Office 2007 UI License

MikeWeller writes, "Microsoft has recently announced a new licensing program for the Office 2007 user interface. This page links to the license and an MSDN Channel9 interview about the program (featuring a lawyer). The program 'allows virtually anyone to obtain a royalty-free license to use the new Office UI in a software product. There's only one limitation: if you are building a program which directly competes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access (the Microsoft applications with the new UI), you can't obtain the royalty-free license.' What does this mean for OpenOffice? Will traditional menus/toolbars hold up to an ever-increasing number of features, or will OO be forced to take on a new UI paradigm? With the gap between OO and MS Office widening, how is this going to affect users trying to move between the two platforms?" You need to sign the license before you can get the 120-page UI implementation guidelines, which are confidential.

Fair enough

Fair enough. You want to compete? Then work your ass off...

so, what this seems to say

So, what this seems to say: Microsoft will allow anybody and everybody to plant their seed (the ribbon UI), to start the viral/grassroots campaign to their way of doing things. Unless and until it conflicts with their existing products.

It's royalty free... translation: Microsoft gets a free ad campaign. But for those who may not be familiar with the company Microsoft, Microsoft is not likely to be friendly about anyone using their UI on any product down the road they decide should be protected.

So are these the dying rattle breaths of a behemoth unable to compete today? Or is it one more salvo (consider Ballmer and his innuendo about Microsoft's Novell-Linux pact) in a war to control even more tightly the computing business world?

Re:so, what this seems to say

Well, Apple did kind of think about it, and spent a lot of time suing Microsoft in the mid-eighties and early nineties (which was rather odd because pre-'95, Windows looked nothing like Mac OS, and even Windows 95 has significant differences.)

Different people have different takes on it. Some say Microsoft resolved the suit when it paid Apple the millions of dollars it did in the infamous Steve Jobs "Microsoft is our friend, Microsoft has always been our friend" keynote in the late nineties. Others say that Apple lost the suit, after successfully bullying companies for long enough using the suit that it didn't really matter (Digital Research is a famous example, who rewrote GEM's "Finder" equivalent to be completely un-Mac like after Apple sued, but after they'd already sold the earlier version to Atari, who continued to bundle the Mac-like version of GEM with the ST for years.)

Re:so, what this seems to say

So, what this seems to say: Microsoft will allow anybody and everybody to plant their seed (the ribbon UI), to start the viral/grassroots campaign to their way of doing things. Unless and until it conflicts with their existing products.

Couldn't have said it better myself. This is Microsoft's way of trying to get a 'unique new interface' rolled out as rapidly as possible. If you're not using this 'unique new interface' then you know you're behind the time - hell, knowing Microsoft products, it also means you're probably about to be EOL [microsoft.com]'d!

"Dude, You're still using XP with those crappy flat menus.... wow..."

I genuinely hope that the public don't buy this latest round of Msft. bullsh-t, Office 2003 is still perfectly capable, why should users be forced to upgrade?

*sigh*

Re:so, what this seems to say

If it (the office suite) is so good, then why is Microsoft afraid of competition in this area?

Re:so, what this seems to say

I think that most reviewers had problems with the new UI because many (most?) people who use MS word have enough trouble with moving between different versions when there is very little UI change. A complete overhaul such as this would be terrible, especially when all the other applications they still use have a completely different UI. I think this is a method of getting more applications that work the same as the new MS Office, so that people start to think that it's more worth it to learn the new UI rather than just stick with the old software, or switch to OO.o, since it's more like Word 2003 is than the new MS Word. I think that MS is taking a brave stance by trying to move away from the tried and true UI, but I think that many users will have a lot of trouble learning the new interface. Remember the UI hasn't changed this drastically since the move to windows in MS Word 6(?).

Re:so, what this seems to say

I think that MS is taking a brave stance by trying to move away from the tried and true UI, but I think that many users will have a lot of trouble learning the new interface.

I tend to agree with you on both points. Changing UIs like that is a gutsy move. Even the switch to the windows 95 OS interface didn't change much about the overall window UI from 3.x. This is a huge move.

That said, I've asked folks at MS several times at conferences about the switch, and they all give a similar answer. Their research indicates that users overwhelmingly prefer the new UI over the old menu-driven approach.

It's a gutsy move, but they're sure it'll be a welcome one.

Re:so, what this seems to say

I think the web (web 2.0 particularly) threw the concept of "uniform UI" out the window. Once the average user was supposed to learn to use a small, consistent and coherent set of widgets, practices, metaphors, etc. now they are exposed to different login procedures, different password schemes, captchas (an absolute UI WTF), flash interfaces, AJAX interfaces, JAVA interfaces, standard Web forms, etc. Thanks to web apps we kissed much of the work on localization, accesibility and contextual help goodbye.

Today there are lots of inexperienced computer users who still manage to:

• Use windows.
• Use a browser.
• Use an IM client.
• Use an email client or webmail site.
• Use some social network site, like the complete UI mess that is MySpace, or blogs, photologs, etc.
• Use a p2p client

Just with that basic usage they're exposed to a ton of different widgets, metaphors and procedures Even users who call the little blue icon with the 'e' "The Internet".

So, sure... some people will feel lost at first, but I think a complete UI overhaul is much manageable now than it was before the coming of the net.

Re:so, what this seems to say

This is not the first time MS has placed this kind of restriction. The MSDN, a large pack of software used by subscription and intended for developers, has had a similar restriction since well before 2000. It says, in a nutshell, that you can use the software to develop anything except a general purpose suite of office software.

It's kind of stupid to offer development tools and then restrict developers, especially if you're interested in convincing people that you're not using your monopoly improperly. It looks bad. But I gotta ask, why on Earth should open source developers care?

Do you want to be in Microsoft's shadow? Are you an "almost as good" substitute for MS, or are you actually better? Do you have origional ideas?

AMD didn't get where it is now by continuing to copy Intel. It got here by at some point realizing it could do better. Intel ended up following them. If you want to look, act and be just like Microsoft, then you should be upset over this. If you want to look and act like something better, then this is just a good reminder that that is your goal.

TW

Re:so, what this seems to say

On the flip side, while the "open source community" can probably outdo Microsoft in terms of developer numbers, there is no effectve way of mobilising that "workforce" towards a common goal. Even Sun has been unable to create a usable GUI for Openoffice. It sucks terribly in comparison with MS Office...

...I'll be the first to cheer when someone comes up with a more usable interface. I won't be holding my breath though.

I'm not so sure it's as bad as all that. For example, look at the OOo 2.0 icons. They look great. I know an icon is barely a UI element, much less a whole UI, but you know a a regular ol' programer didn't do that. It took someone with more than a little artistic talent to pull that off.

For that matter, look at the visual elements in major Linux distros over the last few years. Visual quality and consistency have improved dramatically across the board. Some areas are still rough, but if you've ever looked at the mess that's in most Microsoft "options" menus, you know theyr'e not alone.

I have to admit that I've been lulled into looking for the next clone of an MS feature. When they put the format painter in OO.o 2 I was very pleased. But it's not the clone features that get me comming back to open source. It's the things that only those products offer.

Wasn't it tabs. popup blocking and the small footprint that got you hooked on Firefox? MS didn't have 'em. I know I like being able to have more than one true window in OO.o spreadsheet. The guys in Redmond make me use a single window.

Now microsoft is following Firefox's lead on tabs. They're actually following open source. Tabs are a UI element. Clearly OS has some ability to lead.

BTW, I agree with you. Microsoft has some very bright people who often do a great job at making thier UIs work for you. Sometimes they don't. Often, even if they do, they take their good, sweet time to get there. The OS community can bang out an improvement almost at the speed of thought, and then ramp up evolutionary improvements in short months, or even weeks. I think that if it's a priority for OS to lead, MS is going to have no choice but to follow. I also think if we simply follow, we'll never be given the opportunity to lead.

TW

Ingenuity

Ingenuity is Microsoft's best friend when it comes to fight GPL-licenced products. We are seeing the beginning of that.

I think the courts have made it pretty clear

You can copy any UI that you want to.

This is just a clear threat to competitors that they're going to be spending millions defending frivolous law suits. Interesting that Microsoft have decided that their business model is now to sue competitors.
 

Re:I think the courts have made it pretty clear

Yeah, I agree, this is a fucking joke. MS are not giving away an implementation of the UI. Just the "right" to copy it. Well ffs Microsoft, you copied the entire Windows UI from Xerox. As the OP says, anyone can copy your UI. In fact there's a ribbon bar in at least one commercial UI Windows toolbox I know of - what are MS trying to say to that company?

Basically what this says is, IF you download the document, you CAN'T implement the UI unless MS sign off on your implementation. But if you ignore this propagandist nonsense, you can implement any UI you like including a poorly implemented version of the Ribbon UI.

Jeez. Wake me up when it's in the Win32 API.

Re:I think the courts have made it pretty clear

Nope, nothing to do with the library. It's the User Interface they're licensing.

From the announcement:

"For those that want to build their own UI that takes advantage of our design guidelines, they will need a license."

 

The Gap

>>With the gap between OO and MS Office widening...

Well this is an interesting statement full of subjective possibility. I could probably argue a half dozen different interpretations.

I... don't understand.

But I better learn quick, because this screams PLEASE GOD, PLEASE SOMEBODY PARODY ME, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE and by GOD I will ANSWER THAT CALL.

The myth of Windows GUI consistency.

One thing that those who dislike the X Window System often suggest is that it lacks consistency. They say that the GUI styles change too much between different applications, and then they suggest that Windows offers a much more consistent GUI. Of course, we can see this is quite a false assertion to be making!

Windows has just as little GUI consistency as X. This new Office interface totally deviates from anything they've done in the past. The IE7 interface is completely different, as well. It used to just be that it was certain apps, like iTunes and WinAmp, that used their own stylings. But with Microsoft's new GUIs, user interface consistency has become a thing of the past on Windows.

I wonder if we'll still hear such Windows advocates use the point that most Windows applications tend to use a consistent interface style. If they do, we can surely shoot their sorry asses down. As it stands, the only platform offering consistent UIs is Mac OS X. Otherwise, Windows has become just as much of a hodge-podge of different appearances and UI layouts as a typical X installation.

Re:The myth of Windows GUI consistency.

Well, obviously, X has *NO* consistency because it has no standard widgets. Windows has. WINAPI contains buttons, sliders, scrollbars, text edits, menus etc. So the *base* for consistency is there, which cannot be said for X.

But MS violate their own standards by creating custom widgets for Office and IE. This is something widely criticized by UI designers.

However, usually the WinAPI widgets are the core of Windows GUIs (tweaked buttons, menus ...) Very little programs create their own widgets from the ground up. In X, Qt does everything from scratch, just like GTK, FOX, Athena, Motif, etc. The important thing is that their behaviour is not fully consistent. Aside from funny Office/IE widgets, I can reuse my knowledge with one Windows GUI when using another. Most Windows apps do NOT use custom widgets.

However, nowadays GTK and Qt have little custom quirks of this sort. Their differences are mostly optical (but it is a visual inconsistency when 90% of all apps are Qt/KDE-based and only one program uses GTK). However, the presence of two major TKs is a problem because distros tend to choose only one of these two. In this case you end up with a dependency that may be big enough to turn users and more importantly distro makers away (like "oh no, my system is purely GTK-based, I dont want Qt anywhere").

So what?

What does this mean for OpenOffice?

Of course I didn't RTFA, but considering that OO.o is a) multiplatform, b) open source, and c) doing fine as it is, I'd imagine the folks at OO.o will be filing this under D for Don't Give A Shit.

Seriously - would you lose any sleep because MS won't give you a new toy? Even if OO.o wanted it, and even if MS gave them it, they probably couldn't use it because it'll probably be Vista- (or at least Windows-)only.

And seeing as most critics have slammed the new MS Office UI as being generally awful, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that OO.o's similarity to the "old" MS Office UI might pick them up a few users.

C

OO excluded from the license?

from the licence:
"e. "Excluded Products" are software products or components, or web-based or hosted services that perform primarily the same general functions as the Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access software applications, and that are created or marketed as a replacement for any or all of those Microsoft applications."

i'm not sure if openoffice was created or marketed as a replacement to ms office. from their mission statement: "To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format."

Compatibility

While I love to sell OO to my friends on the fact that it's so compatible with Office that's the only thing about it's compatibility that I like.

Office for the most part has had a good UI. It has served people well over the years with millions of people getting used to it and being productive with it. Copying the interface and features of Office is a good way to get people to switch (Hey, it's free and it does the same thing, cool!).

But in the end I think all this "we can do that too" mentality ends up stifling free software. While I applaud the efforts of OO and am grateful for it's inclusion in modern distros I would also love to see them wake up one day and deceide they were going to take a "and now for something completely different" approach. Forget chasing the MS UI. Come up with your own, or stick to the one that's in there already and work on optimizing OO's use of resources. Create more filters for different file formats. Expand on the scripting capabilities to make OO a better tool for office automation. The UI is fine the way it is! Tweak it, yeah, but redo it to make it look like MS every few years? Screw that!

I understand why they do it but watching the OO team spend the next few years implementing knock offs of ribbons only to see these supplanted by some new inane concept in Office 2010 just seems like a waste to me.

what what what?

The license isn't royalty-free if you're building Office-style apps. So I ask, why would anyone want a royalty-free license for the user interface for Office applications (word processor, spreadsheet, database, personal info manager) unless they were building applications that would compete against Office?

Brain explodes.

What gap ?

With the gap between OO and MS Office widening

You mean Microsoft Office 2007 is so much worse than OpenOffice.org 2.0 and Microsoft Office 2003 ?
It still doesn't number paragraphs (1.1, 1.2) or update references automatically whitout dirty hacks ?
It still retains locks on directories when closed ?
It still somehow corrupt your document once in a while (*) ?
...

(*) Last month I needed to save the document as an XML document because saving it as .doc would cause MS Office to crash a few ops after opening the file.

how about prior art?

the funny thing is that Quanta+ in KDE has had a similar UI with a ribbon for years now:
http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/screenshots//shot2.png [kdewebdev.org]
http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/screenshots//shot13.pn g [kdewebdev.org]

Do they need a license too?

Implementation guidelines...

...drag and drop the attached OCX to your application.
Congratulation :)

Menu structures are common across different models

Many moons ago, I worked on a product which started out using a "lotus 1-2-3" menu structure: one typed "/" then selected from a one-line list of options by typing individual characters.

My Smarter Colleagues noticed that from the same data structure we used for the lotus menus we could build PF-key menus, modern cascading drop-down menus and right-mouse-button pop-up menus.

Which means that for any menu sequence of head->middle->middle*->tail, you can change the visual appearance of the menu without changing the application-level calls used to create it. And that in turn means you can make "ribbon menus" a user-specifiable "skin".

--dave

isn't it just a modern/fancy lotus 123 style menu?

I am not a programmer/developer/UI designer. But to me, it seems like the new UI is just the horizontal equivalent of the vertical pull-down menu, with some sugar coating here and there. "Transpose" all those pull-downs and it more or less becomes a ribbon. It seems like the equivalent of the lotus 123 slash ("/") command, where pressing "/" brings you the horizontal menu.

The bigger question is who cares

Did you look at the UI preview guide? Maybe it is just me, but it looks yet another attempt to change the UI for the sake of change. They have taken the concepts of menus, toolbars, dialog boxes and palettes and combined them in to one big tabbed blob that takes ups even more of the top of each window. Of course it is similar to, but in no way consistent with that annoying new interface they put on IE7. The only thing they have managed to keep consistent in windows is the need to press ^-alt-Del to login. They just don't get it.

One again: Trying to trick the customers.

I hope companies will see this for what it is: An attempt by Microsoft to do with a license trick what they are not able to accomplish with product quality.

There is a social breakdown happening at Microsoft. Bill Gates is, apparently, no longer interested. The company is becoming more and more unable to complete projects.

Microsoft never competed very well on technological merits, but now things are becoming worse. People think that Microsoft has been successful, but the company's success has always depended on tricking customers who don't have much technical knowledge. As customers become more technically knowledgeable, they realize more and more that Microsoft is adversarial.

We who read Slashdot can make a difference. We can explain the issues to everyone we know and meet.

--
Comedy and Tragedy of the Bush administration [futurepower.org]

Lipstick on a pig

Microsoft put a new UI on MS Office because Microsoft said that the users of MS Office could not find all of the features in the product. What Microsoft has not commented upon was whether the users wanted to find any more of the features besides the ones that they use.

I would venture to say that the overwhelming majority of MS Office users do not need to use, or even want to use, most of the features that are present in those bloated applications.

Frankly...

...I think OO.o could benefit from a better UI design rather than aping MS Office. The MS Office and OO.o UIs are too cluttered. I'd suggest something more collapsable and more sparingly reliant on just icons on the less used features. The other suggestion I'd make is to make the OO.o interface more "modal" in a way. As much as I hate 'vi' and it's modality, I think modes could be done right for Office apps. Again, you have all of the most common functionality available in the default mode with little or no space devoted to less popular features. Obviously this would require a study to rank the uasge of features. But there just aren't that many people who use "mail merge" on a daily basis unless they're in the business world. Maybe even having default "Home User" vs. "Business User" modes for OO.o would help. Just a few suggestions anyway. (Even though this is the wrong place for that)

Ever-increasing number of features

"Will traditional menus/toolbars hold up to an ever-increasing number of features, or will OO be forced to take on a new UI paradigm?"

How about turning that on it's head? "Will the paradigm of an ever-increasing number of features hold up to the reality of having to present them in a UI of some sort?"

I've been using office-style apps heavily since about Office 4, and I haven't seen many new features at all that I consider essential -- *especially* not ones that require adding UI elements to accommodate them. MS's own focus group studies show time and time again that 90% of Office features end up in the "rarely used" category anyway.

I use Office 2007 some, and I'm pretty neutral on the ribbon since I do most tasks via keyboard shortcut anyway. For my money (or lack thereof), let OOo keep its traditional menus & toolbars. Just make keyboard shortcuts consistent across an office suite, get the fundamental features right, minimize the bugs & make the memory & disk footprints as light as you can.

The Ribbon may be da new shiznit and whatnot, and by virtue of MS's market penetration may even end up being the "look" that all others are compared to. Even if that happens, though, I have a hard time seeing *feature bloat* being the driving factor behind what UI paradigm wins out.

The only thing OO needs to compete

is slightly better performance, initial feedback on the ribbon has been almost universally negative and there is no reason for other devs to rush to mediocrity. This is truly nothing more than an attempt at viral marketing.

Pure FUD

It isn't a license to use a library that implements their UI features - it's a license to implement such a library. They're trying to license something that they don't own...

ZOMG look at the INNOVATION

I'm glad Microsoft is so innovative, because, you know, shaping a menu and toolbar differently is new, non-obvious, novel, and there is certainly no prior [adobe.com] art containing anything similar [adobe.com], certainly not anything preceding it by a decade.

Given the obvious use of technology here and the subjectiveness of what may constitute a ribbon, and how broadly companies like Microsoft tend to paint their patents, I would contend that their "ribbon" is simply taking the Adobe Creative Suite's toolbar scheme that has been around for a decade and simply repainting it to fit in Microsoft Office components. Likewise, one can argue that since context-sensitive toolbars have been around for about 20 years, and buttons in those toolbars have optionally spawned menus when clicked for at least ten years, that there is NOTHING AT ALL new about a Microsoft "ribbon" aside from the artwork, which is covered by COPYRIGHT, not a patent.

just sign right here for your free ui...

right here, in your own blood, on the dotted line. Did we mention the first male child clause?

Why isn't the ribbon UI part of the OS?

The ribbon is some sort of widget, right? Why isn't it a part of windows?

Is This Anti-Competitive?

This just doesn't sound right. Here we have a known monopoly, with strong control of the desktop operating system and office suite markets. Isn't it in the slightest bit anti-competitive for them to offer this free to anybody but their competitors? I'm no expert on the legal side of things, but this is the exact kind of thing that anti-trust laws are supposed to prevent.

Ribbon UI is old, from 80's

Miss Pac-Man already had one years ago... ;)

Just another attack on the GPL...?

From the article:

You can use the UI in open source projects as long as the license terms are consistent with our license.

But of course the GPL doesn't allow you to say that your code can't be used in Office-like apps.

Never mind, I don't see how the license can apply to anyone who doesn't agree with it.

HAL. (Not following the link!)

the url is wrong on slashdot!

it should be http://developers.developers.developers.slashdot.o rg/article.pl?sid=06/11/22/0140215 [slashdot.org] :-)

Sheep!

It continues to amaze me how sheepish MS fanboys are. From the blog comments

Wow, this is incredibly generous. Thank you, Microsoft!

. And no, I don't think this is cynical, there are many many others in this vein. Sad, really.

IBM -- OPEN SOURCE 1-2-3!!! NOW!!!

Doesn't Microsoft get it? Most users are click-trained on Office. If you move a single icon, they are unable to use the product any longer. If you put this new re-GUI-ed office on a person's computer, they'll be catatonic. I mean, I have seen many users who learn exact, step-by-step procedures. They don't explore. They don't adapt. Revamping the entire UI is a bad idea - people will flee to OpenOffice.

If IBM had any sense at all, they'd open source Lotus 1-2-3 immediately -- there are millions of people who still remember / commands and @ functions who would abandon MS Office in a heartbeat to go back to the old, familiar software. I mean, if Borland can re-launch Turbo, why can't IBM re-launch 1-2-3? I know for a fact it once ran on UNIX - can you imagine what would happen if a character-mode 1-2-3 was available with all the old keystrokes and functions? People would flock to Linux. Does anyone at IBM actually remember they own 1-2-3?