I've been tracking this for the last few months, and it's clear that this was essentially a victory of corruption over merits.
What's being said now is that this will be a pyrrhic victory for Microsoft. Many will discredit this standard (even with the ISO stamp on it) because of the history of corruption that lead to its approval. Those who already disliked Microsoft will only hate it even more and become more vocal.
I hope this whole process served to show the world (once again) what "business as usual" means for Microsoft.
the world would be better off by Microsoft standardizing the binary formats The binary formats are obsolete.
Yes, they're obsolete, which doesn't mean there are millions of files in thos formats. I said they should standardize the binary formats using the fast track process, since that's what that process is meant for. Using that process for a new format doesn't make any sense at all.
On your comments on Gary Edwards, if he's so brilliant and enlightened, how come did he end up making that comment about CDF being the true format for office documents, which is clearly completely off? For me, he just made an ass out of himself with that. He just proved that he didn't know what he was talking about. Although I accept that SUN might be refusing to accept Office compatibility, after Gary's comment on CDF, I don't credit him anymore.
As I said, the leap year bug is there because it of federal regulations that require archived data to remain unchanged.
By that same rule, this data should not be converted to OOXML either. For instance, see the comparison made by Stéphane Rodriguez here and look for "13) Document backwards compatibility subject to neutrino radio-activity". You'll see that charts look different in Office XP and Office 2007.
The argument that bugs should be kept for archival is a great argument for the standardization of binary formats (fast track would be ok for them). In no way standardizing OOXML will help that. OOXML is not the same as the binary formats. There's no confusion about that, the only confusion is Microsoft trying to imply that they are the same thing, when they clearly are not.
Frankly, that's not how an "Open" process is supposed to work. And it's indicitive of the kind of tricks Sun pulls, and why Microsoft saw right through it.
[sarcasm] Oh, yeah... and Microsoft is playing really clean to get OOXML approved... they're the victim of this whole process! [/sarcasm]
Everybody has to gain from Microsoft adopting ODF Actually, no. *ALL* of Microsofts competitors lose if Microsoft adopts ODF.
Yes, Microsoft's competitors will lose (by one side), but the customers will gain. They'll start having the possibility to migrate from one Office suite to the other if their vendor decides to stop improving the product or changing its behaviour completely in a way you have to relearn everything or if they make it work only on the latest version of the OS that forces you to buy a new machine to run it. Of course the opposite is true as well, Sun and IBM will have to shape up and improve their Office suites greatly to compete with Microsoft Office, but that all will be good for us, the customers. We'll finally have a free market and the advantages it brings. The end of vendor lock-in is good to everybody, except of course to those that are profiting from it.
Well, I appologize for implying you were sheeple;)
Good to see that there are balanced people on the other side as well!
The EU didn't fine Microsoft for "abusing their monopoly", but rather for failing to follow their orders in a timely manner.
The particular reason for that specific fine is not that important, the fine is part of EU's action against Microsoft because of their anti-competitive practices, by abusing their monopoly to drive competitors out the market. There's no way to deny they did that several times. I agree that the requirements to produce complex documents on all the proprietary formats that EU required seems to be too tough on Microsoft, and I don't really see much the point of it. But that's a situation Microsoft put itself into, by ignoring existing open standards and prefering to develop proprietary protocols and formats instead. I would rather prefer that EU would forced Microsoft to start implementing (and by implementing I mean 100% fidelity) existing open standards. That certainly would be a step in the direction of openness and interoperability.
The part that most people are confused about is that OOXML is *NOT* a new format.
This argument doesn't convince me. If OOXML = binary format, why isn't there a table with the canonical way to transform binary formats into OOXML? Also, the world would be better off by Microsoft standardizing the binary formats, because most competitors have already reverse engineered most of those formats and support already around 90% of their features. Standardizing them (in a fast track process, it certainly would be appropriate for them, they've been here for more than 10 years, they are de facto standards) would benefit others to reach the missing 10% and achieving full interoperability.
But instead, Microsoft decided to push its new format, with the argument that it's the same as the old one. I call FUD on that.
OOXML has a different purpose from ODF, though they have a large amount of overlap.
They have the same purposes: word processors, spreadsheets, presentations. The large amount of overlap makes it even more clear. If something is not perfect, you don't abandon it and restart from scratch. You improve on it. And that's what should have happened.
there were politics at work that were not entirely (or maybe even mostly) Microsoft's fault. Sun ruled over the ODF TC with an iron fist, and there was never a serious offer for Microsoft to join ODF.
Actually, I recall reading that the head of the board of directors of OASIS was a Microsoft employee during the time that ODF was standardized there. Microsoft could have participated from the start, they would if they were interested in interoperability. The claims that SUN ruled the ODF TC is also false, since SUN has only 3 of the 10 members that decide on it. IBM has 4 members, and the 3 others are independent. Heck, if you said IBM had too much influence in the ODF TC it would make more sense, but even they have less than half of the votes.
Sun would have never allowed the extensions Microsoft needed (as evidenced by the fallout with Gary Edwards and his attempt to get the necessary extensions included in ODF).
Gary Edwards was part of that phony Open Document Foundation, ODF, which ended up saying that ODF was not suitable and that they would promote CDF (Component Document Format), even though W3C, which standardized CDF, said that CDF was intended for a completely different purpose. As far as I know, all Gary had was claims, they claimed to have a plug-in that had 100% fidelity, they claimed to have 5 changes to introduce to ODF that could guarantee 100% fidelity, but as far as I know, they never showed any code or the actual suggestions. I call BS on that.
I also don't know what Microsoft would "require" to be added to ODF. I hope they don't want to introduce leap
I've followed this fairly closely and am EXTREMELY ANGRY at the crap MS has pulled trying to force this through! Actually, what you've been following are biased opinions by people who have a financial stake in OOXML failing. It's no surprise that you're angry, that's what they want you to be.
You are wrong. I've been reading both sides of the story from the start, both pro-ODF (Rob Weir, Updegrove, Sutor, Groklaw, and OOXML [which is indeed quite extremist]) and Microsoft's side as well (Brian Jones, Jason Matusow, and the [sarcasm]"independent"[/sarcasm] consultants Rick Jelliffe, Miguel de Icaza and Patrick Durusau, which have clearly been biased from the start). From viewing what both sides have to say, I can filter out what seems to be exagerated or even a lie, and I can say that I have firm basis for my opinions.
I agree that my bias would be against Microsoft from the start, but that is not unbased either. That is based on a history of Microsoft abusing their monopoly. It's undeniable, EU fined them for US$ 1.3 billion last month for it. I still resent having to use the lower-quality Internet Explorer because Microsoft clearly used their embrace, extend, extinguish tactics to drive Netscape out of the market. That said, even without my predisposition against Microsoft, the facts on this case are very clear to indicate foul play from them.
Some of the arguments from the ODF side seem to be a little over to me. For instance, the argument that Microsoft's promise not to sue is not enough, I never bought that. Microsoft would never try to suit anyone for interoperability, specially with the EU over them as much as they are. Another point was the importance given to the outcome of the votes on the BRM, and to the fact that O members could vote. I think that's not really that important, even if the outcome of the votes was different, the text would be no better or no worse, I don't think the quality of the text is the problem to start with. The standard is unnecessary from the start, and it shouldn't have gotten so far to start with. The only problem in that case was the decision to use a ballot instead of discussing and reaching consensus for every resolution, which was, of course, impossible. That should, in turn, trigger the alarm that fast track was not an appropriate choice, and that should have stopped the process then.
On the other side, most of the arguments from the Microsoft side are pure marketing. "OOXML is a superb standard" and "Everyone was heard" make me laugh particularly hard. The arguments for the need of OOXML are completely flawed, and Microsoft's speech on their openness and will for interoperability are only the new version of the vendor lock-in on times when the EU is watching them closely. It's the less worse they can do for their business to assure other products will have a fidelity level below theirs when they're forced to interoperate, if you have to disclose, you make sure you disclose something so huge, so complex, so tied to other proprietary technologies, that nobody will be able to implement it, at least not before you extend to implementation on the next version and push it for fast tracking after the product is out, making sure your competitors are always busy catching up, and always one step behind.
Anyway, if you want to read the most balanced opinion on OOXML you should read what Tim Bray has to say.
Frank's comments are his own and do not represent any concensus position of the United States.
Rob Weir, another delegate for US, agrees that in some cases the ECMA responses were not improvements. From his blog:
Personally, I do not take it as an article of faith that the Ecma proposals are all improvements to the specification. We certainly found on Monday and Tuesday that almost every Ecma response reviewed was found to require more work.
The third and last member from the US delegation is a Microsoft employee, he certainly wouldn't agree with Frank and Rob, but at least 2/3 of the delegation expressed that.
Not to mention that other countries mentioned that too. I know that Canada, Malaysia and Brazil delegates were particularly unhappy with the outcome of the BRM, as they blogged about it. I don't have the particular references for those, but if you read their blogs you'll see they agree.
Also, my original comment that cited Frank Farance's statement was in response to:
Attendees generally felt it was better to get most suggested changes in as were.
Which, as I just demonstrated, is not the opinion of all attendees.
With standards, customers can choose another product if they don't like or don't want to pay for the newer version of your product. This forces companies to improve their own products, to lower prices, and to compete fairly in a free market. This sounds like communism to me...
Actually, that is the concept of free market, which is part of capitalist economies. In comunism the state owns all the companies and there is no competition.
The 900 change block vote (the 80% that were not discussed) passed based on approve/disapprove votes, but only by counting votes from non P attendees.
There is disagreement about whether non P attendees were entitled to vote on this ballot, under ISO rules.
The consensus is settling toward the non P vote being against ISO rules.
P-members ("P" as in participant) are the ones with the right to vote. O-members ("O" as in observer) have the right to attend meetings, receive documents, make suggestions, but they don't have the right to vote (in general). The votes in the BRM were counted for both P and O members, when according to the directives, only P members should be counted. Here the situation is well explained, the rules seem clear to me, but ISO stands on the grounds that the decision to allow O members to vote was right.
Personally, I don't see much problem with O members voting, many of those that were at the BRM were working really hard, Brazil is a good example, you can see from the blog of one of the delegates. Disallowing O member votes would also only disapprove around 100 of the 900 approved resolutions (some preliminary accounts were suggesting that all of them would be disapproved). And also, although OOXML is a terrible specification, I don't think the technical issues are the most relevant here, I believe the standard should be disapproved even if the text was perfect, on the basis that there is already another standard for the exact same purpose.
Even if I don't think O members voting was a problem, breaking the rules was a problem. If ISO breaks the process, then how can they promote such things as ISO 9001, which is all about the processes themselves?
The majority of attendees chose to abstain or cast no vote during the block vote itself. This brings into question how representative it was.
No. Abstentions are normal, specially on issues that only some countries have the knowledge of the issue. For instance, I read that for bidirectional writing, only Israel has the expertise, and most other countries cannot really have an opinion on it, because most of them don't really know anything about it.
The real problem is that the issue should not be decided by vote, but by consensus. Many delegates tried to raise that issue, and I even read that India's delegate expressed his indignation to travel to Geneva using government and public resources to fill a paper ballot, which he could very well have done without the need of travelling. Here's another account on the sad decision to vote the resolutions.
You flaws 1 and 2 also applied to the ODF ISO standardization.
Not true. ODF standardization by ISO didn't use the fast-tracking process, it was done by the PAS (Publicly Available Specification), which allows the appropriate time for scrutiny of a standard, differently of a fast-tracking process, which is supposed to ratify a de facto standard, which OOXML isn't at all. If you want more details, read Fast Track versus PAS.
Also, from Wikipedia, you can see that the work on ODF started in December 2002 in OASIS, it was approved by OASIS as a standard in May 2005, was submitted as a PAS to ISO in November 2005 and "after a six-month review period, on May 3, 2006 OpenDocument unanimously passed its six-month DIS ballot in JTC1, with broad participation, after which the OpenDocument specification was approved for release as an ISO and IEC International Standard under the name ISO/IEC 26300:2006". If that's not enough scrutiny, I don't know what is.
(And it needed fixing...see the massive changes in ODF 1.2 and compare to 1.0)
Not true. The changes in newer versions of ODF are evolution of the standard. New features are being introduced. Version 1.1 introduced accessibility features. Version 1.2 introduces metadata capabilities, which allows the use of ODF in the semantic web.
So why is Microsoft being required to operate under different rules?
Actually, Microsoft is playing by their own rules, but not in the sense you imply. The rules for fast-tracking seem to have been written specially for OOXML.
People seem to want theirs to be flawless before allowing it to be an ISO standard--a requirement no one else has been subject to.
You're making a lot of false statements on ODF, I wish you could back them out. You base your whole line of thought on the assumption that OOXML is following the same process than ODF, which is completely false, as all the links I included here will show. Agreed, the links are from ODF backers, but it's clear that Microsoft wouldn't start making these comparisons, it only shows how they're abusing a process to have their way.
However, even if Microsoft would submit it as a PAS, after reviewing and finishing it in ECMA, and even if they didn't use dirty tricks to try to approve their standard, it should never be considered for standardization anyway! The thing about standards is that, unless everybody uses the same standard for the same purpose, they're irrelevant. They only solve problems if they're adopted. There already is a standard for office documents, it's ODF.
Instead of promoting their own, on the basis that it provides legacy compatibility (fallacy, otherwise there would be tables on how to convert binary documents), and that standards should compete (fallacy, products should compete, they should all use the same standard so that you can move from one product to the other and take all your documents with you, you would choose products based on features and would not be locked into any vendor), Microsoft should instead just adopt ODF.
The argument that ODF is insufficient for MS Office is a fallacy as well, because ODF supports extensions, and for versions 1.1 and 1.2 (or 1.3, there's still time!) Microsoft could indicate exactly what they think is needed in ODF to support conversion from legacy formats. Microsoft is part of OASIS, they were actually invited to cooperate on ODF when the process started, but they refused. ODF proponents would certainly be interest
Patrick Durusau is the co-editor of ISO ODF and OASIS ODF. He's a Sun employee.
Also, until the audio of the BRM meeting is released, no outsider can properly evaluate what occurred there.
Not really. ISO made an official statement where the fact that 80% of the resolutions were decided by vote was stated. The resolutions that were changed during the BRM are also in that document.
But even then, if you take the statement of who was in the meeting (both from Microsoft's side and the pro-ODF side) and filter out the bias in them, you'll get to the conclusion that the time was really insuficient and also that no consensus was reached for most of the points.
The audio of the meeting will probably never be publicly released. [sarcasm] Apparently secrecy is essencial in developing open standards. [/sarcasm]
Microsoft is only going to start listening when people talk with their wallets. Until then, whatever EU does will only make them use big words as interoperability while disguising their efforts to lock in people to their products.
That's why we should say NO to Microsoft.
Start by saying NO to Internet Explorer and saying YES to Firefox. You won't regret it.
Say NO to Outlook, and say YES to Mozilla Thunderbird, or start using GMail.
Then, try to install Open Office along with Microsoft Office, although you may have problems opening some old documents, in general Open Office has very good quality. Open Office default format is the ISO standard ODF, which is gaining momentum and will start to have mass adoption after OOXML flops in this fiasco.
Say NO to Microsoft's Silverlight, since it's just another attempt to hijack the web. Developers, stick to Flash. Users, refuse installing the plugin and complain to the webmasters whenever you visit a site that requires it.
Say NO to Microsoft's XPS, since PDF is ubiquitous and it's an ISO standard as well.
And finally, if you've come so far, you should start saying NO to Windows and saying YES to Ubuntu. You may be impressed.
I'm not trolling here, this is not open source zealotry. It's only the realisation that Microsoft will only improve if there's competition, and there won't be any competition unless people start realising they have alternatives. Just look at IE, Microsoft didn't improve it at all, until it started having competition from Firefox, which by now has 25% market share for browsers, thanks to people who adopt it and spread the word. It's time we give them reason to do the same with their Office suite and Operating System as well.
At least the Microsoft version of propaganda (blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones) allows freedom of speech, and the owner there gets tons of abuse (warranted or otherwise).
Mod parent funny!!! ROTFL!!!
Only in software is this even considered. You don't hear about how Toyota or GM should be forced to accept Daewoo or Suzuki parts in their cars for "interoperability" purposes.
Terrible car analogy. If you've had a Toyota for 5 years, which is getting old and requiring high maintenance, and you want to buy a new car, will you just have to buy a new Toyota? No! You may choose any car you want. Maybe you won't be able to use the radio you bought for the old car on the new brand, and you'll have to relearn how to turn the A/C on on the new brand, but these are far from showstoppers.
Microsoft has done everything to lock in customers to their products. They've used their embrace, extend, extinguish tactics to drive competitors off the market. And then they've bastardized standards and created proprietary formats to raise the cost of the change. So, the next time you buy a computer, if you use products other than Microsoft's, you'll have problems to open your old documents.
"Hi, our product is super successful and makes tons of money. So obviously the right thing to do now is to spend lots of resources making our competitors's product better!" Crazy, just crazy.
Following standards is in no way using resources to improve the competitor's product! And nobody is saying that Microsoft should improve on Open Office or any other product. The only point in following standards is that, if you want to choose a different product, you'll still be able to access all your documents.
Standards are good because they force products to improve. With standards, customers can choose another product if they don't like or don't want to pay for the newer version of your product. This forces companies to improve their own products, to lower prices, and to compete fairly in a free market. With vendor lock-in, all those benefits are lost, and the only one who gains from it is the monopolist.
Durusau, as the co-editor of ISO ODF and OASIS ODF, should be more interested in pushing Microsoft to implement ODF as a native file format. After all, isn't ODF his own child?
He doesn't realise (or does he?) that if OOXML is standardized, ODF will never be picked up by Microsoft, and all other competitors will be forced to implement OOXML, which will (once again) make Microsoft's format the de facto standard. Just look at how bad it was for everybody to try to follow binary formats as Microsoft changed them once and again.
What father would see a bully beating his child, and praise the bully for "at least listening", even though all is ignored?
Attendees generally felt it was better to get most suggested changes in as were. It was better to make the changes even if they had reservations, rather than leave the text of MS OOXML in it's original form.
Wrong. See what Head of US Delegation Frank Farance said here:
"Eighty percent of the changes were not discussed," said Frank Farance, head of the U.S. delegation [...]
"Virtually every comment we processed did not survive unedited," he said.
The greek delegate Antonis Christofides also said here that Canada had a list of cases where the ECMA resolution made the text worse than the original.
Seems that once governments started to think about lock-in, MS got interested in interoperability.
Yeah, but it's Microsoft's way to interoperate, as usual... If they were really interested in interoperability, they would have implemented ODF as a first-class citizen in Office already.
I also read yesterday that US was advised to vote "yes" by INCITS, despite of what the US delegates and the HoD Frank Farance told about the BRM on the media.
Because the countries raised issues in alphabetic order, and the second round wasn't even completed, US delegates could raise only one issue for discussion. And yet, they recommend that the text is good enough for approval. Unbelievable. As you said, it really smells. Bad.
This OOXML standardization process was actually flawed from the begining.
It wasn't finished when ECMA submitted it to ISO for standardization (flaw 1). It was submitted as a fast-track process, which is clearly not appropriate, and ISO passed the fast-tracking anyway (flaw 2), the first vote was completely corrupted, with banana republics joining as "P" (as in "participating") members one or two weeks before the vote (flaw 3), even though the first vote raised more than 3,000 issues, they went ahead with the fast-tracking (flaw 4), all of them to be discussed and fixed at a 5 week meeting behind closed doors (flaw 5), where all 1,000 corrections were supposed to be discussed and agreed by consensus, but 900 of them were voted instead (flaw 6).
These are only some of the flaws of the process itself, not to mention the flaws of the text or of the format itself (issues with dates before 1900, unnecessary high complexity, bit-masks instead of XML, using proprietary formats for images [VML, DrawingML] and equations [OOML] instead of SVG and MathML).
I hope at least that sanity will prevail until the end of the month, and that the fast-tracking of this standard will be gloriously dropped!
It's not 100% stable on Linux, and you still don't have it for 64-bit platforms. Adobe should release the player as open source.
Considering Flash's popularity, by releasing the code Adobe would have several others (like Ubuntu, RedHat) fixing bugs on it for them. They would provide 64-bit versions of it as well. And they wouldn't have anything to lose, after all, the money they make is on authoring tools for it.
I hope Silverlight will make Adobe see the light and release it as open source, I really don't understand why they didn't do it yet.
Flash would be as inadequate as Silverlight for publishing information.
Silverlight is worse than Flash for several reasons. 1) It's from Microsoft, a company that has been known for introducing proprietary technologies to lock in people to their products. 2) It's a new, unstable and unproven technology; Flash at least has been around for many years now. 3) Silverlight seems to be patent encumbered, and it seems Microsoft will try to use it against free software and the GPL.
However, ultimately I believe that Silverlight will fail for the same reasons Flash failed. 10 years ago I remember that every single company was converting their websites to Flash. Every webdesigner at that time was versed at that technology and it was being pushed very strongly. At that time, the incompatibilities and bugs in implementations of HTML (introduced by... can you guess it? Of course! Microsoft's IE!) made a big case for starting to use Flash and have consistent look and feel among different browsers and platforms.
But now most companies are back to having HTML based websites, and using Flash sparingly, and not for publishing content. They realised that using Flash had many shortcomings, and that they would have to use HTML if they wanted to:
Have search engines index their sites. In a world where most company websites are reached through Google, no company would want a Flash website that will never be reached because it's not properly indexed.
Allow people to bookmark or link specific pages. In the blogging era this is very important, as bloggers want to point readers exactly to the page and snippet where the relevant information is. If a blogger starts to have to write instructions ("follow this link then click on 'Products' and then search for 'Name' and click on the tab for 'Data Sheet'"), they'll not link to you at all, and maybe even try to find the information from your competitors.
Mashups. Same as before. Your content will only be usable if it's accessible.
The need for plugins is not longer the reason why people don't use Flash (and won't use Silverlight). When content is king, it has to be served in an open standardized format, that allows it to be accessed, indexed, linked and ultimately used. That's what the Web 1.0 was about, and the Web 2.0 kind of tried to bring these core ideas back, after technologies such as Flash were being misused for content publishing.
We've already been mistaken once. Are we going to do it again? I really hope not.
Note how Apple literally went from.5ish% marketshare to 6+% during the same time Linux was supposed to be taking over the desktop?
Apple sells hardware and software. They don't have to press Dell and HP to sell their OS.
Linux depends on Dell and HP deciding to sell it bundled with their hardware, but Microsoft used anti-competitive practices for long to avoid that to happen. Now we're starting to see some companies selling Linux computers, as Dell started to do in Canada this Thursday.
Linux is also different because it's a community effort, not a company. It's a different model at all.
All businesses use anti-competitive actions. It's called business.
No. Most business use competitive practices, such as improving their products and showing customers they can provide them the best solution.
That's what capitalism is all about. You always have to improve and lower your prices, otherwise your competitors will come up with a better product with lower prices and you'll lose market.
But that's not what's happening with Microsoft, which doesn't improve anything for more than 5 years, just because they don't have to. They found a loophole in the system, namely the monopoly, which allows them to just push proprietary and non-interoperable crap to their customers to lock them in to their platform (unless they're willing to get rid of all their legacy data). There are better products (Apple) and cheaper products (Linux), but even then Microsoft keeps its market share.
The free market was supposed to be good to customers, because they'll have good and cheap products. What most people have to buy is just the opposite: Microsoft's expensive crap.
I'm a believer that the only true monopolies are companies that can literally have no competition. Thank you for pointing out that the iMac was able to compete with just a quality product and awesome marketing. It's amazing how that can happen when Microsoft controls everything.
Microsoft knows that, and does its dirty tricks even to keep some competitors small but alive, because it knows it's going to be sued much harder for anti-competitive practices otherwise. See the comment above about them injecting money into Apple in the 90s. The iMac was in part consequence of this Microsoft's money. They just didn't think Apple would grow as much, otherwise they would have tried harder to control it.
Microsoft is just a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition. Who can't see that is blind.
If it's superior why the need for interopoerability? Oh right, it's because Windows still has things Linux doesn't.
Yes! Windows has lots of proprietary protocols and formats introduced only to lock the costumers in their product. They realised that was the way to keep making money even without innovating. Nobody would be willing to migrate to another platform and just leave all their documents and files behind. Even on the web, with their buggy IE requiring tons of workarounds, such that most websites worked for IE only sometime ago, even IE was an obstacle for migration.
Now the world is getting more aware of Microsoft's practices, and it's refusing them. The problem is that the fight is just begining, there's still a lot ahead. You can see that there's reaction from Firefox adoption (should be around 25% or more now) and ODF standardization, which Microsoft is trying to fight and avoid at all costs, even by the bastard standardization of their crappy MSOOXML.
Microsoft's product don't have any innovation over Linux, all they have is lock-in, made to keep people away from Linux using dirty tactics.
the arrival of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the same year brought stiff competition and surpassed Netscape within three years.
I remember well those days. IE was no competition to Netscape, Netscape was much superior. IE2 was unbloated but lacked support for many features that Netscape 3 had, I guess it didn't even support tables, for sure it didn't have frames, Javascript, etc.
IE3 was the worst piece of software I have seen. EVER!
The fact was that Netscape was its own enemy there. Netscape 3 was really good, a lean and fast browser. It didn't have good support for CSS, but was years ahead of IE. Then they launched Netscape Communicator. Man, was it slow. They made the only possible download the bundle of browser, mail, news reader. Even Mozilla when they got the code from Netscape they had it bundled, further on they split it again to launch Phoenix (then Firebird then Firefox) to start getting some success again.
Netscape didn't die from competition of IE, at least not in terms of features. If Netscape wasn't the only one to blame for its own death, Microsoft's part in it was only by bundling the browser into the OS, not by making a product that could compete with Netscape.
O.J. Simpson is an acquitted murderer too that doesn't mean it's true.
Are you trying to imply that they were wrongly accused?
Microsoft is a monopoly for a fact, they detain more than 90% of the market share of OS for desktops and Office applications. In several occasions Microsoft was shown to use anti-competitive practices, using their monopoly to kill their opponents and keep their market share.
If their monopoly power was so great Apple & Linux wouldn't be here.
Well, if they're still here, it's not for lack of Microsoft efforts to get rid of them.
Apple was virtually dead in the mid-90s, they only reappeared due to the amazing success of the iMac. They've been able to keep alive after that by delivering superior products and by marketing them right.
Linux is an pretty good piece of software and newadays it's superior to Windows in most of its features. The fact that it still has less than 1% of market share in the desktop is a direct result of Microsoft's dirty practices (such as blackmailing hardware vendors into bundling their OS and using proprietary protocols to make interoperability impossible).
You can't have it both ways.. The death of Microsoft and Linux/Apple winning! Or Microsoft is so powerful the government has to destroy it for others to compete.
Actually Microsoft has enough money and enough good programmers that they could compete by delivering good quality products if they wanted too. Even if they're forced to play nice (use open standards, unbundle software, interoperate), either by the courts or by the fact that they're no longer a monopoly, they'll probably be here for long.
It would be good though, because they'll have to deliver good software to keep some market share. If they would put all the effort they put to FUD us into writing decent software, I would have no problem with them at all.
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I live in Québec!
You insensitive clod!
Unfortunately, it seems to be true.
I've been tracking this for the last few months, and it's clear that this was essentially a victory of corruption over merits.
What's being said now is that this will be a pyrrhic victory for Microsoft. Many will discredit this standard (even with the ISO stamp on it) because of the history of corruption that lead to its approval. Those who already disliked Microsoft will only hate it even more and become more vocal.
I hope this whole process served to show the world (once again) what "business as usual" means for Microsoft.
Wrong.
Yes, they're obsolete, which doesn't mean there are millions of files in thos formats. I said they should standardize the binary formats using the fast track process, since that's what that process is meant for. Using that process for a new format doesn't make any sense at all.
On your comments on Gary Edwards, if he's so brilliant and enlightened, how come did he end up making that comment about CDF being the true format for office documents, which is clearly completely off? For me, he just made an ass out of himself with that. He just proved that he didn't know what he was talking about. Although I accept that SUN might be refusing to accept Office compatibility, after Gary's comment on CDF, I don't credit him anymore.
As I said, the leap year bug is there because it of federal regulations that require archived data to remain unchanged.By that same rule, this data should not be converted to OOXML either. For instance, see the comparison made by Stéphane Rodriguez here and look for "13) Document backwards compatibility subject to neutrino radio-activity". You'll see that charts look different in Office XP and Office 2007.
The argument that bugs should be kept for archival is a great argument for the standardization of binary formats (fast track would be ok for them). In no way standardizing OOXML will help that. OOXML is not the same as the binary formats. There's no confusion about that, the only confusion is Microsoft trying to imply that they are the same thing, when they clearly are not.
Frankly, that's not how an "Open" process is supposed to work. And it's indicitive of the kind of tricks Sun pulls, and why Microsoft saw right through it.[sarcasm] Oh, yeah... and Microsoft is playing really clean to get OOXML approved... they're the victim of this whole process! [/sarcasm]
Everybody has to gain from Microsoft adopting ODF Actually, no. *ALL* of Microsofts competitors lose if Microsoft adopts ODF.Yes, Microsoft's competitors will lose (by one side), but the customers will gain. They'll start having the possibility to migrate from one Office suite to the other if their vendor decides to stop improving the product or changing its behaviour completely in a way you have to relearn everything or if they make it work only on the latest version of the OS that forces you to buy a new machine to run it. Of course the opposite is true as well, Sun and IBM will have to shape up and improve their Office suites greatly to compete with Microsoft Office, but that all will be good for us, the customers. We'll finally have a free market and the advantages it brings. The end of vendor lock-in is good to everybody, except of course to those that are profiting from it.
Well, I appologize for implying you were sheeple ;)
Good to see that there are balanced people on the other side as well!
The EU didn't fine Microsoft for "abusing their monopoly", but rather for failing to follow their orders in a timely manner.
The particular reason for that specific fine is not that important, the fine is part of EU's action against Microsoft because of their anti-competitive practices, by abusing their monopoly to drive competitors out the market. There's no way to deny they did that several times. I agree that the requirements to produce complex documents on all the proprietary formats that EU required seems to be too tough on Microsoft, and I don't really see much the point of it. But that's a situation Microsoft put itself into, by ignoring existing open standards and prefering to develop proprietary protocols and formats instead. I would rather prefer that EU would forced Microsoft to start implementing (and by implementing I mean 100% fidelity) existing open standards. That certainly would be a step in the direction of openness and interoperability.
The part that most people are confused about is that OOXML is *NOT* a new format.
This argument doesn't convince me. If OOXML = binary format, why isn't there a table with the canonical way to transform binary formats into OOXML? Also, the world would be better off by Microsoft standardizing the binary formats, because most competitors have already reverse engineered most of those formats and support already around 90% of their features. Standardizing them (in a fast track process, it certainly would be appropriate for them, they've been here for more than 10 years, they are de facto standards) would benefit others to reach the missing 10% and achieving full interoperability.
But instead, Microsoft decided to push its new format, with the argument that it's the same as the old one. I call FUD on that.
OOXML has a different purpose from ODF, though they have a large amount of overlap.
They have the same purposes: word processors, spreadsheets, presentations. The large amount of overlap makes it even more clear. If something is not perfect, you don't abandon it and restart from scratch. You improve on it. And that's what should have happened.
there were politics at work that were not entirely (or maybe even mostly) Microsoft's fault. Sun ruled over the ODF TC with an iron fist, and there was never a serious offer for Microsoft to join ODF.
Actually, I recall reading that the head of the board of directors of OASIS was a Microsoft employee during the time that ODF was standardized there. Microsoft could have participated from the start, they would if they were interested in interoperability. The claims that SUN ruled the ODF TC is also false, since SUN has only 3 of the 10 members that decide on it. IBM has 4 members, and the 3 others are independent. Heck, if you said IBM had too much influence in the ODF TC it would make more sense, but even they have less than half of the votes.
Sun would have never allowed the extensions Microsoft needed (as evidenced by the fallout with Gary Edwards and his attempt to get the necessary extensions included in ODF).
Gary Edwards was part of that phony Open Document Foundation, ODF, which ended up saying that ODF was not suitable and that they would promote CDF (Component Document Format), even though W3C, which standardized CDF, said that CDF was intended for a completely different purpose. As far as I know, all Gary had was claims, they claimed to have a plug-in that had 100% fidelity, they claimed to have 5 changes to introduce to ODF that could guarantee 100% fidelity, but as far as I know, they never showed any code or the actual suggestions. I call BS on that.
I also don't know what Microsoft would "require" to be added to ODF. I hope they don't want to introduce leap
You are wrong. I've been reading both sides of the story from the start, both pro-ODF (Rob Weir, Updegrove, Sutor, Groklaw, and OOXML [which is indeed quite extremist]) and Microsoft's side as well (Brian Jones, Jason Matusow, and the [sarcasm]"independent"[/sarcasm] consultants Rick Jelliffe, Miguel de Icaza and Patrick Durusau, which have clearly been biased from the start). From viewing what both sides have to say, I can filter out what seems to be exagerated or even a lie, and I can say that I have firm basis for my opinions.
I agree that my bias would be against Microsoft from the start, but that is not unbased either. That is based on a history of Microsoft abusing their monopoly. It's undeniable, EU fined them for US$ 1.3 billion last month for it. I still resent having to use the lower-quality Internet Explorer because Microsoft clearly used their embrace, extend, extinguish tactics to drive Netscape out of the market. That said, even without my predisposition against Microsoft, the facts on this case are very clear to indicate foul play from them.
Some of the arguments from the ODF side seem to be a little over to me. For instance, the argument that Microsoft's promise not to sue is not enough, I never bought that. Microsoft would never try to suit anyone for interoperability, specially with the EU over them as much as they are. Another point was the importance given to the outcome of the votes on the BRM, and to the fact that O members could vote. I think that's not really that important, even if the outcome of the votes was different, the text would be no better or no worse, I don't think the quality of the text is the problem to start with. The standard is unnecessary from the start, and it shouldn't have gotten so far to start with. The only problem in that case was the decision to use a ballot instead of discussing and reaching consensus for every resolution, which was, of course, impossible. That should, in turn, trigger the alarm that fast track was not an appropriate choice, and that should have stopped the process then.
On the other side, most of the arguments from the Microsoft side are pure marketing. "OOXML is a superb standard" and "Everyone was heard" make me laugh particularly hard. The arguments for the need of OOXML are completely flawed, and Microsoft's speech on their openness and will for interoperability are only the new version of the vendor lock-in on times when the EU is watching them closely. It's the less worse they can do for their business to assure other products will have a fidelity level below theirs when they're forced to interoperate, if you have to disclose, you make sure you disclose something so huge, so complex, so tied to other proprietary technologies, that nobody will be able to implement it, at least not before you extend to implementation on the next version and push it for fast tracking after the product is out, making sure your competitors are always busy catching up, and always one step behind.
Anyway, if you want to read the most balanced opinion on OOXML you should read what Tim Bray has to say.
Rob Weir, another delegate for US, agrees that in some cases the ECMA responses were not improvements. From his blog:
Personally, I do not take it as an article of faith that the Ecma proposals are all improvements to the specification. We certainly found on Monday and Tuesday that almost every Ecma response reviewed was found to require more work.The third and last member from the US delegation is a Microsoft employee, he certainly wouldn't agree with Frank and Rob, but at least 2/3 of the delegation expressed that.
Not to mention that other countries mentioned that too. I know that Canada, Malaysia and Brazil delegates were particularly unhappy with the outcome of the BRM, as they blogged about it. I don't have the particular references for those, but if you read their blogs you'll see they agree.
Also, my original comment that cited Frank Farance's statement was in response to:
Attendees generally felt it was better to get most suggested changes in as were.Which, as I just demonstrated, is not the opinion of all attendees.
Actually, that is the concept of free market, which is part of capitalist economies. In comunism the state owns all the companies and there is no competition.
You're still off...
P-members ("P" as in participant) are the ones with the right to vote. O-members ("O" as in observer) have the right to attend meetings, receive documents, make suggestions, but they don't have the right to vote (in general). The votes in the BRM were counted for both P and O members, when according to the directives, only P members should be counted. Here the situation is well explained, the rules seem clear to me, but ISO stands on the grounds that the decision to allow O members to vote was right.
Personally, I don't see much problem with O members voting, many of those that were at the BRM were working really hard, Brazil is a good example, you can see from the blog of one of the delegates. Disallowing O member votes would also only disapprove around 100 of the 900 approved resolutions (some preliminary accounts were suggesting that all of them would be disapproved). And also, although OOXML is a terrible specification, I don't think the technical issues are the most relevant here, I believe the standard should be disapproved even if the text was perfect, on the basis that there is already another standard for the exact same purpose.
Even if I don't think O members voting was a problem, breaking the rules was a problem. If ISO breaks the process, then how can they promote such things as ISO 9001, which is all about the processes themselves?
The majority of attendees chose to abstain or cast no vote during the block vote itself. This brings into question how representative it was.No. Abstentions are normal, specially on issues that only some countries have the knowledge of the issue. For instance, I read that for bidirectional writing, only Israel has the expertise, and most other countries cannot really have an opinion on it, because most of them don't really know anything about it.
The real problem is that the issue should not be decided by vote, but by consensus. Many delegates tried to raise that issue, and I even read that India's delegate expressed his indignation to travel to Geneva using government and public resources to fill a paper ballot, which he could very well have done without the need of travelling. Here's another account on the sad decision to vote the resolutions.
You flaws 1 and 2 also applied to the ODF ISO standardization.
Not true. ODF standardization by ISO didn't use the fast-tracking process, it was done by the PAS (Publicly Available Specification), which allows the appropriate time for scrutiny of a standard, differently of a fast-tracking process, which is supposed to ratify a de facto standard, which OOXML isn't at all. If you want more details, read Fast Track versus PAS.
Also, from Wikipedia, you can see that the work on ODF started in December 2002 in OASIS, it was approved by OASIS as a standard in May 2005, was submitted as a PAS to ISO in November 2005 and "after a six-month review period, on May 3, 2006 OpenDocument unanimously passed its six-month DIS ballot in JTC1, with broad participation, after which the OpenDocument specification was approved for release as an ISO and IEC International Standard under the name ISO/IEC 26300:2006". If that's not enough scrutiny, I don't know what is.
(And it needed fixing...see the massive changes in ODF 1.2 and compare to 1.0)
Not true. The changes in newer versions of ODF are evolution of the standard. New features are being introduced. Version 1.1 introduced accessibility features. Version 1.2 introduces metadata capabilities, which allows the use of ODF in the semantic web.
So why is Microsoft being required to operate under different rules?
Actually, Microsoft is playing by their own rules, but not in the sense you imply. The rules for fast-tracking seem to have been written specially for OOXML.
People seem to want theirs to be flawless before allowing it to be an ISO standard--a requirement no one else has been subject to.
You're making a lot of false statements on ODF, I wish you could back them out. You base your whole line of thought on the assumption that OOXML is following the same process than ODF, which is completely false, as all the links I included here will show. Agreed, the links are from ODF backers, but it's clear that Microsoft wouldn't start making these comparisons, it only shows how they're abusing a process to have their way.
However, even if Microsoft would submit it as a PAS, after reviewing and finishing it in ECMA, and even if they didn't use dirty tricks to try to approve their standard, it should never be considered for standardization anyway! The thing about standards is that, unless everybody uses the same standard for the same purpose, they're irrelevant. They only solve problems if they're adopted. There already is a standard for office documents, it's ODF.
Instead of promoting their own, on the basis that it provides legacy compatibility (fallacy, otherwise there would be tables on how to convert binary documents), and that standards should compete (fallacy, products should compete, they should all use the same standard so that you can move from one product to the other and take all your documents with you, you would choose products based on features and would not be locked into any vendor), Microsoft should instead just adopt ODF.
The argument that ODF is insufficient for MS Office is a fallacy as well, because ODF supports extensions, and for versions 1.1 and 1.2 (or 1.3, there's still time!) Microsoft could indicate exactly what they think is needed in ODF to support conversion from legacy formats. Microsoft is part of OASIS, they were actually invited to cooperate on ODF when the process started, but they refused. ODF proponents would certainly be interest
Patrick Durusau is the co-editor of ISO ODF and OASIS ODF. He's a Sun employee.
Also, until the audio of the BRM meeting is released, no outsider can properly evaluate what occurred there.Not really. ISO made an official statement where the fact that 80% of the resolutions were decided by vote was stated. The resolutions that were changed during the BRM are also in that document.
But even then, if you take the statement of who was in the meeting (both from Microsoft's side and the pro-ODF side) and filter out the bias in them, you'll get to the conclusion that the time was really insuficient and also that no consensus was reached for most of the points.
The audio of the meeting will probably never be publicly released. [sarcasm] Apparently secrecy is essencial in developing open standards. [/sarcasm]
Microsoft is only going to start listening when people talk with their wallets. Until then, whatever EU does will only make them use big words as interoperability while disguising their efforts to lock in people to their products.
That's why we should say NO to Microsoft.
Start by saying NO to Internet Explorer and saying YES to Firefox. You won't regret it.
Say NO to Outlook, and say YES to Mozilla Thunderbird, or start using GMail.
Then, try to install Open Office along with Microsoft Office, although you may have problems opening some old documents, in general Open Office has very good quality. Open Office default format is the ISO standard ODF, which is gaining momentum and will start to have mass adoption after OOXML flops in this fiasco.
Say NO to Microsoft's Silverlight, since it's just another attempt to hijack the web. Developers, stick to Flash. Users, refuse installing the plugin and complain to the webmasters whenever you visit a site that requires it.
Say NO to Microsoft's XPS, since PDF is ubiquitous and it's an ISO standard as well.
And finally, if you've come so far, you should start saying NO to Windows and saying YES to Ubuntu. You may be impressed.
I'm not trolling here, this is not open source zealotry. It's only the realisation that Microsoft will only improve if there's competition, and there won't be any competition unless people start realising they have alternatives. Just look at IE, Microsoft didn't improve it at all, until it started having competition from Firefox, which by now has 25% market share for browsers, thanks to people who adopt it and spread the word. It's time we give them reason to do the same with their Office suite and Operating System as well.
Mod parent funny!!! ROTFL!!!
Only in software is this even considered. You don't hear about how Toyota or GM should be forced to accept Daewoo or Suzuki parts in their cars for "interoperability" purposes.Terrible car analogy. If you've had a Toyota for 5 years, which is getting old and requiring high maintenance, and you want to buy a new car, will you just have to buy a new Toyota? No! You may choose any car you want. Maybe you won't be able to use the radio you bought for the old car on the new brand, and you'll have to relearn how to turn the A/C on on the new brand, but these are far from showstoppers.
Microsoft has done everything to lock in customers to their products. They've used their embrace, extend, extinguish tactics to drive competitors off the market. And then they've bastardized standards and created proprietary formats to raise the cost of the change. So, the next time you buy a computer, if you use products other than Microsoft's, you'll have problems to open your old documents.
"Hi, our product is super successful and makes tons of money. So obviously the right thing to do now is to spend lots of resources making our competitors's product better!" Crazy, just crazy.Following standards is in no way using resources to improve the competitor's product! And nobody is saying that Microsoft should improve on Open Office or any other product. The only point in following standards is that, if you want to choose a different product, you'll still be able to access all your documents.
Standards are good because they force products to improve. With standards, customers can choose another product if they don't like or don't want to pay for the newer version of your product. This forces companies to improve their own products, to lower prices, and to compete fairly in a free market. With vendor lock-in, all those benefits are lost, and the only one who gains from it is the monopolist.
Durusau, as the co-editor of ISO ODF and OASIS ODF, should be more interested in pushing Microsoft to implement ODF as a native file format. After all, isn't ODF his own child?
He doesn't realise (or does he?) that if OOXML is standardized, ODF will never be picked up by Microsoft, and all other competitors will be forced to implement OOXML, which will (once again) make Microsoft's format the de facto standard. Just look at how bad it was for everybody to try to follow binary formats as Microsoft changed them once and again.
What father would see a bully beating his child, and praise the bully for "at least listening", even though all is ignored?
Wrong. See what Head of US Delegation Frank Farance said here:
"Eighty percent of the changes were not discussed," said Frank Farance, head of the U.S. delegation [...]"Virtually every comment we processed did not survive unedited," he said.
The greek delegate Antonis Christofides also said here that Canada had a list of cases where the ECMA resolution made the text worse than the original.
I also like Rob Weir's blog at http://www.robweir.com/blog/
Seems that once governments started to think about lock-in, MS got interested in interoperability.Yeah, but it's Microsoft's way to interoperate, as usual... If they were really interested in interoperability, they would have implemented ODF as a first-class citizen in Office already.
I also read yesterday that US was advised to vote "yes" by INCITS, despite of what the US delegates and the HoD Frank Farance told about the BRM on the media.
Because the countries raised issues in alphabetic order, and the second round wasn't even completed, US delegates could raise only one issue for discussion. And yet, they recommend that the text is good enough for approval. Unbelievable. As you said, it really smells. Bad.
This OOXML standardization process was actually flawed from the begining.
It wasn't finished when ECMA submitted it to ISO for standardization (flaw 1). It was submitted as a fast-track process, which is clearly not appropriate, and ISO passed the fast-tracking anyway (flaw 2), the first vote was completely corrupted, with banana republics joining as "P" (as in "participating") members one or two weeks before the vote (flaw 3), even though the first vote raised more than 3,000 issues, they went ahead with the fast-tracking (flaw 4), all of them to be discussed and fixed at a 5 week meeting behind closed doors (flaw 5), where all 1,000 corrections were supposed to be discussed and agreed by consensus, but 900 of them were voted instead (flaw 6).
These are only some of the flaws of the process itself, not to mention the flaws of the text or of the format itself (issues with dates before 1900, unnecessary high complexity, bit-masks instead of XML, using proprietary formats for images [VML, DrawingML] and equations [OOML] instead of SVG and MathML).
I hope at least that sanity will prevail until the end of the month, and that the fast-tracking of this standard will be gloriously dropped!
Yes, Flash still sucks.
It's not 100% stable on Linux, and you still don't have it for 64-bit platforms. Adobe should release the player as open source.
Considering Flash's popularity, by releasing the code Adobe would have several others (like Ubuntu, RedHat) fixing bugs on it for them. They would provide 64-bit versions of it as well. And they wouldn't have anything to lose, after all, the money they make is on authoring tools for it.
I hope Silverlight will make Adobe see the light and release it as open source, I really don't understand why they didn't do it yet.
Flash would be as inadequate as Silverlight for publishing information.
Silverlight is worse than Flash for several reasons. 1) It's from Microsoft, a company that has been known for introducing proprietary technologies to lock in people to their products. 2) It's a new, unstable and unproven technology; Flash at least has been around for many years now. 3) Silverlight seems to be patent encumbered, and it seems Microsoft will try to use it against free software and the GPL.
However, ultimately I believe that Silverlight will fail for the same reasons Flash failed. 10 years ago I remember that every single company was converting their websites to Flash. Every webdesigner at that time was versed at that technology and it was being pushed very strongly. At that time, the incompatibilities and bugs in implementations of HTML (introduced by... can you guess it? Of course! Microsoft's IE!) made a big case for starting to use Flash and have consistent look and feel among different browsers and platforms.
But now most companies are back to having HTML based websites, and using Flash sparingly, and not for publishing content. They realised that using Flash had many shortcomings, and that they would have to use HTML if they wanted to:
The need for plugins is not longer the reason why people don't use Flash (and won't use Silverlight). When content is king, it has to be served in an open standardized format, that allows it to be accessed, indexed, linked and ultimately used. That's what the Web 1.0 was about, and the Web 2.0 kind of tried to bring these core ideas back, after technologies such as Flash were being misused for content publishing.
We've already been mistaken once. Are we going to do it again? I really hope not.
Apple sells hardware and software. They don't have to press Dell and HP to sell their OS.
Linux depends on Dell and HP deciding to sell it bundled with their hardware, but Microsoft used anti-competitive practices for long to avoid that to happen. Now we're starting to see some companies selling Linux computers, as Dell started to do in Canada this Thursday.
Linux is also different because it's a community effort, not a company. It's a different model at all.
No. Most business use competitive practices, such as improving their products and showing customers they can provide them the best solution.
That's what capitalism is all about. You always have to improve and lower your prices, otherwise your competitors will come up with a better product with lower prices and you'll lose market.
But that's not what's happening with Microsoft, which doesn't improve anything for more than 5 years, just because they don't have to. They found a loophole in the system, namely the monopoly, which allows them to just push proprietary and non-interoperable crap to their customers to lock them in to their platform (unless they're willing to get rid of all their legacy data). There are better products (Apple) and cheaper products (Linux), but even then Microsoft keeps its market share.
The free market was supposed to be good to customers, because they'll have good and cheap products. What most people have to buy is just the opposite: Microsoft's expensive crap.
I'm a believer that the only true monopolies are companies that can literally have no competition. Thank you for pointing out that the iMac was able to compete with just a quality product and awesome marketing. It's amazing how that can happen when Microsoft controls everything.Microsoft knows that, and does its dirty tricks even to keep some competitors small but alive, because it knows it's going to be sued much harder for anti-competitive practices otherwise. See the comment above about them injecting money into Apple in the 90s. The iMac was in part consequence of this Microsoft's money. They just didn't think Apple would grow as much, otherwise they would have tried harder to control it.
Microsoft is just a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition. Who can't see that is blind.
If it's superior why the need for interopoerability? Oh right, it's because Windows still has things Linux doesn't.Yes! Windows has lots of proprietary protocols and formats introduced only to lock the costumers in their product. They realised that was the way to keep making money even without innovating. Nobody would be willing to migrate to another platform and just leave all their documents and files behind. Even on the web, with their buggy IE requiring tons of workarounds, such that most websites worked for IE only sometime ago, even IE was an obstacle for migration.
Now the world is getting more aware of Microsoft's practices, and it's refusing them. The problem is that the fight is just begining, there's still a lot ahead. You can see that there's reaction from Firefox adoption (should be around 25% or more now) and ODF standardization, which Microsoft is trying to fight and avoid at all costs, even by the bastard standardization of their crappy MSOOXML.
Microsoft's product don't have any innovation over Linux, all they have is lock-in, made to keep people away from Linux using dirty tactics.
I remember well those days. IE was no competition to Netscape, Netscape was much superior. IE2 was unbloated but lacked support for many features that Netscape 3 had, I guess it didn't even support tables, for sure it didn't have frames, Javascript, etc.
IE3 was the worst piece of software I have seen. EVER!
The fact was that Netscape was its own enemy there. Netscape 3 was really good, a lean and fast browser. It didn't have good support for CSS, but was years ahead of IE. Then they launched Netscape Communicator. Man, was it slow. They made the only possible download the bundle of browser, mail, news reader. Even Mozilla when they got the code from Netscape they had it bundled, further on they split it again to launch Phoenix (then Firebird then Firefox) to start getting some success again.
Netscape didn't die from competition of IE, at least not in terms of features. If Netscape wasn't the only one to blame for its own death, Microsoft's part in it was only by bundling the browser into the OS, not by making a product that could compete with Netscape.
Are you trying to imply that they were wrongly accused?
Microsoft is a monopoly for a fact, they detain more than 90% of the market share of OS for desktops and Office applications. In several occasions Microsoft was shown to use anti-competitive practices, using their monopoly to kill their opponents and keep their market share.
If their monopoly power was so great Apple & Linux wouldn't be here.Well, if they're still here, it's not for lack of Microsoft efforts to get rid of them.
Apple was virtually dead in the mid-90s, they only reappeared due to the amazing success of the iMac. They've been able to keep alive after that by delivering superior products and by marketing them right.
Linux is an pretty good piece of software and newadays it's superior to Windows in most of its features. The fact that it still has less than 1% of market share in the desktop is a direct result of Microsoft's dirty practices (such as blackmailing hardware vendors into bundling their OS and using proprietary protocols to make interoperability impossible).
You can't have it both ways.. The death of Microsoft and Linux/Apple winning! Or Microsoft is so powerful the government has to destroy it for others to compete.Actually Microsoft has enough money and enough good programmers that they could compete by delivering good quality products if they wanted too. Even if they're forced to play nice (use open standards, unbundle software, interoperate), either by the courts or by the fact that they're no longer a monopoly, they'll probably be here for long.
It would be good though, because they'll have to deliver good software to keep some market share. If they would put all the effort they put to FUD us into writing decent software, I would have no problem with them at all.
Good article, wrong link, this is the right one.