Comments on: Office standards battle grinds on
Creation of Ecma standard committee gives Microsoft a point in escalating battle over desktop software.
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About time someone stated the obvious.
Most blatant lie I ever heard.
M$ intentionally was breaking backward compatibility for many years. Hearing such lie now sounds more or less like rude joke. When such /joke/ comes from ECMA, it forces you think what the people are after.
Which is what they said. So how it can be a blatant lie... I do not know.
And the idea Microsoft intentionally break backward compatiblity is silly :P Of course, they have, but intentionally? The idea they sit down and decide; ok, let's break compatibility is pretty much stupid :P What they have been doing for years is not caring about backward compatibility because customers have not been caring. Now; apparently they do. So, Microsoft, being a fantastic company, is giving us backward compatibility not only right now forward, but backwards using a conversion tool.
2. If OpenOffice and Linux are being offered for free... which Government, company or individual in their right minds will be purchasing products from Microsoft? Will MS Office and Windows be offered for free also?
3. How is it intended that the approval of the Microsoft's XML-based Office file formats by the Ecma International influence the international marketplace conditions?
MOST OF THEM.........
Don't flatter yourself into believing the entire world thinks open source is the solution to all problems large and small.
It's not.
It's just a different set of problems.
2. OpenOffice and Linux are not free for anybody and we both know that, they both cost in training, support, administration and conversion. In numbers that make the cost of Office look like pre-school maths.
3. The intension of course is that Microsoft offer to customers, especially the huge ones, what the OpenDocument is, along with everything it has always offered that OpenDocument don't, and the advantage of no changing costs. Ultimately what everybody will get is all the features everybody who normally wouldn't care has been moaning about; and it will be back to all the Hippies moaning again about how Microsoft killed their Grandmother and initiates racial hatred, how Open-Source represents peace and love, and how we should all go out, smoke some weed, and bare ridiculously high numbers of illegitamate children for us to sacrifce to our Lord Tux when the cleansing of souls comes and we find out if we are worthy of his blessing to get a Linux Distribution that will last more than six months without the group who made it deciding they don't like that and starting a whole new one and hence ending support for the old one.
======================
Redoing Macros is like rebuilding in way...
If someone dropped a bunch of bombs and blew up everything we would rebuild our farms and infrastructure.
However, as long as the bombs blew up a cruel and evil dictator (IRAQ) then I think anyone that was suffering over there would probably be okay with the cost of rebuilding.
That is, if my PERL program running on Linux could output a Word document, why would I need some funky macro language to automate my document production? I'd just write programs on any platform that produce the needed document file.
decide what is and is not a standard.
How can something controlled by one company be a "standard?"
This is nonsensical. Why doesn't the reporter see that?
What the point is about is not who is fiddling with it, but the backwards compatibility and the ability to anybody to write an application to use it. That is what everybody has been wanting from the .doc Format since OpenDocument. 'I want to use whatever Program I want', 'I want to know my file will work in a thousand years', 'don't tread on me' and so forth. This is what the proposal does.
You cannot edit the OpenDocument Format; you cannot now edit this format. The differences for you or anybody is nill; other than that OpenDocument would involve a long drawn out war with Office that would take years in order to gain the same level of backwards compatibility and 'freedom' Microsoft is giving us right now.
Microsoft has not approached the ECMA with its own rules; it has put its format on the table for standardisation. It is not saying 'change some things for me so I can continue what I am doing and win' it is saying 'ok, maybe we should standarise this format, it is what people seem to want'. These are not new rules, this is Microsoft using its powerful set of 'players' with style and intelligence. Why IBM seems to be so in the front of your mind I do not know; but IBM seems to have been the only industry representative who said don't let them do this. Against a huge number of them who have rallied to help this uncommonly open effort from Microsoft. Are you saying that the standards for the Concorde were not right in some way? The only reason the Concorde no longer makes flights in times no other plane filled with passengars has yet to do is because of money and safety, not its standards.
I can't admit to understanding what you continue to talk about in the way of rules? How is openning up Microsoft formats changing the rules? Or do you consider the rules to be that Microsoft have a Closed Format and OpenDocument have an Open Format? :P If you are after being fair, surely both teams should be allowed to do the same things to their formats or it would not be at all fair.
But you can't take away Hugo's club, because that would be unfair.
If you did, Hugo would find it harder to dominate the playground. Instead, just let Hugo design a new "standard" club.
Gartner's comment made me laugh...translated to my analogy, it becomes...
'The other children have been unsuccessful at having any fun on that playground for at least 10 years.'
LOL :-)
Anyway, even though every novice is told to learn Word or they
won't be able to play, I have actually found it easier to use LaTeX
and appear to be the alpha dog when it comes to making
presentable mathematics.
So which is better? The solution that involves years of drawn out war with 'Hugo' to dominate the playground in a way that 'Hugo' could do right now without any War and far more fantastic perks.
Microsoft 'kindly' sets a 'standard' for Office documents that...Microsoft will adhere to and everybody else should (try to) have compatibility with.
I have 3 comments to that:
1. The threat of Open Documents must really scare the pants off Microsoft to go to such lengths. Otherwise, why do this now? Why didn't Microsoft 'kindly' start this before? So it is a victory for Open Documents.
2. What users are interested in is the final document result (print-out, page-view, etc.). However, Ms Office adds stuff (insecure), which are invisible to the naked eye, but bloat a document. If you think making Office save files in XML format is the solution, it is not. Firstly because that is NOT compatible with the existing format which may very well continue (as default for document save) next to XML, and even be 'bettered' unstandardized. Lastly, because Microsoft 'standards' are bloated anyway; just look at the junk you need to change or delete after you've designed a page with Frontpage.
2. Asking Microsoft to define a document standard is like asking Microsoft to define networking standards (IP anyone?). Thank God we have other standards otherwise we'd still be with Netbios and PPTP.
3. WHY DOESN'T MICROSOFT WANT TO HELP WITH THE OPEN DOCUMENT STANDARD? WHY CREATE ANOTHER ONE? If they are so kind and open and think of users' well being, they could work with with the Open Document commitee. If they are not, and are spending time and dollars in meetings, can it be because their intentions are not so customer focused? How long will their good will (of not taking people to court for using their technology) last (until 'the market conditions warrant...)?
http://www.os2ezine.com/v1n13/opendoc.htm
and the mission of the OpenOffice.org whose goal "is to 'create 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" which will be standardized by OASIS, the 'Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards'.
http://wiki.ffii.org/OpenDocIda04
As to "WHY DOESN'T MICROSOFT WANT TO HELP WITH THE OPEN DOCUMENT STANDARD? WHY CREATE ANOTHER ONE?... can only best be answered the learned representatives from the Campus at Redmond.
Standards and Open Source does have MS running scared. Investments in SCO, "shared" source, IE7 and this farce are proof of that.
Why anyone would lock themselves into MS "standards is beyond me. It makes things more complex, more buggy, less compatible and more expensive. For developers and end-users alike.
Why write a app that only runs on windows when you can create a cross platform app that is cheaper, at least as fast, and just as easy to maintain and you aren't held to the whims of any company. No, you do not need java do accomplish this. C and C++ can be used to even more powerful effect.
2. We are making the presumption the stuff Microsoft adds to give us a format that today is more powerful than anything else in existance is insecure then? :P There is such a thing as MetaData, it is very handy for advanced searching and so forth, you cannot see this, does this bloat the document? Style functions, you cannot see these but they make the page what it is do they bloat the document? All the functions in Office Documents than make the file bigger have good uses, just not everybody uses them. That of course is the advantage of the XML Standard plans; they will have to start from scratch to do this; a good way to clean everything up especially now they're working with the ECMA. There is not actually that much you need to change in a Frontpage Document if you actually used the Designing Tool. If you used the designing tool; you do not care about the extra kilobyte you might save by getting rid of the excess crap in there. If you use the Code Tool; you can only blame yourself for the code.
3. (I presume you meant 3?) Netbios and PPTP are very old. You cannot say thank god those don't exist now, we have a way better thing here now from right now. Had those two been advanced rather than IP who knows what they would be now? It is impossible to know, but you would have to base the NetBios and PPTP from then on the IP from then, not from now.
4. (4?) The same question could be asked of the OpenDocument Standard? Microsoft's format was incharge first, the OpenDocument has never had any marketshare useage ever. It hardly has any now. Why doesn't the OpenDocument want to help with the new Office XML Standards - why try to defibrillate an already dead one. You are presuming that OpenDocument is for users' well being. Have you seen standards done by the W3C? XHTML 1.1 was done in 2001, XHTML 1.0 in 1999... XHTML 2.0 isn't out yet? Microsoft Document Formats are constantly updated, an OpenDocument type setup would give us a W3C of the Office; a huge uselessly slow publically based group of old people who try to tell us how to design websites while making there own look like something I threw together in notepad in thirty seconds and uploaded in ten. Office Formats are far more customer focused than OpenDocument Formats for one simple reason. If Microsoft moved to OpenDocument, OpenDocument wouldn't be after customers and hence, like the W3C would not care what they think. Microsoft has to always care what the customer thinks.
So we introduce Open formats. Formats that are not dictated by any one company but are agreed upon between all companies and nations for the sake of future readability. The format needs to be feature rich to be usable today. It needs to be expandable to adopt to future standards. It needs to maintain compatibility over many years.
For comparison, standards on the web such as HTML, CCS and Javascript can afford complete metamorphisis over the longer term because they address whatever current needs there are. Keep in mind too that many of those standards are for the most part, in their infancy.
Document standards on the other hand are important to civilization as we know it. If you don't think so, think about how much of our past is available today and how much we lose in documented facts. Pictures are lost. Books are lost. What is left becomes priceless and eventually disappear.
This is actually a step in human evolution. We gain the ability to create a worldwide, non-partisan standard that we can stick in a time capsule and read in the distant future. We can propel our voyagers into space with records for other civilizations to access and interpret. A distant notion perhaps, but the seed begins here.
Any one company should not be the veiled dictator of something so important.
-Alex Taylor
A "disruptive" action in the case mentioned was the destruction of this company's as well as other documents (as well as the disruption of thousands of people's lives) that would have allowed for accessibility to the company's operations and any corrective measures taken where possible. Fortunately, we now have the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which "was created to protect investors by improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures. The act covers issues such as establishing a public company accounting oversight board, auditor independence, corporate responsibility and enhanced financial disclosure"; see link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes-Oxley_Act
True to reason and fact, the introduction of OpenDocument Format Standards upon which individuals, organizations, companies as well as nations all over the world stake their future must not be entrusted to the dictates of a single company.
My point is...50 or 100 years from now, who knows what will happen to the digital world we know today? You have all seen how rapidly the world and the work environment has changed just in the last 20 years and the speed and rapidity of changes that have caused sparkling new technologies to become obsolesced overnight.
We can dig up clay tablets written in cuniform buried in the sands of Iraq for 5,000 years and still read them. We can visit the temples of Egypt to read and see, how they lived their daily lives. Even fingerprints on a cave wall in France says something about the lives of people in prehistoric times. A Gutenberg Bible is priceless. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address were penned or scribbled on paper. And every writer from Shakespere to Robert Frost to Robert Ludlam, puts their words on paper.
All these forms of communication, from handprints on cave walls to today...will outlast the digital media that most of our nonsense world today jibberishes on digital media. The CD's we store data on today won't even be readable in who knows how long??? When they stop making CD readers, I suppose. There will be a scramble, to copy things from one media to the next, but the fact is...whatever is copied over and over is inevitably corrupted and lost.
The only way to do this to paper, is to burn it or chew it up in a grinder.
There is no dobut, that computers save forests, but they also polute our waste dumps and have torn our entire civilization apart. They have not made life better, they have made it much more complicated and divisive. These tools we created to make our work easier, have instead been used to enslave us even more...we are not freed by them, we are enslaved to them by our masters. There was once freedom in the written word, but instead we find our lives controlled and our written words, controlled by corporate dictate. And like the princes and kings of old, who had history written for their glory, we now have, the dictates of sterile corporate life, impugning the freedom of our thoughts.
The only way to preserve our humanity is to never EVER, let our history become soley digital.
We must never trust computers entirely, or business or government, but continue to document life on paper or on other media, that cannot be so easily controlled, so easily erased, so permanently dismissed. What would Abraham Lincoln have said at Gettysburg if there was a corporate CEO telling him, he couldn't speak those words because they did not fall within the confines of their sterile and rigid corporate policy? Think about it.
It is too dangerous to leave the truth about humanity in the hands of any one corporation, any one government, any one ideology...and only on one form of media. Computers have their place. That is all. They do A job. They do not do THE job. They should never be relied upon to do THE job.
That is why Open Document is absolutely necessary. For computer based documents, it should never be left up to any single corporation (Microsoft or any other) to dictate what information will be placed on what and how or by what means. When and if this happens, we have surrendered our civil and constitutional liberties up to the dicates of corporations.
Long after the last corporation gasps its last breath on the earth...if we do not have history on other media than computer media...all that will be left of it, will be the deteriorated and rotted disks, full of corrupted history.
Open Document is necessary, to preserve the independence of information free of the restraints of profit. The issue is here and the point I am making, is simply...human rights, civil rights and civil liberties...those fundamental aspects of our civilization we all take for granted which have allowed us thus far to get where we are...Open Document is just one aspect of preserving that independent freedom. The ultimate solution, is to make sure, no single form of media excludes the others.
- MS Office? What's that?
- by kensystem December 16, 2005 7:36 AM PST
- Why bother using it if you can do *nearly*... or everything you need using OpenOffice? Do you like to pay money for a black box?
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(77 Comments)My company has had no trouble converting to OpenOffice - even telling users to install openoffice to read *standard* document types that M$Office cant read. And for the truly, truly hardware MS loyalists, OpenOffice just exports to that closed format.