prime assertion of the essay. Microsoft's bundling of I.E. has clearly resulted in a destryed browser market and the corporate sale of Netscape. One could argue Opera is not free but Opera has a minute market share and is very limited as to what platforms it supports. If the barriers to entry are severe for browser sellers, there won't be browser sellers. Clearly that has harmed consumers--not in the availability of free browsers but that there are only 2 browsers that support modern web standards.
Granted, there are many examples we can point to about the anti-competitive practices of Microsoft. Office is among those examples. However, what the government is asserting and what seems most valid is that Microsoft used unfair tactics to gain the power it had. Had it not used those tactics, Office, Internet Explorer, Windows, and other examples of anti-competitive behavior would not have profited at the expense of the consumer and competition. In other words, had Microsoft not destroyed consumer choice and competition these issues would not exist. We can go after little flames of monopoly--like Office and IE, but until we address the root of the problem, more flames will appear. Therefore, it would be wrong to assert that the government is fighting for the wrong reasons, however poorly or greatly they do so.
-Clump
I don't know about everyone else, but I find it interesting to get a certain amount of background. Even if you know most of what is being said, you might still read something interesting. I don't really mind waffly articles myself, I just read through them faster.
Yes this is a long article, but there is a lot of information in there, and a lot of different areas being addressed. If you need a short summary, just skip to the last couple of paragraphs, which provide a neat synopsis of the points being made.
Well, going along the BWM theory, but let's shift it more to Microsoft's aspects...
What if BMW created new type of fuel. It's not a better fuel, just different. They get it put into all normal gas stations, and open gas stations that sell only it.
Now, all of the new BMWs run on this new fuel. Not much of a problem there. Now, say, for a year, BMWs are really cheap. Lots of people buy them, so more people use this new fuel. As more people use the fuel, fewer gas stations would sell the normal fuel. More people would buy BMWs, simply for convienince. As more people bought BMWs, more gas stations would surve fuel only for them, so more people would have to buy BMWs, or have to get fuel far out of thier way.
Microsoft not releasing thier doc specs would be like BMW not telling anyone how to use this fuel. The only reason to do it would be to make sure people only bought BMWs. However, it's using thier dominance in the fuel supply to dictate what car you'd buy, which is bad.
What's even worse, is if BMW created another different fuel, and had their new BMWs use that fuel. They stopped making the old one, and started selling the new one instead. They get all gas stations that sold thier fuel to switch. Now, everyone has to buy the newest car, so they can continue driving. That's the problem Microsoft makes with thier anti-backward compatable document formats. While it's great for them, since yo need the newest product, it's using their control to force consumers to buy something, and that's also wrong.
I remember the first time I came across IFF on the old Amiga I had a sudden epiphany. What a farking great idea! Although that format thrived on the Amiga it never really went anywhere else, which is sad.
It seems to me that a revival of this excellent format is in order. It would make it possible for any program to read any document of any type, simply by only pulling out the "chunks" it wanted and ignoring the rest.
Also IFF was defined to always be an open format. Any new "chunk" type had to be documented and registered, and then placed in the public domain to be viewed by anyone who wanted. In the days before WWW this was a lot more difficult, because you'd have to order a new "Inside Amiga" book to get the latest chunk information.
I would suggest to those in the Linux community who have not as-yet started making Open Document Format Standards a priority that the time is precisely NOW! to do it, and I can't imagine a better wrapper than IFF.
Let this stand as the seed of a manifesto.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Somehow i question the validity of comparing
M$ $oftware to BMW engines...
BMW has a reputation standing excellent engineering, and M$ stands on crappy products
forced on the public by an exceptionally slick
marketing/PR machine and flat out buisness muscle
you could try comparing Corel and BMW....
CrAzYjOn -Master Of Digital Chicanery
I really like the point about the relationship between paper use, document preparation systems and authentication.
Clearly we use these systems because their printed output is superior. We need this media primarily because we still rely on hand written signatures to provide authentication of provider/recipient. With the advent of digital signatures this is no longer necessary. (If you check out some recent news, Congress has made some headway in this arena.) Once digital signatures become commonplace, the digital format, and by inference an "internet friendly" format will replace this paper-centric system.
I would further say that this is already happening. I read some recent news about the financial services industry cooperating on an XML dtd. Do you think they are going to document prep systems for this? You bet! Evantually they are not going to bother with M$ Word(y).
I found the article well written but I would prefer a more rigid solution than what the author suggests:
I think a better idea, than to make Microsoft publish their "Office" file formats 6 months in advance, would be to make them reviewed, discussed, specified and published through a standardization body (Subcommittee of ISO, IEEE, ect...).