"Our competitors have targeted this one product..."
Interesting that he's supposed to be talking about document standards, but goes on to talk about software and products. Maybe this is just a Freudian slip. He just can't help talking about what's really on his mind - the future of their Office software monopoly.
But nah - I'm sure he knows exactly what he's doing - FUDing up the debate nicely.
First he talks about mandating the use of ODF (which wouldn't stop people using MS Office). Then he talks about mandating the use of open-source software (which wouldn't stop people using OOXML). We were talking about ODF / OOXML, right?
They are separate issues - you can have proprietary software and standardised document formats. You can have open source software and proprietary document standards. And all other combinations. This from the "senior director of interoperability and IP policy at Microsoft". I leave it to you to decide whether this is pure FUD or pure stupidity.
I was told this heartwarming story a few years ago by someone involved in creating the system described below. A very large, well known organisation (call them B) was threatened by a visit from either the BSA or FAST (can't remember which), on the grounds that yet another large software house (call them A) thought that B was using far more copies than they were paying for. B was a very large customer of A's software - they literally couldn't run their business without it, and A certainly knew it.
They had the usual problems of any large organisation - software would get installed and not removed, people would move desks, jobs, etc. They weren't knowingly in violation, but they couldn't really honestly say how many licenses were in use or where everything was installed.
They decided to write a system that would track all the licenses and software in use across the organisation, and allow it to be fully managed - installed and removed on demand. It could handle many different kinds of licensing for many different bits of software. There was nothing commercially available at the time that could do what they needed.
Anyway, after doing this, they found out that not only had they had been over-buying company A's software licenses, the flexibility of the new management system allowed them to have far fewer licenses anyway. Effectively, they had been buying enough to cover installs in all the remote offices, for their more mobile staff, of which there were a lot. Apparently, it was a very pleasant moment when they told A they didn't need any more licenses for the next year or two.
I don't think that's true. Microsoft has a clear monopoly in PC operating systems in the EU - but Microsoft is not illegal in the EU.
If a company has a dominant position in an EU market, under article 82, it has "a special responsibility not to allow its conduct to impair competition on the common market". This is not so different to US anti-trust law, although it is apparently defined and enforced a bit more vigorously than in the US.
ODF is controlled by OASIS, not ISO. A version of ODF has been approved by ISO as an ISO standard.
Just like if Microsoft OOXML gets ISO approval, ISO wouldn't control OOXML - they only get to put their badge on a version of it and call it an ISO standard. Microsoft would still control development of OOXML.
(sorry - repeated this in a few places in this discussion, but I'm on a mission to get these facts straight. Then we can criticize OOXML if we like!)
Ah - sorry for the confusion. I read your comment about open source and ODF, and that's well, a red rag to me. I'm on a bit of a mission to disentangle open source software from open information standards in people's minds right now.
Reference code can be useful, and I guess it pretty much has to be open source to be useful for this purpose. But any standard complex enough to need such clarification will need complex code, which can contain its own ambiguities! Even if there is code that people think of as a good reference for a standard, the standard must be the final reference, IMHO.
I didn't mention documents specifically - I talked about reasons to support open information standards in general.
As far as documents go, if you're saying that we already have some open document standards (txt, rtf, html and pdf), then you're right. However, they don't cover even half of what people typically do with documents - and two of them are certainly about final publication, rather than direct editability. What about versioning, comments and track changes, tables of contents, indexes, outlining, templating, style handling, text flow, margins, headers and footers, page numbering, tabs, cross-references, bookmarks, mail merging, etc.? If the formats you mention were up to the job, no-one would care about ODF or OOXML - we would all just export our DOC files into TXT, HTML, PDF or RTF and it would be job done. But they aren't, and people don't.
Oh - and I will keep repeating this until people get it - documented information standards have nothing to do with open source software. You know, how those JPG, BMP, PNG and GIF files have nothing to do with photoshop or paint shop pro, or paint.net, or the Gimp, or Word, or Open Office, or Internet Explorer, or Firefox, or whatever. Isn't it nice that both proprietary and open source software can work on *your* information, without fear of corruption or arbitrary change, and stored and exchanged in a standard, documented, open format!
The reason to support any genuinely open, implementable information standard, whoever it's from, and whatever its about, is because it gives us more choice to work with *our* information, using whatever tools are appropriate for us. It frees *our* information from a particular vendor.
It increases competition in the software marketplace, giving all of us more and better tools to work with, and forces prices for common functionality down over time. I think those are good enough reasons to care.
Business built on open source might suffer in a recession, like any business. And yes, of course, some development of some projects might slow down or even cease. Lots of things suffer in recession.
But the code is still available, ready to be picked up again if anyone is still interested. Open source is not a business model, although you can build business models around it.
It's a good question, but rather than suggesting radical improvements, how about they just make what's there work without so much hassle? Or, indeed, work at all?
Style handling in Word is awful. Auto numbering has a mind of its own. Sometimes options are just greyed out (with no indication of why they are unavailable). Why do I have to have a blank line above a heading at the top of a page, and why does deleting that blank line get rid of the style on the heading? Why don't the table of contents refresh automatically? Why do I have to insert a new table of contents if I want to adjust the depth of levels it shows? Why do links to external documents sometimes work and sometimes not, especially when files are copied to another machine? Why do you have to go into 20 obscure places to stop Word from auto correcting what I've just typed in? Why does entering a date offer a suggestion of a date in another format, but if you accept the change, it leaves the previous date intact too, so you have to go back and delete it!
I could go on, but the fact is that even very normal things I encounter every day in Word are incredibly awkward and frustrating. This is not mature, usable software; this is feature-overloaded software, with almost no thought put in to basic usability and consistency.
Project managers are not generally sales people, and vice versa! From their perspective, they are trying to herd cats with limited resources and time - that is their reality. If they don't manage that, they are out of a job, same as if you write crap code that doesn't meet requirements. It's incredibly important to understand that people who aren't like you aren't idiots or monsters - they just have different priorities.
In my experience, most people are not good at abstract thought, and need concrete examples before they understand that what seems to them to be nerdy, unimportant disagreements are actually important issues that need working out properly. How to communicate successfully in this world is very hard. I also find it frustrating - but I'm trying to learn to put myself in their shoes... not always successfully;)
Ummmm, the bit you quote was itself a quote from someone else. And if you'd read a bit further, you'd have discovered that the author disagrees with it.
Well, the GP stipulated that the owners of the intranet *already* have a mechanism to deploy software to all users machines, letting them roll out the Silverlight plug-in.
Microsoft technologies like ClickOnce can be easily used to deploy forms apps - and ensure that the latest version of the app is being used - and this seems to work very well. Software deployment across most corporate networks is just not a major problem anymore.
My point is only that Silverlight is not primarily intended to solve a software deployment problem in corporate intranets, even if it does have the happy effect of making that easy too.
Errr... if it was for a corporate intranet where they can force any software they want onto users machines and they want a real UI like Windows Forms.... Why don't they just write windows forms apps in the first place?
It's not aimed at GUI design in particular, but I'd strongly recommend "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman.
Also, "The Inmates are Running the Asylum (why high tech products drive us crazy)" by Alan Cooper is quite good (although about a third of the book is just a pitch for the author's consultancy).
Yes, very similar. The main differences are that DROID is cross platform, and its signature system allows it (to a limited extent) to parse into binary file types to extract more detailed version information. There's also a GUI to let non-techies figure out what files they have.
There is a tool called DROID (Digital Record Object Identification) that will scan a bunch of files and identify the file formats (including the version, not just the mime type).
It is developed by the Digital Preservation department at the UK National Archives, licensed under a BSD license, and is available from source forge:
IANAP, but it doesn't seem to be a goofy idea. As postulated by some string theories, if our universe is a 4d "brane" (3 space, 1 time) embedded somehow in a higher dimensional "bulk", they wondered what would happen if a brane started to change its dimensional signature relative to the bulk - for example, a time dimension transforming into a space dimension.
It turns out, according to their calculations we would see the universe gradually accelerating just like we perceive the effects of "dark energy". Brane time would slow down relative to bulk time, but the change is gradual, look like it is speeding up. We would not notice local effects on our human timescale, but we could see the effects on the cosmological scale over billions of years.
It bends my mind too, and I can't pretend to really understand even my own summary, to me it raises a lot of questions about what a time dimension really is - but its certainly no wackier than many other ideas in super-string theory or relativity. I guess we'll have to see if the maths stacks up after its published.
Slashdot Mirror
"Our competitors have targeted this one product..."
Interesting that he's supposed to be talking about document standards, but goes on to talk about software and products. Maybe this is just a Freudian slip. He just can't help talking about what's really on his mind - the future of their Office software monopoly.
But nah - I'm sure he knows exactly what he's doing - FUDing up the debate nicely.
First he talks about mandating the use of ODF (which wouldn't stop people using MS Office). Then he talks about mandating the use of open-source software (which wouldn't stop people using OOXML). We were talking about ODF / OOXML, right?
They are separate issues - you can have proprietary software and standardised document formats. You can have open source software and proprietary document standards. And all other combinations. This from the "senior director of interoperability and IP policy at Microsoft". I leave it to you to decide whether this is pure FUD or pure stupidity.
I was told this heartwarming story a few years ago by someone involved in creating the system described below. A very large, well known organisation (call them B) was threatened by a visit from either the BSA or FAST (can't remember which), on the grounds that yet another large software house (call them A) thought that B was using far more copies than they were paying for. B was a very large customer of A's software - they literally couldn't run their business without it, and A certainly knew it.
They had the usual problems of any large organisation - software would get installed and not removed, people would move desks, jobs, etc. They weren't knowingly in violation, but they couldn't really honestly say how many licenses were in use or where everything was installed.
They decided to write a system that would track all the licenses and software in use across the organisation, and allow it to be fully managed - installed and removed on demand. It could handle many different kinds of licensing for many different bits of software. There was nothing commercially available at the time that could do what they needed.
Anyway, after doing this, they found out that not only had they had been over-buying company A's software licenses, the flexibility of the new management system allowed them to have far fewer licenses anyway. Effectively, they had been buying enough to cover installs in all the remote offices, for their more mobile staff, of which there were a lot. Apparently, it was a very pleasant moment when they told A they didn't need any more licenses for the next year or two.
OOXML is not an IEEE standard. Are you thinking of ECMA?
I don't think that's true. Microsoft has a clear monopoly in PC operating systems in the EU - but Microsoft is not illegal in the EU.
If a company has a dominant position in an EU market, under article 82, it has "a special responsibility not to allow its conduct to impair competition on the common market". This is not so different to US anti-trust law, although it is apparently defined and enforced a bit more vigorously than in the US.
http://ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/antitrust/overview_en.html
If I've misunderstood the law here, I'd be grateful for any references you can provide.
ODF is controlled by OASIS, not ISO. A version of ODF has been approved by ISO as an ISO standard.
Just like if Microsoft OOXML gets ISO approval, ISO wouldn't control OOXML - they only get to put their badge on a version of it and call it an ISO standard. Microsoft would still control development of OOXML.
(sorry - repeated this in a few places in this discussion, but I'm on a mission to get these facts straight. Then we can criticize OOXML if we like!)
Ah - sorry for the confusion. I read your comment about open source and ODF, and that's well, a red rag to me. I'm on a bit of a mission to disentangle open source software from open information standards in people's minds right now.
Reference code can be useful, and I guess it pretty much has to be open source to be useful for this purpose. But any standard complex enough to need such clarification will need complex code, which can contain its own ambiguities! Even if there is code that people think of as a good reference for a standard, the standard must be the final reference, IMHO.
I didn't mention documents specifically - I talked about reasons to support open information standards in general.
As far as documents go, if you're saying that we already have some open document standards (txt, rtf, html and pdf), then you're right. However, they don't cover even half of what people typically do with documents - and two of them are certainly about final publication, rather than direct editability. What about versioning, comments and track changes, tables of contents, indexes, outlining, templating, style handling, text flow, margins, headers and footers, page numbering, tabs, cross-references, bookmarks, mail merging, etc.? If the formats you mention were up to the job, no-one would care about ODF or OOXML - we would all just export our DOC files into TXT, HTML, PDF or RTF and it would be job done. But they aren't, and people don't.
Oh - and I will keep repeating this until people get it - documented information standards have nothing to do with open source software. You know, how those JPG, BMP, PNG and GIF files have nothing to do with photoshop or paint shop pro, or paint.net, or the Gimp, or Word, or Open Office, or Internet Explorer, or Firefox, or whatever. Isn't it nice that both proprietary and open source software can work on *your* information, without fear of corruption or arbitrary change, and stored and exchanged in a standard, documented, open format!
The reason to support any genuinely open, implementable information standard, whoever it's from, and whatever its about, is because it gives us more choice to work with *our* information, using whatever tools are appropriate for us. It frees *our* information from a particular vendor.
It increases competition in the software marketplace, giving all of us more and better tools to work with, and forces prices for common functionality down over time. I think those are good enough reasons to care.
ODF is controlled by OASIS. A version of it has been approved as an ISO standard.
No no no. ODF is an *OASIS* standard. Sun does not control it:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office
Please can we get this clear:
ODF != Open Office.
File formats != Applications.
Open Information Standards != Open Source Software
It's not illegal to be a monopoly. It is illegal to (ab)use a monopoly to distort other markets.
Business built on open source might suffer in a recession, like any business. And yes, of course, some development of some projects might slow down or even cease. Lots of things suffer in recession.
But the code is still available, ready to be picked up again if anyone is still interested. Open source is not a business model, although you can build business models around it.
It's a good question, but rather than suggesting radical improvements, how about they just make what's there work without so much hassle? Or, indeed, work at all?
Style handling in Word is awful. Auto numbering has a mind of its own. Sometimes options are just greyed out (with no indication of why they are unavailable). Why do I have to have a blank line above a heading at the top of a page, and why does deleting that blank line get rid of the style on the heading? Why don't the table of contents refresh automatically? Why do I have to insert a new table of contents if I want to adjust the depth of levels it shows? Why do links to external documents sometimes work and sometimes not, especially when files are copied to another machine? Why do you have to go into 20 obscure places to stop Word from auto correcting what I've just typed in? Why does entering a date offer a suggestion of a date in another format, but if you accept the change, it leaves the previous date intact too, so you have to go back and delete it!
I could go on, but the fact is that even very normal things I encounter every day in Word are incredibly awkward and frustrating. This is not mature, usable software; this is feature-overloaded software, with almost no thought put in to basic usability and consistency.
Project managers are not generally sales people, and vice versa! From their perspective, they are trying to herd cats with limited resources and time - that is their reality. If they don't manage that, they are out of a job, same as if you write crap code that doesn't meet requirements. It's incredibly important to understand that people who aren't like you aren't idiots or monsters - they just have different priorities.
;)
In my experience, most people are not good at abstract thought, and need concrete examples before they understand that what seems to them to be nerdy, unimportant disagreements are actually important issues that need working out properly. How to communicate successfully in this world is very hard. I also find it frustrating - but I'm trying to learn to put myself in their shoes... not always successfully
Ummmm, the bit you quote was itself a quote from someone else. And if you'd read a bit further, you'd have discovered that the author disagrees with it.
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/890801/000095013407026067/d52464e10vk.htm
Well, the GP stipulated that the owners of the intranet *already* have a mechanism to deploy software to all users machines, letting them roll out the Silverlight plug-in.
Microsoft technologies like ClickOnce can be easily used to deploy forms apps - and ensure that the latest version of the app is being used - and this seems to work very well. Software deployment across most corporate networks is just not a major problem anymore.
My point is only that Silverlight is not primarily intended to solve a software deployment problem in corporate intranets, even if it does have the happy effect of making that easy too.
Errr... if it was for a corporate intranet where they can force any software they want onto users machines and they want a real UI like Windows Forms.... Why don't they just write windows forms apps in the first place?
It's not aimed at GUI design in particular, but I'd strongly recommend "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman.
Also, "The Inmates are Running the Asylum (why high tech products drive us crazy)" by Alan Cooper is quite good (although about a third of the book is just a pitch for the author's consultancy).
Yes, very similar. The main differences are that DROID is cross platform, and its signature system allows it (to a limited extent) to parse into binary file types to extract more detailed version information. There's also a GUI to let non-techies figure out what files they have.
There is a tool called DROID (Digital Record Object Identification) that will scan a bunch of files and identify the file formats (including the version, not just the mime type).
It is developed by the Digital Preservation department at the UK National Archives, licensed under a BSD license, and is available from source forge:
http://droid.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Introduction
Errr... if you're going to invest your life savings in them, why would you keep quiet? Tell you what, just let me know about them first, OK? ;)
IANAP, but it doesn't seem to be a goofy idea. As postulated by some string theories, if our universe is a 4d "brane" (3 space, 1 time) embedded somehow in a higher dimensional "bulk", they wondered what would happen if a brane started to change its dimensional signature relative to the bulk - for example, a time dimension transforming into a space dimension.
It turns out, according to their calculations we would see the universe gradually accelerating just like we perceive the effects of "dark energy". Brane time would slow down relative to bulk time, but the change is gradual, look like it is speeding up. We would not notice local effects on our human timescale, but we could see the effects on the cosmological scale over billions of years.
It bends my mind too, and I can't pretend to really understand even my own summary, to me it raises a lot of questions about what a time dimension really is - but its certainly no wackier than many other ideas in super-string theory or relativity. I guess we'll have to see if the maths stacks up after its published.
Gah. Here's a FAQ you may find useful:
Q: What does open office and MS Office have to do with a document standard?
A: Nothing.
Q: What does the GUI of your word processor have to do with the format you save a document in?
A: Nothing.
Q: Why do you need to use open office if you use ODF?
A: You don't, use whatever software you like.
Q: What does the open source software development model have to do with open information standards?
A: Nothing.
Q: Does using ODF mean that communists will steal my children?
A: No.
Q: Will aliens eat my brain if I equate information standards with software implementations?
A: Yes.