Either way, MOOX or what-you-call-it, does not comply with the definition for open or standard.
It's not even fully documented. Heck, even M$ itself doesn't use the specification. M$ itself adds cruft like scripts, macros, digital restrictions, encryption, and proprietary hooks like Sharepoint. Nor does M$ implement all of the features described in the MOOX (DIS 29500) specification and some of the extensibility 'features' in the spec even cause MS Word to crash.
One could almost draw the conclusion that DIS29500 is just a moving target for competitors to chase but never quite reach. M$ will not catch up to ODF.
Secure communications are not just a Constitutionally protected right, they are a prerequisite for business.
Your observation is underappreciated in too many circles. Though the EC also recognizes the need and called upon member states to get their act together, very little has actually happened on either side of the pond despite widely available, easy to use encryption technologies.
(Links and bold are added for emphasis)
on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (ECHELON interception system)
(2001/2098(INI))
29. Urges the Commission and Member States to devise appropriate measures to promote,
develop and manufacture European encryption technology and software and above all to
support projects aimed at developing user-friendly open-source encryption software;
.
30. Calls on the Commission and Member States to promote software projects whose source
text is made public (open-source software), as this is the only way of guaranteeing that no
backdoors are built into programmes;
.
31. Calls on the Commission to lay down a standard for the level of security of e-mail software
packages, placing those packages whose source code has not been made public in the "least
reliable" category;
.
32. Calls on the European institutions and the public administrations of the Member States
systematically to encrypt e-mails, so that ultimately encryption becomes the norm;
Further, what's kind of funny is that though businesses make all kinds of noise and bluster about security, many go ahead and put business plans and meeting minutes on servers which (not counting holes and back doors) explicitly sign over access to their competitor(s). However, see if M$ makes it easy for businesses to see what their so-called tech support is agreeing to.
It's a shame that/. posted that link from a spammer instead. That spammer always copies a story 1 - 3 months after it was fresh. Probably has something to do with Google-jamming.
...
This wouldn't be a story if Microsoft had done it, trying to force WMP codecs into the standard - I'm actually kind of surprised they hadn't yet... but Nokia? wtf
Nokia recently signed on with MS for its proprietary codecs and is shoehorning WMP/WMA codecs into many (all?) of its products. Biting into Ogg and other open formats is probably part of the deal, or perhaps the MS boosters working from inside Nokia now feel secure enough to upset the apple cart.
... not least of which is that it will likely arrive on a new PC bought, not because vista is available but because a new computer is required...
Good. Hit a nerve with that one.
Even if those home users are stuck in the Windows quagmire (for whatever reason or excuse), most OEMs still allow purchasers to upgrade from MS Vista to XP for the asking. That's the catch though, they have to ask for the upgrade from Vista to XP or else they're stuck with the infected machine.
Seriously, for 99% of what most home users do, Kubuntu / Ubuntu would be a drop in replacement -- except for the maintenance and malware nightmares -- and it's now possible to get Ubuntu installed on several big brand OEMs like Dell. WINE is seriously underrated for the one or two legacy apps holding people back.
... not least of which is that it will likely arrive on a new PC bought, not because vista is available but because a new computer is required...
However, even if they're stuck in the Windows quagmire (for whatever reason or excuse), most OEMs allow purchasers to upgrade from MS Vista to XP for the asking. That's the catch though, they have to ask or else they're stuck with the infected machine.
Seriously, for 99% of what most home users do, Kubuntu / Ubuntu would be a drop in replacement -- except for the maintenance and malware nightmares.
What would you like to see in the next generation of laptop computers?
I would love to see any brand with non-x86 architecture again. If Dell is now supporting Linux andSolaris, the could bake a move and support modern CPUs in addition to the modern operating systems.
There are some advantages to x86, mostly price, but it's a case of finding the right tool for the job and for me much would benefit from sparc, ppc, cell or something else. Not that ubiquitous wi-fi or GPRS doesn't allow remote access, even X or thin clients, to remote hosts running the right architecture but it would be excellent to be able to find all that in a notebook, too.
Shoot. For many things, bringing back the 14" G3 iBook would do the job.
Not really. Our submarines are far superior to the Chinese even now, but the problem is the crews. .... I knew the M$ party line would pop up. It's convenient to blame the user so as to direct attention away from design flaws or other shortcomings. The Kitty Hawk is older, but may have been retro-fitted (or not), so these below may or may not be directly related, but at the very least indicate how far afield defense politics are from actual effectiveness.
Not only is Qt dual licensed (proprietary or GPL, you choose) the KDE Free Qt Foundation was set up to ensure that regardless of what happens to Trolltech, Qt, which is the foundation of KDE, will remain available.
Rather ironic that a project like Gnome which was established to create a Free counterpart to what was back then non-Free software has become an antagonist to open source and even to open standards. A small number of Gnome people work against open standards, that hurts both closed and open source projects.
Yet despite a 56% reduction in violent crime, we increased our prison population faster than we increased the national population and have a record level of people in jail. How does unleaded gas explain that? It doesn't. However, privatization of the prison system goes a long way. Once there are major economic incentives for lobbied money to maintain, or increase, a large prison population, then it becomes business as usual.
If MS published the specs for the old binary formats, we wouldn't ahve that problem either.
They tried to with OOXML, but in many cases large part of the specs are "make it work like this version of Word."
Actually, as you point out, they did not. Though to hear the MS boosters hoot and howl, you'd think it did. MS OOXML does not provide any information at all about how to implement the legacy formats.
It's rather funny to see how easily the MS-fed media is able to bullshit people, distracting them with talk of conversion and APIs. But at the end of the day, excuses and distractions don't cut it. To read a format, you need the specification, regardless of whether it is new or old. The legacy formats have specifications, presumably, that could be published.
In the mean time, it is important to start creating documents using formats that are published and open, such as OpenDocument.
The student was fully correct to 1) try to negotiate with the teach and 2) when that failed, switch to a more competent one. If the teacher is *requiring* a format that can be used by only one application on only one platform (both of which are expensive to acquire, operate and maintain) then they have too much ignorance or too much of an axe to grind to be allowed to continue teaching. To add to the damage, that application munges older files in older formats
...You're saying they declared their entrance into the health software market just to harm some open source project's standing in Google? Dude. You're stoned. Go eat some glass or something. Read the post again. MS decided to go after VistA and Google-bombing is part of that, not the other way around. And Vista is more than just an open source EHR, it's an EHR system that is use heavily -- worldwide. That's why it's a target now that MS is going after health records systems.
I generally follow that: ODF for my work and for interoperability. PDF for files to be printed by the clueless.
If I know someone is using MS Office and doesn't have a parallel installation of another suite, then I point them to Sun's ODF plugin as well as to the Firefox ODF Viewer.
I mainly use OOo, but occasionally try Koffice, Abiword, etc. I used to have MS Office one various spare machines. What got me (re-)started with OOo was how slow and crash-prone I found MS Office XP to be. When OOo hit 1.5 I found that, for me, it beat XP in speed, flexibility, reliability and accurate rendering of files produced by others. YMMV.
It's been years since I had MS Office on any machines and I look forward to promoting KOffice now that it's available even for legacy platforms.
I do'em one better. I grab the beginning of the binary file and use dd to fill the rest with 'data' from/dev/random or/dev/urandom, then I send the modified attachment back complain that it won't open to please send another format, usually PDF.
No, MS is simply going after VistA. Now that the MS marketing engine has had a year to Google-bomb them out of existence. After all, if it doesn't exist in Google then it's not on the net, right?
With somewhat more than a year of MS' loyal media outlets yammering about MS Windows Vista and 'turfers and Gold Partners setting up blogs and fake websites about MS Windows Vista, the real VistA should be long gone from even the caches. Don't even get me started on the corporate PR playground that is Wikipedia.
So now, when administrators decide to investigate what's the most widely used medial record system, they won't likely find it on the net. Nor will they find out that it is modular, standards, based and like most software, VistA is Open Source*.
(OK, technically it's public domain, but you do get the source under a Crowley-style license as a result.)
Sweden has never been socialist. It has, during nearly all of the previous century, followed a policy of the "Middle Path" choosing the elements from the free market where they are best applied and elements from socialism where they are best applied.
Nowadays it is following a Bush/ Bliar/Thatcher-style neoliberalism with heavy emphasis on buracracy, privatization and corporate welfare.
Go look at the statistics. During the years Sweden prospered economically, had low debt or a surplus, had good services such as health care, low unemployment, it was during the periods of closest adherence to the middle path. Look at the times where services are few and of poor quality, the budget is in shambles, lots of debt and high unemployment, it is during times when deviation from the middle path has been strongest -- such as the last 15 years.
The Swedish banks are the worst examples of failure of unrestrained capitalism. They have collapsed and been bailed out twice. However, normally when one buys out the debt from a failed company, the buyer then owns the company. Stupidly in the last case, the buyer (the Swedish government) simply handed the banks back to the same asshats that bankrupted them in the first places. These are the clowns that then pick the recipients for the Swedish Bank's Prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel. To try to lend credibility to their scam they, to their credit, have schmoozed into the Nobel celebration. However, the Swedish Bank's Prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel
is to the Nobel Prize what films like Ernest in the Army is to fine cinema.
Here is the correct link to the free ODF import/export plugin. The one at sourceforge is the one sponsored by MS and has only recently started work. The Sun plugin has been ready for a while now.
They jury is still out as to whether MS will fund the sourceforge project to completion or even allow it to be completed. Seeing as MSOOXML can't be implemented without full details of some undocumented, proprietary, legacy specifications, full implementation is contingent on a lot of help and heretofore unavailable information from MS.
Get over yourself and your alternate reality: it is possible for something to be wrong, bad, inadequate or harmful. It's not all a spectrum of opinions. Look at the businesses that succeeded before, during and after the dot-bomb they work with facts not wishful thinking. Take a friggin look at the specs and compare ODF vs MSOOX yourself, or hire someone to do so. It's not a matter of opinion that one is hands down better, it's a reproduceable fact. There are many metrics to measure by, including third-party availability.
Not that I don't enjoy a good OSS flamewar, but isn't this something of a leading question? As an individual in a position to make buying decisions based on this sort of thing, this is exactly what turns me off to ODF and other "community" technologies.
I would hope that someone in the position to make buying decsions should be able to figure out the difference between a format and an application. Let's apply the wirebrush of enlightenment to the foreskin of ignorance here:
ODF
ODF is a format, not an application. It is not OSS
It is backed by industry, with one exception.
It has ISO standing thus backed by the world's nations, but even as just an OASIS standard, it has the backing of some 600 businesses and institutions.
OSS
OSS is a development model. Like scholarly research which gives use things like the Internet and washed hands, it builds on past works.
OSS is also a licensing model. The goal is to promote collaboration and accelerate advancement.
...Give me something that works for 95% of the whole group...
Bzzzt. Sorry. Thanks for playing. Even an astroturfer is expected to produce better than that these days.
While you are correct that MSOOX or what ever it is called this week, is a closed technology, it is incorrect to say that it works for significant portion of the population. Currently it is limited to MSO2007 users and that application has far less than MSO 2003 market share. MSO 2003 never even hit 15%. As it stands there are currently more applications deployed which support ODF.
However, let's try bending your quote back. Let's say as an individual in a position to make buying decisions based on this sort of thing you realize that it is possible for *everybody* except MSO2007 users to use ODF and that for them it is possible to install a helper application parallel to MSO2007. What then? Are you still going to have an axe to grind and force the latest, most-proprietary-todate MS format? Or will you go with the interoperability provided by an industry backed format?
I suppose this is why the ISPs in the US and Europe have been pressured into shutting off their Usenet access. Of course systems that ship without Usenet are an active part of the problem.
With all that is happening in the world, I see a greater need for a distributed, decentralized, asynchronous message service, not less. Of course centralized systems like myspace and facebook are the antithesis and a boon to surveilance and restriction, as are DRM'd communication and broadcasting.
Control the flow of information and you control the population.
Anyway, I guess it's true that Microsoft has gotten more secure and therefore isn't as much of a security laughing stock.
Wait a sec. Don't project your own values onto a group that may not share them, nor assume a causal relationship where no data has been shown to indicate one.
So the claim is that it's no longer a laughing stock in the realm of security. All right then. Let's pretend for a moment that claim is true. The next question is why?
There are at least two possible answers:
the design of the software has been changed (security == design)
the public relations and marketing activities have been better at quashing unfavorable press and burying complaints
We can see from the systems affected by vulnerabilities that the former has not happened, no redesign. Maybe it's the latter, better PR.
You're making the mistake of assuming that they are working for the company from which they draw a paycheck. It's kind of hard to make that jibe with the observed behavior
In those other 66%, they're not clue free. Quite the opposite, it's a problematic situation, where the roles of vendor and customer are intentionally switched and the customers are obeying orders from the vendor to the great disadvantage of everyone else at the company. They couldn't give a rat's ass if your mail doesn't work or the web server is down or NAS/filesharing doesn't ever work, just as long as it's all not working on MS.
Don't support ODF just because it's not the Microsoft format. Unless you've actually looked at both specs, there's no way you can say one is better than the editor.
I have taken the time and looked at both specs. I even found areas for improvement in ODF and have suggested them. Two are being folded into subsequent versions, though not as a result of my particular voice.
My conclusion back then? It's a travesty that any time is still wasted even discussing the MS format. The MS format is not only unimplementable technically, as others have also concluded seen in the link, being loaded with problem after problem and missing definition after definition. If that is not enough, there is a swarm of licensing and sw patent issues that are unlikely to ever be resolved in a positive manner. ODF in contrast has clearly benefited from a long and open development cycle.
Probably the best way to see for yourself, though, not to pore through the dozens of pages in the standard or through the 6000+ pages of MS vomit, but instead to simply look at the existing implementations. Even better, take a look at some of the ODF tools available and try a few of your own implementations.
Not all land is equally suited to agriculture. Only an MBA would consider squares on a map equivalent, instead of following contours, soil types, microclimates and sun. Unfortunately we're taking the best land out of production and turning it into office parks and other death. As was pointed out high up on the thread, once you put a building on a site, there's no going back. That land is gone.
I would not be the first to point out that you cannot eat money.
Slashdot Mirror
Either way, MOOX or what-you-call-it, does not comply with the definition for open or standard.
It's not even fully documented. Heck, even M$ itself doesn't use the specification. M$ itself adds cruft like scripts, macros, digital restrictions, encryption, and proprietary hooks like Sharepoint. Nor does M$ implement all of the features described in the MOOX (DIS 29500) specification and some of the extensibility 'features' in the spec even cause MS Word to crash.
One could almost draw the conclusion that DIS29500 is just a moving target for competitors to chase but never quite reach. M$ will not catch up to ODF.
Your observation is underappreciated in too many circles. Though the EC also recognizes the need and called upon member states to get their act together, very little has actually happened on either side of the pond despite widely available, easy to use encryption technologies.
(Links and bold are added for emphasis)
Further, what's kind of funny is that though businesses make all kinds of noise and bluster about security, many go ahead and put business plans and meeting minutes on servers which (not counting holes and back doors) explicitly sign over access to their competitor(s). However, see if M$ makes it easy for businesses to see what their so-called tech support is agreeing to.
Here is the link to the real article at the Georgia Institute of Technology entitled Bee Strategy Helps Servers Run More Sweetly.
It's a shame that /. posted that link from a spammer instead. That spammer always copies a story 1 - 3 months after it was fresh. Probably has something to do with Google-jamming.
... This wouldn't be a story if Microsoft had done it, trying to force WMP codecs into the standard - I'm actually kind of surprised they hadn't yet... but Nokia? wtfNokia recently signed on with MS for its proprietary codecs and is shoehorning WMP/WMA codecs into many (all?) of its products. Biting into Ogg and other open formats is probably part of the deal, or perhaps the MS boosters working from inside Nokia now feel secure enough to upset the apple cart.
It could also be backlash from MSFTers (both inside Nokia and outside) from Jorma Ollila's public support of open standards.
Or it could just be the water
... not least of which is that it will likely arrive on a new PC bought, not because vista is available but because a new computer is required...Good. Hit a nerve with that one.
Even if those home users are stuck in the Windows quagmire (for whatever reason or excuse), most OEMs still allow purchasers to upgrade from MS Vista to XP for the asking. That's the catch though, they have to ask for the upgrade from Vista to XP or else they're stuck with the infected machine.
Seriously, for 99% of what most home users do, Kubuntu / Ubuntu would be a drop in replacement -- except for the maintenance and malware nightmares -- and it's now possible to get Ubuntu installed on several big brand OEMs like Dell. WINE is seriously underrated for the one or two legacy apps holding people back.
... not least of which is that it will likely arrive on a new PC bought, not because vista is available but because a new computer is required...However, even if they're stuck in the Windows quagmire (for whatever reason or excuse), most OEMs allow purchasers to upgrade from MS Vista to XP for the asking. That's the catch though, they have to ask or else they're stuck with the infected machine.
Seriously, for 99% of what most home users do, Kubuntu / Ubuntu would be a drop in replacement -- except for the maintenance and malware nightmares.
I would love to see any brand with non-x86 architecture again. If Dell is now supporting Linux and Solaris, the could bake a move and support modern CPUs in addition to the modern operating systems.
There are some advantages to x86, mostly price, but it's a case of finding the right tool for the job and for me much would benefit from sparc, ppc, cell or something else. Not that ubiquitous wi-fi or GPRS doesn't allow remote access, even X or thin clients, to remote hosts running the right architecture but it would be excellent to be able to find all that in a notebook, too.
Shoot. For many things, bringing back the 14" G3 iBook would do the job.
- Gates buys stake in aircraft carrier builder
- New Aircraft Carrier to use Windows
Gates and his anti-American movement are not a laughing matter.Not only is Qt dual licensed (proprietary or GPL, you choose) the KDE Free Qt Foundation was set up to ensure that regardless of what happens to Trolltech, Qt, which is the foundation of KDE, will remain available.
Rather ironic that a project like Gnome which was established to create a Free counterpart to what was back then non-Free software has become an antagonist to open source and even to open standards. A small number of Gnome people work against open standards, that hurts both closed and open source projects.
It doesn't. However, privatization of the prison system goes a long way. Once there are major economic incentives for lobbied money to maintain, or increase, a large prison population, then it becomes business as usual.
They tried to with OOXML, but in many cases large part of the specs are "make it work like this version of Word."
Actually, as you point out, they did not. Though to hear the MS boosters hoot and howl, you'd think it did. MS OOXML does not provide any information at all about how to implement the legacy formats.
It's rather funny to see how easily the MS-fed media is able to bullshit people, distracting them with talk of conversion and APIs. But at the end of the day, excuses and distractions don't cut it. To read a format, you need the specification, regardless of whether it is new or old. The legacy formats have specifications, presumably, that could be published.
In the mean time, it is important to start creating documents using formats that are published and open, such as OpenDocument.
The student was fully correct to 1) try to negotiate with the teach and 2) when that failed, switch to a more competent one. If the teacher is *requiring* a format that can be used by only one application on only one platform (both of which are expensive to acquire, operate and maintain) then they have too much ignorance or too much of an axe to grind to be allowed to continue teaching. To add to the damage, that application munges older files in older formats
...You're saying they declared their entrance into the health software market just to harm some open source project's standing in Google? Dude. You're stoned. Go eat some glass or something. Read the post again. MS decided to go after VistA and Google-bombing is part of that, not the other way around. And Vista is more than just an open source EHR, it's an EHR system that is use heavily -- worldwide. That's why it's a target now that MS is going after health records systems.I generally follow that: ODF for my work and for interoperability. PDF for files to be printed by the clueless.
If I know someone is using MS Office and doesn't have a parallel installation of another suite, then I point them to Sun's ODF plugin as well as to the Firefox ODF Viewer.
I mainly use OOo, but occasionally try Koffice, Abiword, etc. I used to have MS Office one various spare machines. What got me (re-)started with OOo was how slow and crash-prone I found MS Office XP to be. When OOo hit 1.5 I found that, for me, it beat XP in speed, flexibility, reliability and accurate rendering of files produced by others. YMMV.
It's been years since I had MS Office on any machines and I look forward to promoting KOffice now that it's available even for legacy platforms.
I do'em one better. I grab the beginning of the binary file and use dd to fill the rest with 'data' from /dev/random or /dev/urandom, then I send the modified attachment back complain that it won't open to please send another format, usually PDF.
No, MS is simply going after VistA. Now that the MS marketing engine has had a year to Google-bomb them out of existence. After all, if it doesn't exist in Google then it's not on the net, right?
With somewhat more than a year of MS' loyal media outlets yammering about MS Windows Vista and 'turfers and Gold Partners setting up blogs and fake websites about MS Windows Vista, the real VistA should be long gone from even the caches. Don't even get me started on the corporate PR playground that is Wikipedia.
So now, when administrators decide to investigate what's the most widely used medial record system, they won't likely find it on the net. Nor will they find out that it is modular, standards, based and like most software, VistA is Open Source *.
(OK, technically it's public domain, but you do get the source under a Crowley-style license as a result.)
-1 disinformative for you there.
Sweden has never been socialist. It has, during nearly all of the previous century, followed a policy of the "Middle Path" choosing the elements from the free market where they are best applied and elements from socialism where they are best applied.
Nowadays it is following a Bush/ Bliar/Thatcher-style neoliberalism with heavy emphasis on buracracy, privatization and corporate welfare.
Go look at the statistics. During the years Sweden prospered economically, had low debt or a surplus, had good services such as health care, low unemployment, it was during the periods of closest adherence to the middle path. Look at the times where services are few and of poor quality, the budget is in shambles, lots of debt and high unemployment, it is during times when deviation from the middle path has been strongest -- such as the last 15 years.
The Swedish banks are the worst examples of failure of unrestrained capitalism. They have collapsed and been bailed out twice. However, normally when one buys out the debt from a failed company, the buyer then owns the company. Stupidly in the last case, the buyer (the Swedish government) simply handed the banks back to the same asshats that bankrupted them in the first places. These are the clowns that then pick the recipients for the Swedish Bank's Prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel. To try to lend credibility to their scam they, to their credit, have schmoozed into the Nobel celebration. However, the Swedish Bank's Prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel is to the Nobel Prize what films like Ernest in the Army is to fine cinema.
Are there any posters to print out? If there are SVG's of the logo and other graphics we can make local variations.
Here is the correct link to the free ODF import/export plugin. The one at sourceforge is the one sponsored by MS and has only recently started work. The Sun plugin has been ready for a while now.
They jury is still out as to whether MS will fund the sourceforge project to completion or even allow it to be completed. Seeing as MSOOXML can't be implemented without full details of some undocumented, proprietary, legacy specifications, full implementation is contingent on a lot of help and heretofore unavailable information from MS.
Get over yourself and your alternate reality: it is possible for something to be wrong, bad, inadequate or harmful. It's not all a spectrum of opinions. Look at the businesses that succeeded before, during and after the dot-bomb they work with facts not wishful thinking. Take a friggin look at the specs and compare ODF vs MSOOX yourself, or hire someone to do so. It's not a matter of opinion that one is hands down better, it's a reproduceable fact. There are many metrics to measure by, including third-party availability.
Not that I don't enjoy a good OSS flamewar, but isn't this something of a leading question? As an individual in a position to make buying decisions based on this sort of thing, this is exactly what turns me off to ODF and other "community" technologies.I would hope that someone in the position to make buying decsions should be able to figure out the difference between a format and an application. Let's apply the wirebrush of enlightenment to the foreskin of ignorance here:
...Give me something that works for 95% of the whole groupBzzzt. Sorry. Thanks for playing. Even an astroturfer is expected to produce better than that these days. While you are correct that MSOOX or what ever it is called this week, is a closed technology, it is incorrect to say that it works for significant portion of the population. Currently it is limited to MSO2007 users and that application has far less than MSO 2003 market share. MSO 2003 never even hit 15%. As it stands there are currently more applications deployed which support ODF.
However, let's try bending your quote back. Let's say as an individual in a position to make buying decisions based on this sort of thing you realize that it is possible for *everybody* except MSO2007 users to use ODF and that for them it is possible to install a helper application parallel to MSO2007. What then? Are you still going to have an axe to grind and force the latest, most-proprietary-todate MS format? Or will you go with the interoperability provided by an industry backed format?
I suppose this is why the ISPs in the US and Europe have been pressured into shutting off their Usenet access. Of course systems that ship without Usenet are an active part of the problem.
With all that is happening in the world, I see a greater need for a distributed, decentralized, asynchronous message service, not less. Of course centralized systems like myspace and facebook are the antithesis and a boon to surveilance and restriction, as are DRM'd communication and broadcasting.
Control the flow of information and you control the population.
Wait a sec. Don't project your own values onto a group that may not share them, nor assume a causal relationship where no data has been shown to indicate one.
So the claim is that it's no longer a laughing stock in the realm of security. All right then. Let's pretend for a moment that claim is true. The next question is why?
There are at least two possible answers:
We can see from the systems affected by vulnerabilities that the former has not happened, no redesign. Maybe it's the latter, better PR.
You're making the mistake of assuming that they are working for the company from which they draw a paycheck. It's kind of hard to make that jibe with the observed behavior
In those other 66%, they're not clue free. Quite the opposite, it's a problematic situation, where the roles of vendor and customer are intentionally switched and the customers are obeying orders from the vendor to the great disadvantage of everyone else at the company. They couldn't give a rat's ass if your mail doesn't work or the web server is down or NAS/filesharing doesn't ever work, just as long as it's all not working on MS.
I have taken the time and looked at both specs. I even found areas for improvement in ODF and have suggested them. Two are being folded into subsequent versions, though not as a result of my particular voice.
My conclusion back then? It's a travesty that any time is still wasted even discussing the MS format. The MS format is not only unimplementable technically, as others have also concluded seen in the link, being loaded with problem after problem and missing definition after definition. If that is not enough, there is a swarm of licensing and sw patent issues that are unlikely to ever be resolved in a positive manner. ODF in contrast has clearly benefited from a long and open development cycle.
Probably the best way to see for yourself, though, not to pore through the dozens of pages in the standard or through the 6000+ pages of MS vomit, but instead to simply look at the existing implementations. Even better, take a look at some of the ODF tools available and try a few of your own implementations.
Not all land is equally suited to agriculture. Only an MBA would consider squares on a map equivalent, instead of following contours, soil types, microclimates and sun. Unfortunately we're taking the best land out of production and turning it into office parks and other death. As was pointed out high up on the thread, once you put a building on a site, there's no going back. That land is gone.
I would not be the first to point out that you cannot eat money.