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Two of the company's general managers published an open letter on document formats titled Interoperability, Choice and Open XML. In the letter, they argue that Microsoft is doing all the right things with standards and that IBM is not playing by the rules.
The letter is about an ongoing battle between two Extensible Markup Language-based document formats. IBM and others have supported the OpenDocument format, or ODF, from its inception in OpenOffice to its current International Organization for Standardization-accepted status.
Microsoft is trying to give its own Office Open XML (OOXML) the same stamp of approval by taking a shortcut through the "fast track" offered by the European standards body Ecma International into the ISO.
The conflict has provided prime entertainment for document geeks, and the letter adds to the amusement.
Jean Paoli and Tom Robertson share a tear-jerking story on how Microsoft has "stepped up efforts" and "listened to customers." Microsoft "congratulates Ecma" for producing a 6,000-page specification that will "spark an explosion of innovation." The enemy, on the other hand, is using the "standards process to limit choice in the marketplace for ulterior commercial motives." Microsoft has the nerve to criticize competitors for having commercial motives?
Further, the letter claims that "ODF is closely tied to OpenOffice and related products" (bad!) while OOXML "reflects the rich set of capabilities in Office 2007" (good!). A more even-handed sentence might read: ODF is an XML-based dump of the internal data structures of OpenOffice, while OOXML is an XML-based dump of the internal data structures of Microsoft Office.
"Choice" is a prominent word in the letter. The authors argue that consumers want several standards from which to choose. I don't think so. Consumers never wanted the choice between VHS and Beta, and mobile telephony in the United States was hindered by customers having to choose between competing standards.
Choice soon turns to frustration when your rented video doesn't fit in the slot, or your phone doesn't connect. People want to choose products based on price and performance, not on underlying equivalent standards.
According to the letter, governments have also been asking Ecma to "establish choice." Which countries? Is it Kazakhstan, by any chance? Kazakhstan recently joined the relevant ISO group. In the past, consultants paid by Microsoft have joined standardization groups and have become sympathetic voices. Are they buying countries this time?
In this conflict, ISO must answer a difficult question: is there room for both ODF and OOXML inside ISO? I'm not a fan of either format, but ISO should be concerned about the closeness of the two formats. They are similar in function, solving the same problems and using XML as the syntactic foundation. While it's healthy to have competition between different standards, it's rarely productive to have competing standards within an organization.
It can be argued that, by introducing a competing standard, one risks jeopardizing both standards. Around 1990, the SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) and ODA (Open Document Architecture) standards were competitors. Both of them were ISO standards, and I believe this was counterproductive for everyone involved. For example, SGML added useless features just to compete with ODA. Microsoft is not to blame for this, as they were not interested in standards in 1990. In 1997, however, they were.
Biography
Håkon Wium Lie is chief technology officer of
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that 'consumers don't want a choice' and to be honest, they
really don't. They aren't interested in what the underlying format
is as long as they can use that format anywhere they want to. So
what does this mean? The discussion about these open formats
is really going to have very little impact on most consumers and,
for the most part, they're going to continue to use the doc, xls,
and ppt formats because, as of now, everything understands
those formats.
This is bad because it gives one company a near stranglehold
over people's documents. On the other hand, its good because
any standard is better than no standard. I used to be an
organizer for a relatively well attended technical conference
(Joint Techs) and all presenters were required to submit their
presentations in advance so we could get them on line and not
have to worry about swapping laptops at the podium. Initially we
let presenters use whatever format they wanted - we ended up
with PDFs, magicpoint, html, RTF, powerpoint, and so forth. It
ended up being a logistical nightmare - especially being that
presenters would tweak their presentations constantly. We'd end
up getting 'revised' presentations 10 minutes before they were
supposed to speak and this made things *very* difficult to
support. So... after trying to accomodate everyone's choices for
a couple of years we just said *every* submission had to be in
powerpoint (98) format. It might not have been the best format
for everyone, but it was a standard and cut down on our
overhead and really let things run a lot more smoothly.
The point of this is that standards organizations can come up
with any format they like but the public and business community
will end up deciding what the real standard is going to be.
Which, is kind of how it should be I think.
open standards"? Pah! Customers want a computer that just works.
DrDreg
www.drdreg.com
I love the last line but unfortunately I doubt they'll ever start using standards
What I don't want is a choice in document formats. I want a universal document format that works in all office products. I want to send that document to somebody without worrying if they can or can't open it or if they have the right version of a specific program. When I receive a document I want to open it without having to go through conversion filters that sometimes work and sometimes don't.
So what is Microsoft doing? That's simple they are giving us a choice where most of us don't really want a choice. Muddying up the water to suit their needs. They are not helping consumers and that's what they are really doing.
It may be evenhanded, but it's inaccurate. ODF is designed as an "idealized" representation of a document. The specification says that ODF "...provides for high-level information suitable for editing documents", and that's not what a dump of OpenOffice.org's internal data structures provide.
I do agree that M$ EOOXML attempts are a pathetic attempt to undermine ODF.
There is no avoiding browsers eventually rendering ODF, so you might as well get on it.
/apol
- ODF is NOT OpenOffice
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by DarkPhoenixFF4
February 23, 2007 7:44 AM PST
- Hakon, you're falling for Microsoft's rhetoric. ODF was developed by committee, and in fact OOo was not the first office suite to implement it; KOffice was. OASIS designed ODF to be generic and easy to extend if necessary.
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1 | 2 | Next 10 Comments >>It is OOXML that is based on a memory dump, and Microsoft, ironically, is trying to hide that by claiming that ODF is inexorably tied to OpenOffice.org; that, in short, ODF was produced the same way as OOXML so "the enemy" should not be using the fact that OOXML is a dump of the Office internal structure as a counterargument against it. In reality, it is not.
HTML/CSS is very good for web-based documents, but is still very limiting for general documents (I always suspected that was the reason for XSL-FO's existence in the first place). While I imagine HTML and CSS could be extended to the point where they could be used where ODF/OOXML might be used instead, odds are such a transformation would make HTML something that it shouldn't be.
Keep in mind, also, that ODF uses XHTML, CSS, MathML, SVG, RDF, and other W3C standards under the hood, and that is why the standard is shorter than the behemoth OOXML spec. The OOXML spec contains proprietary replacements for all of these, including Microsoft's failed Vector Markup Language and Windows Metafiles for semantic data. This limits OOXML to Windows-based systems (because WMF was patented by Microsoft last time I checked)...