Microsoft Just Says No to .Doc Replacement Panel 569
Schlemphfer writes "OASIS is a nonprofit consortium backed by top technology companies, and the purpose of this organization is to set open standards for desktop and business software. They've just announced a working group that will create an XML-based document format standard for openoffice.org. And even though Microsoft is a member of Oasis, they aren't going to be taking part in this group. It's a logical move on Bill's part, considering that standardized XML docs are sure to weaken the hold that Microsoft's proprietary .doc format has on business software."
SURPRISE! (Score:4, Insightful)
But, I guess everyone will have a great time bashing MS for doing the obvious...
Re:SURPRISE! (Score:2, Interesting)
it ain't happening any time soon fellas.
Sure they will allow the inspectors in
Re:SURPRISE! (Score:3, Insightful)
Come on now, regime change begins at home.
Re:SURPRISE! (Score:5, Insightful)
As you say, hardly surprising, but it's important to note the details.
Re:SURPRISE! (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm... maybe I've just made your point for you. =) The albatross around Microsoft's neck has sort of always been that backward compatibility, hasn't it?
Re:SURPRISE! (Score:4, Informative)
No it doesn't. It talks about protocols, not file formats.
What you talkin about Willis? (Score:3, Insightful)
Where does the format of a
Don't believe me? Read it for yourselves.
Final Decree [usdoj.gov]
Re:SURPRISE! (Score:5, Insightful)
OpenOffice.org is a tremendous threat to M$ Office. I have said before that all OOo needs is for a few major corporate users of office suites to spend a fraction of the $ they send to Redmond instead on funding the final polish of OOo and the benefits of essentially zero $ cost coupled with open file formats and free-as-in-freedom will take care of the rest. If M$ does not see this as a real and serious threat, they are fools. (I believe they do see it as a threat, and will act accordingly) Boeing is on board, it shouldn't be too hard to get AOLTW and a few other obvious examples, and soon the dominoes will begin toppling. M$ cannot win the fight in the long term. They may win some battles, but they cannot win this war.
Re:SURPRISE! (Score:3)
Have you used OpenOffice.org lately? 1.0 is very good and has all the features that the vast majority of users will ever need.
Once the word gets out and ordinary people find out the monetary cost is $0, and the thing looks and feels basically like it did when they were paying $199 or more for the M$ equivalent, and they can still open their old M$ files, and they can install it on every machine they want and their grandma's too, and some big companies begin to switch and a lot of schools make the switch because it works in OS X and Windows and every other platform they have, and on and on...
M$ did it to Netscape, now it's M$'s turn to lose their air supply. There is a free in every sense alternative to Office. And it's not just a loss leader to get you hooked; it's the real deal free forever.
Even with $40B in the bank, M$ cannot compete with the potential resources that are available to a massively successful GPL product. Whole governments are beginning to take notice. Add the financial and human resource support of a few major corporations, and you have all the features you will ever dream of. Add a billion or more new computer users as developing countries come online, and you have all you need to swamp the M$ Office castle.
Re:SURPRISE! (Score:5, Insightful)
RagManX
Re:SURPRISE! (Score:5, Insightful)
What's most important in the article above, though, is that it makes Microsoft's stance on interoperability crystal clear.
Re:SURPRISE! (Score:3, Funny)
When I play Everquest I'm stealing fish?
VBA (Score:3, Interesting)
However, MS definitely isn't going to want to lose any market share to the home/student market who have no need for such things.
Re:SURPRISE! (Score:3, Insightful)
The point is noted: in a free market you always have to watch your back for the competition, lest they sweep by you. However, there's a bit of a difference between incumbent word processors and web browsers (Microsoft vs. Netscape).
The word processor requires a significant investment to learn, if you're going to use it to produce documents with any structure or complexity (cross-references, indexes, tables, consistent style, etc.) There is no such learning curve for a basic use of a Web browser. So, abandoning one for another is a lot less painless than migrating from Word, to, say, FrameBuilder (which, IMHO, is a programmer's and publisher's dream to use).
Thus, once an investment is made in something complex, particularly when its utility is enhanced by network effects, it's difficult to change.
Now, I hear you all screaming, "WordPerfect!". Truthfully, Word offered more elaborate formatting control, to make the transition from a simple "text formatter" to a "word processor" worthwhile -- providing greater functionality (and locking in a commitment to greater complexity). Yes, WordPerfect caught up, but it was a question of too little too late, espescially with Microsoft's intergration of their office suite components.
Now, there is still hope: an XML-based standard document format can offer something that is difficult at best to do in Word: separating style and output from content: a single document could end up rendered in PDF, HTML, plain text, or conceivably, Word formats (though RTF is more likely than Word, and importable into same, IIRC).
Re:SURPRISE! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:SURPRISE! (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually they do, it's called experience. Word sure may not be the best WP out there, but people are familiar with it, and in the terms of business productivity, that means more than being "the best". Businesses have a HUGE investment in training their staff on how to use software, and once that expense is incurred, you better have a damn good reason to incur it again. And seeing as how businesses make up the overwhelming _paying_ majority of Word users, I don't think it's going to disappear tomorrow.
Re:SURPRISE! (Score:3, Insightful)
<ObligatorySlashdotAnalogy>Word is the aging gunfighter with a spreading paunch and OO is the young kid waiting his time....<\ObligatorySlashdotAnalogy>
Re:SURPRISE! (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh really, can you tell which basic editing commands have changed radically in the last three verions of Word? And by basic I am including things like creating style sheets, fields (which also includes things like TOC and indices), not just typing and deleting. Just using style sheets as an example, they have not fundamentally changed since the days of the DOS version of Word.
Re:SURPRISE! (Score:3, Insightful)
The argument is that although MS Office license costs more, the costs of training folks to use OpenOffice.org could cost more. Also, since so many people already know MS Office (at a basic level at least), they don't need to be trained at all. Many businesses have already paid a one time license for a recent version of MS Office, so staying with it costs them nothing, while switching to OOo costs them for training. (although if MS goes with this new pay-per-year / forced-upgrade license, those OOo training costs might not look so bad)
Training isn't that difficult (Score:3, Interesting)
I have been involved with 2 "from Office" migrations, one from MS Office to Star Office, another to OpenOffice.org. The first move involved showing two secretaries, 6 library workers, one tech, and an admin Star Office. Since they were born this century and have been introduced to desktop computing, learning how to click different looking buttons was not hard for them and navigate run-of-the-mill menus. It took less then a day to "train" them. The second move was for a small office of about 6 people to OpenOffice.org. It was likewise painless and fast.
I understand that each company will have the trademark little old lady that is almost unable to learn new tricks, or the gung-ho MS fan that will whine all the way through, but that really shouldn't be a major issue to a seasoned IT pro - just business as usual. The "high training cost and time" to move to OOo is just FUD.
Re:SURPRISE! (Score:5, Insightful)
If AbiWord, Open Office, Star Office, Word Perfect, and any other Office Suite package (KOffice?) settle on a standard common XML format, it IS going to be big.
All it takes is one *single* library to convert Microsoft
And then the CMS solutions start using it, and then Microsoft has to upgrade Office so that Office can read these files, then you suddenly do have a viable alternative.
Will it happen? Beats me. If the standard is good, simple, easy to understand and all the other office suites implement it then yes I think it has a very good chance of having a big impact. If everybody bickers about it, nobody implements it, or the standard sucks (look at RDF) then Microsoft will eat our lunch.
Re:SURPRISE! (Score:3, Insightful)
An Office format risks the same issues. In order to support all the wacky formatting in documents you'll need a very rich language and that combined with XML could lead to a totally unintelligble format. I haven't looked at the spec, but I hope they make due allowance for people who'll be writing the tools. If they make tool writers wade through shit trying to comprehend what's going on they'll be damaging themselves.
You can bet your boots that is MS settles on XML, they will make developers wade through shit trying to understand the format. Look forward to mixed namespaces, data islands and other garbage to trip up someone expecting to knock out a tool in perl.
Re:SURPRISE! (Score:5, Funny)
Besides (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Besides (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Besides (Score:4, Funny)
I can see it now....
<?MSXML version="1.0">
<data>
$%G)FKJ#$&F_CGKASK!^HAD*+ZXL:P::?......
Re:Besides (Score:4, Insightful)
False... (Score:4, Informative)
False. The ".doc" format is definitely not simple. It's also not a raw dump of memory, it's objects that have been serialized into OLE structured storage, which you can think of an evil twin of the already evil FAT file system.
Probably one of the *least* robust file formats I know of
Yes, that's true.
Re:Besides (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Besides (Score:5, Insightful)
[Insert binary blob of data that is currently a
Lookeee! Now it's XML. Isn't that so much better?
No, I don't think MS is going to do anything that awful, but realize that XML is not magic. It does nothing by itself to make a document more open. If you have lookup table values in the XML data then you're still screwed unless you know what the actual lookup table is. You can have utterly meaningless tags with random data in it. If you don't have agreements on what fields actually mean then all you have is content without value. Yay.
Frankly, all XML really does is explode a file's size by encapsulating data with tags. Whoop de doo. You have to have a rigorous and complete document specification, and while a DTD may fulfill that need it doesn't always. With a rigorous and complete spec though then XML is redundant - you can just as easily parse a binary file at that point. And look! You can do it with less memory and CPU. Funny that.
Re:Besides (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, all XML really does is explode a file's size by encapsulating data with tags. Whoop de doo. You have to have a rigorous and complete document specification, and while a DTD may fulfill that need it doesn't always. With a rigorous and complete spec though then XML is redundant - you can just as easily parse a binary file at that point.
That's just false. With a rigorous and complete specification for a language you still have to write a parser for that language. But with XML, you use one of the dozen off-the-shelf parsers, including the one that probably ships with your operating system or browser. Guess what, these office documents will probably work _out of the box_ with pre-existing XML browsers (Mozilla, IE 6) and CSS stylesheets. Or at worse, an XSLT could do the transformation on either the client or server side. The virtue of standards is that you can leverage standard tools.
A binary file format would typically need a binary plugin.
Re:Besides (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, in my experience, OpenOffice's compressed XML files are smaller than their MS .doc equivalents.
Why using XML doesn't explode data size ... (Score:5, Informative)
Because XML is highly compressible, use of XML does not necessarily increase file size. The Gnome apps that use XML data formats store it compressed as gzip; I just took a typical small Excel spreadsheet, which takes 20.5 kbytes in Excel format, and saved it in the Gnumeric XML-based format: it's 3K. Uncompressed, it's 37K, but that doesn't matter, as the uncompressed format is never kept either in disk or in memory all at one time.
This is hardly surprising... (Score:4, Insightful)
Especially, if it meant as you replacement did more work, it meant your paycheck was incrementally decreased...
Re:This is hardly surprising... (Score:3, Insightful)
Heyy, you aren't one of those idiot job security programmers who believes that obfuscated source actually helps you keep your job are you?
In Other News... OPEC turns down Solar, Wind (Score:4, Funny)
OPEC decides not to support Solar and Wind power generation standards,
RIAA chooses WAV files as the new digital music standard for best interoperability,
Disney suggests donating all Copyrighted works created prior to 1996 entered into the Public Domain,
NSA injects every wiretapped communication with a pre-taped public service announcement consisting of celebrity voiceovers reciting the Fourth Amendment in languages such as Farsi, Hindi and Mandarin.
There's a bit of an editoral at the register (Score:2, Informative)
God, someone explain to me how to do links right!? (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/28218.html
Re:God, someone explain to me how to do links righ (Score:3, Informative)
And this time, with a working link! [theregister.co.uk]
Re:God, someone explain to me how to do links righ (Score:2, Insightful)
There is at article at <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/2821
Headline Translation? (Score:4, Informative)
Do the /. editors have access to some special Babelfish plugin the rest of us aren't privy to?
Re:Headline Translation? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Headline Translation? (Score:3, Funny)
I thought MS Wait and See meant, "Wait and see what you do so we can squash you like the pesky bug you are."
At least they're not yet marketing MS Nothing and forcing users to upgrade to MS Nothing XP SP1.
Re:Headline Translation? (Score:5, Funny)
Other common translations include:
"We don't have any openings that fit your qualifications" = "We think you are dumb"
"We're streamlining the company" = "Start looking for a new job"
"We offer value-added services" = "We are going to make you pay extra for stuff that should have come with it in the first-place"
and there are a myriad of others that my brain is too fried to think of right now.........
Re:Headline Translation? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Headline Translation? (Score:5, Funny)
You forgot misspillings.
Re:Headline Translation? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Headline Translation? (Score:5, Funny)
It makes sense. (Score:4, Insightful)
XDocs... (Score:4, Informative)
"XDocs," the code name for a new product in the Microsoft Office family, streamlines the process of gathering information by enabling teams and organizations to easily create and work with rich, dynamic forms. The information collected can be integrated with a broad range of business processes because XDocs supports any customer-defined XML schema and integrates with XML Web services. As a result, XDocs helps to connect information workers directly to organizational information and gives them the ability to act on it, which leads to greater business impact.
But what about... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:But what about... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's really a very cool idea. Your Word templates can reference Schema elements; so non programmers can create the template. Anyone who knows how to use Word will be able to make a form that interfaces with existing XML formats.
Can we have documents that are printable too? (Score:2)
Microsoft is a monopoly (Score:5, Insightful)
Office is the cash cow, and they have done their best to eliminate viable competition.
The only reason that Corel Wordperfect lives on is the legal community, and a few bullheaded supporters that will not change. (not that refusal to change is bad in this case.)
Why would anyone logically think that they would embrace a standard that will put their competitors on an equal playing field?
A standard that they cannot "extend" easily at this point without lots of bad publicity.
I think that they are going to "wait and see" if it flies, then embrace and extend it after it sticks. It is in their benefit to wait for it to fail, or for more time between their conviction and their extension of this standard. They don't want to get their hand slapped again so soon.
Cuchullain
Re:Microsoft is a monopoly (Score:3, Interesting)
I can understand how they've done their best to eliminate the competition with regards to browsers and operating systems ... but Office??
Does anyone have any actual details on what they did with Office that was so anticompetitive?
Propiatory document formats as a reason don't cut it, other manufacturers use that sort of thing (insert any non-MS package under the sun here) - the only reason it's so widespread is because of the massive take up of Word at a time when the competition was, quite frankly, rubbish.
But I've never read anything about them exercising anti-competitive behavours with word - more that the entire world and his dog have become so entrenched with the .doc format, that MS don't need to actually do anything.
So just come up with something else (Score:2)
Call the new standard
Er (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone noticed that (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, the other thing no one has really noticed has been that Office XP has it's own XML document specification. Even they are starting to get away from the proprietary format.
Number one hold on the market (Score:5, Insightful)
I've tried using LaTeX with several groups and each group has decided to move back to Word. It is just too familiar, too standard.
The sad part is that I absolutely hate Word as much as I dislike any other program. It has nothing to do with my feelings towards MS. Word is just a poorly done program.
In the real business world, Office will be king until MS opens its format. StarOffice (which I've used quite a bit) is nice, but at 99.5% compatability, it just isn't good enough. No one wants to lose a business deal because they don't use the standard.
I highly doubt MS will ever release its hold on the Office formats. Of course, they are going to XML, but that doesn't mean the format will be open and readable to competitors.
Re:Number one hold on the market (Score:3, Insightful)
So the failure of (La)TeX to take over the whole world doesn't mean that a document format which would permit the use of a Word-like program would also fail.
...just like Unix took over the proprietary OSs (Score:3, Interesting)
Why?
Because the major corporate customers know that proprietary products screw consumers in the long and possibly short run.
If anyone is still in the dark on how a proprietary single source for technology can screw your company, just look at the price increases, license changes and other efforts by Microsoft to screw its own customer base during tough times.
You might expect Microsoft to raise prices and tighten up terms during good times. But, the idiots running Microsoft are so dumb and stupid (that means Gates and Ballmer) that they do so during difficult times.
It is proof positive to avoid doing business with Microsoft Corporation.
Any business.
After all they are looking for more partners to screw.
Do not blame me for the decisions made by Microsoft Corporation. Blame Gates and Ballmer.
Re:...just like Unix took over the proprietary OSs (Score:5, Informative)
Err..umm..UNIX is a proprietary OS. There's a very good reason Linux is referred to as a 'UNIX work-alike.'
Ye Gods, though, go take a look at a 'history of UNIXes' chart. You think Win95 vs 98 vs ME vs NT4 vs 2K vs XP is bad? You kids don't know how nice you have it now adays; even several years ago, at least it was starting to coalesce into BSD versus SVR4.
Re:...just like Unix took over the proprietary OSs (Score:3, Informative)
Not really. There are many proprietary implementations of UNIX, but they abide by standards. This is why a "UNIX administrator" can feel comfortable on Solaris, IRIX, HPUX, Linux, BSD etc. It is also why software written under one UNIX is generally easy to get working on another UNIX.
Compared to Windows, UNIX is wide open. They are before my time, but I would guess that UNIX compares favorably to Mainframe OSes, too.
Re:...just like Unix took over the proprietary OSs (Score:3, Funny)
Ach! I remember the good old days. One of my chores was to port my daily 4.2BSD kernel code to SunOS 1.0. If I didn't have it done by noon, my pa would whip me with SysV init scripts.
A European Office data format based on OO (Score:5, Informative)
The site says : 1dok.org is part of a programme of the Ministry of Economics, Technology and Transport (MWTV) and the Schleswig- Holstein Technology Foundation (TSH) funded out of the Innovative Actions of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) by the European Commissions GD Regio.
I believe their intention is to base it on OpenOffice format, they want to make it the official office data format for the German government, and may later for all the Europen governments.
Microsoft's contribution (Score:4, Funny)
How to avoide Embrace and Extend (Score:3, Insightful)
BUT, this can be avoided IF the standards committe carefully structures the standard in such a way to prevent custom incompatible extensions and that any application not adhering to the standard cannot advertise itself as compliant or able to read/write such documents. A good trademark owned by the standards body would assist in enforcing this. Then Microsoft would have to choose either to implement it openly, or not fully support it. This would at least force them to be honest.
What a bunch of clueless posts (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't Microsoft .doc format based on XML already?
Yes, but this doesn't really help a whole lot. XML is a standard for designing document formats, it is not a format in its own right. The fact that Microsoft's format is "based on XML" really only says that they will use HTML-like tags <foo>some text here</foo>, it doesn't say that how their word processor will interpret those tags, or even what the tags will be, etc.
What's wrong with RTF or straight-up ascii?
Try embedding a spreadsheet in RTF, and get back to us (is this question for real ?)
I was under the impression that Microsoft Office 11 was promoting their own??? version of XML. If that is the case, I am sure that BillG wouldn't want anything else as a standard
No, Microsoft are using their own document format. It's not a "version of XML", XML is a specification for writing document formats. It isn't a format in its own right. Bill couldn't care less if something else became standard, but the issue here is convenience. Microsoft may want to be able to add tags to their document format, as they add features to their software. It's really a case of the "not invented here" syndrome -- everyone likes to invent their own format. Even with standards like POSIX, C++, C, and HTML, any vendor of consequence adds their own vendor extensions.
Yes, MS isn't going to open up one of its proprietary license. Especially one that is so widely used. If this comes as a surprise, you need to soak your head.
"Proprietary licenses" are not the issue here. Microsoft are moving to an XML based format, and they already allow developers access to documentation for their formats. Moving to XML will make their formats more accesible -- it might not make much difference to a serious implementor, but it will make it much easier for the average perl hacker to do something with their documents.
The issue is that MS don't want someone else controlling the format that their software uses. It's simply more convenient if you have complete control over the specifications of your format. Compatibility requires some discipline, and possibly a certain amount of inconvenience. Whether or not that inconvenience is worthwhile depends on the merits of the format, which is why Microsoft are playing "wait and see".
In any case, I doubt Microsoft would use a standard format as their native format, at best they would base their native format on a standard and add a bunch of vendor extensions to it.
Re:What a bunch of clueless posts (Score:3, Informative)
Seriously, their XML will most likely be along these lines:
A "creator" section that has the creator metadata,
A "Bodytext" section that contains the bodytext,
and some additional metadata that will only be of use to VB6 programmers working with an ODBC database.
The rest of the formatting and rendering information will be stored in poorly documented areas in HEX or binary encoding. Why? The system uses this type of information in Binary or Hex encoding.
Honestly, I have my suspicions that the new "XML based" formats are more a response to the decoding of their previous formats than anything else. MS can dance the Mighty "XML Standard" dance, all while providing a broken XML implementation. The truth is that people are already feeling "locked-in" and the XML stretegem is Microsoft's way of pretending to be more open.
~Hammy
Foot in mouth (Score:4, Interesting)
XML isn't a silver bullet. (Score:3, Insightful)
I fully expect MS version of "XML based .doc" to be simply a base-64 encode of the .doc we have today, enclosed in a pair of XML-tags.
Thinking "Oh, it's XML! Then we can all understand what it says!" is naive.
Avoiding conflict-of-interests? (Score:3, Interesting)
As has been reported, they are developing XDocs in the future, and this consortium could potentially be putting together something fairly similar to XDocs.
I doubt MS wants to be involved in something that appears like the whole DDR SDRAM/RDRAM fiasco.
-Jayde
Instead, Microsoft will use their own XML format! (Score:3, Funny)
<document type="ms-word">
<data>aksljdflkaj31948lksadjfmn232.....</data>
</document>
</xml>
Ahh, open standards at work over in Redmond.
In related news... (Score:4, Funny)
doc format the keys to the kingdom (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft also enforces its planned obsolesence in the same way. Since new machines only come with the new version of Office, any existing organization is eventually infected with the 'upgraded' versions (complete with their 'smart' features that are either annoying or useless to 99% of the consumer base). Once these documents begin to float around and not open quite right in old versions of Office, everyone needs to upgrade. Otherwise, countless billable hours will be lost to futzing with file formats. $400 for an Office license quickly pays for itself when you're billed out at $50-$100 per hour. Its not the most desireable path, but for a struggling business, its the quickest pain relief available.
File formats also further entrence the Windows operating system. Clearly, linux and unix are out with no native MS Office suite. While I admire the open source projects and their ability to continually reverse engineer the moving target of MS file formats, it is impossible to keep up and they can never provide 100% compatibility which is imperative for a working daily interaction with MS Office users. Even on the Mac with Office X (touted by MS ads for its full compatibility), there are roadblocks to easy transion. My wife uses Office at work because she has to interact with others who do. She recently tried to move to Mac but couldn't because her files weren't quite right. The symbols didn't translate correctly, which might not bother business folk, but as a scientist, it meant that all her technical papers would require endless fixing just to do a little work at hoem. So she's back to a Microsoft Windows box. How fortunate for Redmond that the software they supplied wasn't capable enough for her to make the 'switch'.
All of this hinges on the ability of Office to maintain a closed file format. It keeps users trapped in Office due to compatibility with their coworkers and colleagues. It forces users to upgrade their perfectly good software and shell out more $$$ to MS just because someone else in the office has a new machine. It locks users into the blessed Windows OS again solely for the sake of compatibility and ease of document exchange. MS will never agree to a default open file format for its applications as it would break their stranglehold on both office productivity software and operating systems, the only two profitable portions of their business. Even the new XML formats that promise self describing data storage will only pay lip service to the critics as they wrap up their proprietary binary formats in easy to read, text tags.
I was about to mod you down, but (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft Office file formats are the lynchpin to their dominance of the computer software world.
I am amazed that so many people who should know better - all of the /.ers who claim to be clued in - believe this tripe. Let me enlighten everybody who has fallen for this line...
First, do any of you out there remember a software company named Claris? For those of you who don't, Claris was the software division of Apple, and was responsible for programs such as MacWrite, MacDraw, MacPaint, etc. Claris not only had proprietary file formats for all of its software, they had inside knowledge of every detail of the Mac - the OS, the hardware, everything. What happened to them?
MacWrite was killed off rather effectively by - you could see this coming, right? - Word Perfect and Microsoft Word.
MacDraw was buried completely by Adobe Illustrator.
MacPaint was annihilated by Adobe Photoshop.
The lesson here is simple. If Claris, which had access to every facet of their only target platform could not dominate the Mac software market with proprietary file formats and exclusive knowledge of the OS, no one can.
Microsoft Office will not be taken down because its file formats are open, or because a 'standard' format comes along. Office - and this applies to pretty much anything - will be beaten by something better.
And as an aside, MS Windows is the dominant OS out there because - and think on this for a bit - there was no alternative to Win95 at the time it was introduced. Where was Linux at? BeOS? I owned a Mac IIfx, and it cost three times as much as a PC at the time. No alternative there.
What I don't understand... (Score:5, Interesting)
Office, one of MS's two profitable divisions, gives Microsoft a 79% profit margin for each product sold. I have a feeling that if your average Joe only KNEW about openoffice.org as an alternative, they'd use it in a heartbeat. Businesses might be harder to convince, but when I told my dad about OO.o, he just about shat himself. $400 saved.
If the Internet community can raise $100K (in what was it, 5 weeks?!) to free Blender [blender3d.com], surely if given enough time we could raise a million for say, a Superbowl or Oscar ad in 2004. I'm sure there's more than one corporate competitor of Microsoft's that wouldn't mind kicking Bill in the financial balls by making a modest contribution to the OO.o publicity effort.
I can see the ad now...
"Coming up next, the Oscar for Best Picture..."
CUT TO BLACK.
FADE UP:
MEDIUM SHOT OF a SILVER CD-ROM on a DESK with "openoffice.org" scrawled in BLACK SHARPIE.
AS WE SLOWLY ZOOM IN TO THE CD-ROM...
ANNOUNCER: Hey, America. Four hundred bucks is too much to pay for Office software, don't you think? But now there's an alternative you can download for free and copy for your friends. It's called OpenOffice.org. The people who make the "monopoly" version of Office don't want you to know about it. But we do. So visit www.Openoffice.org and give it a try. This message was paid for by thousands of Internet users around the world who thought you should know about alternatives to supporting the monopoly.
TEXT: "OpenOffice.org -- A free alternative"
FADE TO BLACK.
I'd put ten bucks in for this ad. Just the articles ABOUT the ad and how it was financed would be great publicity.
(Oh, and I hereby release all the text above under the open content [opencontent.org] license, v1.0.)
Never happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Time to break another monopoly (Score:5, Insightful)
A tough choice for Bill (Score:3, Interesting)
As a desperation ploy, they could use XML file formats, leaving the tags in plain text but encrypting the data. Any competetive products trying to work with the file would be face the wrath of DMCA.
Re:A tough choice for Bill (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft doesn't have to do anything so sneaky. You see, Microsoft isn't really competing against OpenOffice, they are actually competing against old versions of their own software. Microsoft would love to make the XML format the default format in Office 11, but they know that if they do that their corporate users will freak out. Microsoft nearly had a revolt on their hands when they switched the Office formats in Office 97. All of a sudden people couldn't open the MS Office documents they received via email.
On the other hand, it did drive a lot of MS Office upgrades.
"Chicken or Egg" Scenario.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft XML Architect and W3C XML Standard Co-creator Jeal Paoli announce XML integration with "Office 11" on November 14th... [microsoft.com]
Open Source community (in no doubt lead/prodded/cajoled/wrangled by Sun's Scott McNealy) tries to upstage W3C's work on XML by producing their own standard on November 20th. [com.com]
Can you say "wanna-be"?
Also, I think the "editors" of /. should be lynched for turning an honest response from Microsoft into a "we-don't-play-that-no-mo" response. Microsost NEVER said that they weren't going to work within that working-group or not. CowboyNeal et. al. are just a bunch of freakin' gits who love to "sucker-punch" anyone they can.
I think /. should change their background color to "yellow" - because this STINKS of "Yellow Journalism"
ScottKin - looking for CowboyNeal so I can PUMMEL him into consciousness.
XML sucks! Lisp S-expr rules! (Score:5, Funny)
A simple fix (Score:3, Insightful)
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
<xsl:output method="text"/>
<xsl:template match="*">
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="count(node()) = 0">
<xsl:value-of select="name()"
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
( <xsl:value-of select="name()"
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
The transformation in the other direction is left as the traditional exercise for the interested reader.
I would not participate if I were MS (Score:3, Interesting)
Ignore all of the obvious issues about the value of the .DOC monopoly. Consider instead that the name of the working group is the same as the name of a product that competes with yours and that the working group has pretty much decided that the file format will be based [oasis-open.org] upon the file format of that competitor.
In other words, Microsoft would be participating in the canonization of the file format of not only a competing product but an open source competing product. Can you really blame them from seeing that as a no-win situation?
I wish the standardizers and coders the best of luck and I would love to see them succeed. But I'm sure none of them are naive enough to have expected Microsoft to participate. Only the scandal-hungry hounds at CNet and Slashdot consider this news.
Benefits others besides Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)
So maybe McAfee or Symantec or someone like that, slipped a few bucks into Microsoft's pocket to ask 'em to oppose the new format. ;-)
(I love coming up with this crazy shit.)
sabatoge? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think MS would do this, but I think that there are worse things MS could have done than simply not participate.
Wrong strategy (Score:4, Interesting)
An Oasis in the WYSIWYG Desert? (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the problems with WYSIWYG markup is that it is visual, everyone likes Word (or whatever) because they can make things Look Right. But this is also its biggest problem, as it removes the structural/semantic information. We've now trained a whole pile of people to believe that what they think looks good must (obviously) look good to anyone. (To see the validity of that, just look at what those attitudes have done to the web. "I like blinkies, so everyone must." Ewww.)
But now the document is non-portable, and in some sense digitally unusable. Hard to index, hard to grab bits of for the next time you need almost that same thing. Indeed, something like the oft vaunted "mail merge" in Scribe, LaTeX, XML are relatively simple (a shell script and sed) but they tend to be hard in WYSIWYG documents.
Why? Because semantic markup is necessarily domain-centric. A business letter doesn't have the same kind of content as an invoice. Even when they're part of the same communication.
Thats a good thing for indexing, cataloging, analyzing and all that.
Its also a good thing for those who need to produce a lot of documents that look a lot alike. Hence document templates (available in any decent word processor).
Even better, using XML allows a nice separation of powers. The person writing the business letter does not need to know what it will look like, and the person defining its look does not need to know its content. Since the writer is not concerned with the look, editing actually gets easier. For example, I often use LaTeX (also HTML and XML increasingly) and emacs and know them both relatively well (and I use both under both Windows and Unix) and when I need to switch to something WYSIWYGish, I tend to get very cranky. "What do you mean, you cant put every sentence on a line by itself?"
Now everyone with a grain of sense knows all this (so I apologize for repeating it). Or do they?
Microsoft does. XML based documents are going to be the future, they say. Oasis does (but then they're SGML oriented anyway).
But not everyone does. That secretary down the hall doesn't. And he's going to fight like hell having to do things in a true XML oriented way (show him an xml editor and wait for him to threaten to quit). (Why do you think SGML never caught on?) He doesn't care about saving work - he wants to get paid for his 40 hours. And his boss is going to hear him loud and clear since he sits right outside her door. Even though putting him into that XML re-education camp is very likely to save a whole pile of money in the long run, the noise and screams and the short run cost is going to make it very hard to push in any kind of organization.
Which means we might end up with an XML representation of that WYSIWYG text. This would be a real mess. There is a thing called the "Rainbow DTD" (a quick web search turned up no live copies of this). This was an SGML (it predated XML) markup that essentially represented WYSIWYG markup. So there were elements like "". Yech.
As a proof of concept, a while back, I cobbled together a script that would read this and guess as to the users "meaning" (we were dealing with a relatively small target domain)- it worked, but quite badly, to get it to work well would have taken expert system or statistical inference kinds of code. The idea was not supported by my boss, because it would have required iterations and feedback from the original authors to tune the translations. He said, "They like WYSIWYG, lets not bother them." It was clear that it would have worked though, and with tools like XSLT, it would not have been all that hard.
So now I wonder, are the OASIS folks going to do a "rainbow dtd" type thing? Perhaps at a slightly higher level of abstraction? Or will it be a metalanguage for document definition (hey, I thought that was what XML was). And the MS folks, what does their XML look like?
Cuz, one way or another, with XSLT and a bit of hackery, someone will find a way to translate one to the other. And back. The only question left is how hard it will be and how much semantic information will carry across.
It's not about features (Score:4, Insightful)
The era of adding genuinely useful features to productivity software is long past. I defy you to find any company (including Microsoft) where more than 5% of the people use more than 5% of the features in MS-Office. Feature creep in that product is addressing a diminimus minority. Sure, you can do all kinds of clever stuff with VBA - who actually needs to? Very few people.
The one and only time in recent memory I have tangled with VBA was to borrow from a colleague a script which implements a basic feature that MS-Access (2000) is simply missing - save a table as CSV. That's right, it can't do it. It can put it on the clipboard, but as any non-techie who wangs data around using Excel will tell you, the world stops at row 65,535. Lame.
Why do people upgrade from MS-Office 97 to 2000 to XP? Not for features, for one of two reasons - (a) they get a new computer and the old version won't run, or far more commonly, (b) they start receiving too many .DOC files by email that their software won't read. MS not only has the sense to stick with the impenetrable binary format, but to make an incompatible change to the default save format each release to force the upgrade path. Forget XML - the .DOC is the lingua franca of non-techie document exchange. There is a 3-way tie for second place between .PPT, .XLS and those little winmail.dat calendar thingies from Outlook.
I use StarOffice 5.2 for day to day munging of MS-Office files, for which it is fine, and it has come a long way from earlier versions, but it still needs work in the one word processor feature that really matters - handling .DOC - nowadays it supports even fancy stuff like change tracking, fonts are mostly their though it suffers from more "layout creep" than exchanging files from one setup of MS-Word to the next (what a bunch of lameness, making layout depend on the print driver, Word's worst bug IMHO).
ISTR that MS was originally proposing to use XML in Office 2000 when it was first on the drawing board. Some PM pulled that piece of business suicide away right quick.
Simmer Down Slashdot Monkeys (Score:3, Informative)
All microsoft said was that they were going to wait and see.
Here are a few things to read. I'm sure you can find more if you try....
Ripped from the headlines....
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,561973,00.as
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2002/Nov
all software will be totally commoditized (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know about you guys, but OOo is more than good enough for my needs. So is Mozilla. So is Linux. Not even taking into account the traditional free software advantages (interoperability, stability, security, no spyware or excessive restrictions, etc.), it's a matter of time before free software becomes the standard.
It's simple economics: Money talks, bulls**t walks.
Re:RTF and ascii (Score:5, Funny)
Call this post a flamebait, but most people that use "Word" do that stuff.
S
Re:RTF and ascii (Score:5, Funny)
It had no fancy formatting, and was essentially a list of do's and don'ts for corporate e-mail usage. One of the items on the list was "don't include unnecessary attachments - if it can be said in plain text, don't make it a Word document"...
Re:RTF and ascii (Score:5, Informative)
And don't even get me started on RTF. Have you ever looked at that crap? I worked on an open source xsl:fo to RTF converter [jfor.org] and I'd have to say that RTF is extrememly anoying to work with.
Microsoft has a RTF specification doc. but this is notoriously full of holes and ambiguities. There is a reason that RTF still works best with Office: they don't tell you how exactly to implement it.
It's tremedously hard to debug, ugly, verbose(more so than xml), hard to read. I hate RTF. I've had dreams when i kick it in the forehead and strangle it underwater. But that's just me.
Compare an XML document with a RTF document and you'll see what I mean.
Re:Wrong (Score:2)
Actually, it's Microsoft's customers are that 95% of the market. What *they* say goes, and if folks widely realize that Microsoft is deliberately holding their data hostage, I'd imagine a good portion of them might take action. OASIS is one venue that could allow that.
Don't remember Word Perfect, do you? (Score:3, Insightful)
Word may have a stranglehold on the marketplace right now, but nothing lasts forever. Nothing.
Re:Isn't MS-Word going to an XML based format alre (Score:2)
Re:It's easy to paint this in an anti-Microsoft li (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny. I just made a "hello world" document using Word 2000 and it was 19 KB.
Lack of features -- there's a reason people are still using
If you seriously think that XML is just a fancy HTML, then there's no hope of you understanding why this open standard is a good thing in the first place.
Re:Unless they've got wicked voodoo... (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if the rest of your argument is true, which I don't feel it is (I feel that Corel's office suite for Linux was better than MS Office at the time they launched it), Word is not something that is easily replaced. Word is the most used component of MS Office by the average person. The word processor component in any suite will likely be the first thing someone tries to use, and the ability to open all document types is key.
Most people save in the
If another company releases an office suite that blows MS Office away, all MS has to do to kill it is "tweak" the MS Word file format in a "bug fix" just to break compatability before this new suite has a chance to take hold. Even if there is a workaround, this small incompatability will turn people away from the new Office Suite.