October 3, 2005 1:13 PM PDT
Newsmaker: Microsoft says Office beta coming in November
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May 3, 2005
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for a very long time. They were incredibly excited. None of them asked for any other formats in addition to this one.
How important is this movement toward open documents? Massachusetts is one example. Certainly there have been countries overseas that have wanted more openness. How big an issue is that for Microsoft and how are you thinking about that?
Sinofsky: We've always felt that the primary value that we deliver to people is not in the format that the information is stored in but in the tool that's used to create the format. At the same time, what the format does is it affords us a way of delivering scalable, robust secure applications. There are engineering reasons why we invest in different formats over time.
Yet, from a marketplace perspective, we continue to focus on the experience. That's why you see the new user experience in Office 12 as being a really big focus. We think, at the end of the day, that's where customers make their decisions about what's really valuable.
Is there a proprietary value in the formats?
Sinofsky: Generally speaking, we've always had the point of view that the value comes with the tools themselves. The format is a way of representing the features in the product and a way of maintaining the reliability and the robustness.
It used to be that the format was something that you changed every single release and nobody thought about it. Now, what people are saying is, "We don't mind change, we like change, but we want it to have very specific value propositions."
With Office 12, we really focused on (the fact that) we want to open up the format to developers, so you can right code on servers, so you can more easily index and retrieve information from the files. We want it to be more robust... and we wanted the files to get smaller because more and more things are sent over mail attachments where that really matters.
With adding the ability to save Office documents as PDF, it seems like once again Microsoft is going after one of Adobe's cash cows. We've seen a lot of products that seem to be targeting one thing or another that Adobe does. How do you guys view the relationship with Adobe?
Sinofsky: I would certainly not agree with the premise of your question. Adobe publishes the PDF specification as an open standard and encourages developers to implement the output as PDF. They've gone out of their way to tell people, "Please support this format." We're just supporting the format, which is the message that they've given to us.
We appreciate the work that they have done to publish the standard just like we have done to publish our Open XML standard...I wouldn't think of this at all as going after Adobe. In fact, it is doing precisely what they have been telling the public, and evangelizing to (other software makers) to do.
If documents can be saved as PDF files, why not allow them to be read that way from within Office?
Sinofsky: PDF is by far and away a representation designed to be the printed page, or "as printed." That's predominately the vast majority of usage, well over 99 percent of it on the Web. If you see something centered on the page, in PDF you won't know if that came from a table, if that came from an indented margin, if it came from a style. All of that information is lost when you save it as a printed page, just like when it is printed out to a printer. If you want to have a round trip for editing, that's really why we have invested heavily in the open XML format.
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irrelevant, you can do that now, especially with Mac OS X. The
rest of Office 12 will juts be a rehash of the current Office, which
already is overloaded with far too many built in features.
But, MS has never turned down a chance to integrate software in
an ever more massive kludge, and Office 12 is likely to set a new
record. But whatever... my current Office is more than adequate
for my needs so Office 12 is not a consideration. And when the
time comes to upgrade, it will be to an OpenDovcument type
software suite.
I may have already bought my last piece of MS software - we'll
see what happens......
These Microsoft guys get smarter every day!
Sinofsky can say anything - this is just a desperate move from MS to preserve their teritory. It's just a pressure from businesses and possible competitors to implement that. It's a simple business move.
"Sinofsky: We've always felt that the primary value that we deliver
to people is not in the format that the information is stored in
but in the tool that's used to create the format."
What a crock of ****. If MS had thought that, then the MS Office
file formats would have been opened up a long, long time ago. If
they truly believed that it was the "quality" of their applications
that made people use the Office formats, then they would have
had nothing to fear from the ability of other applications to
seamlessly read and save to those formats. The reality was that,
over time, Office has become more and more mediocre and
lacking any UI innovation whatsoever and the only reason why
people have to keep buying it is because it became a de facto
standard largely by stealth and OS monopoly abuse rather than
by merit alone.
It would be wonderful if Office's file formats were truly open
because competitor applications could succeed in competing
with Office by actually doing something clever with the UI rather
than twiddling the dials that are already there. This is why Open
formats will (hopefully) eventually succeed - people are
beginning to realise that paying the excessive upgrade fees for
Office when not a lot has actually been added to merit the price
is a truly stupid, stupid thing to do.
If that is the case, there must be something broken in the Office 12 XML. Perhaps they are hiding part of their fileformat as CDATA sections of binary data encoded in some way. If it just was text and xml tags, supporting opendoc would be as simple as writing an XSLT filter. That shouldn't be too difficult to Microsoft, as they have taken part in some of the OASIS works around the OpenDocument standard.
Perhaps it is the task of training their sales people to convince people to use Microsofts propriatory format over OpenDocument and let Microsoft compet on equal terms that would be that substantial undertaking.
In both Gulf Wars the Allied Forces were far superior to the Iraqi Forces. Should the Allied Forces have given up everything they had that the Iraqi's didn't, brain-washed all the training they had that the Iraqi's didn't, all the intelligence they had that the Iraqi's didn't, and cull their forces so that they fought on equal terms? I would argue that fight, and the fight between Microsoft and this OpenDocument Format is on equal terms. A tremendous customer base, a deep and complex codebase, hundreds of thousands of workers trained to use their software and their interface, amazing programmers who have a deep knowledge of Office, and a knowledge of how to destroy their enemies are advantages Microsoft spent decades working to get. If you had worked to get these things, would you give them up? Nobody is equal, everybody has a advantage; would the OpenDocument Format give up its advantage of having an enemy so disliked as Microsoft? I think not.
In the end though, the Microsoft Document Format is not any less an OpenDocument Standard than the OpenDocument Standard. Tens of thousands of people contribute to both, probably more contribute to the Microsoft Document than to the OpenDocument. The OpenDocument is an attempt to make an Open-Source Standard. Why do we want such a thing? When we have a Stanard at the moment, one standard, that everybody can use, everybody can edit, everybody can share.
That of course is putting aside the User Interface, which even against Office XP is bad, against Office 2003 it is poor in the extreme and there are no words for the comparison between it and this Office 12.
I also have to dispute the point that OpenOffice is a complete Suite, perhaps the continued usage of it has warped this poor person's brain but as far as I am aware OpenOffice does not include: an e-mail Program, a form maker, a note making tool, a publishing tool, and a diagramatic tool. Not only that but it lacks a proper Database program, and has seriously impotent attemps at even the basics; its Spreadsheet does half what Excel does, its Presentation program is not comparable to PowerPoint, its Web Page creator isn't as good as Word at creating webpages, let alone Frontpage, and I used a better Word Processing Program in 95.
Hats off to them for even getting StarOffice into the mid-90s. That is an impressive feat, I wouldn't have tried. Anybody who compares OpenOffice to Office has obviously never used Office properly. Very few people actually know everything Office does, hopefully this feature will help more people do that, I know I'd like to know everything Office does.
As for this OpenDocument. It is just another standard, my chickens could create a standard, the challenge is in making it an actual standard. .doc is a Standard, more people save .doc in a day than have ever saved in OpenDocument. By that alone, it is a standard, it is the standard.
How can he say there has been no customer demand? We all know that at least one customer (the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) has expressed a demand for this feature.
The media are such sheep. It's amusing to see that in every article I've read, they neglect to mention that OpenOffice is the reason they're doing this.
What's next, the ability to save a presentation as a Flash file?
As usual, C(ZD)-Net is behind the times by about 5 years.
Nick
The media are playing this PDF thing up an aweful lot, but I think more the people here Talking Back are. If you want to save something in a PDF so much, you would have got Adobe Professional Ages ago. I can print to PDF already, it is not a big deal, and to be honest, I don't use it. When the only feature OpenOffice has that Office doesn't is the ability to do something nobody in an Office Environment needs, because in an Office Environment they would buy Adobe Professional, it is not a good thing :D The only people who should care about this are Adobe, because in a year, hundreds of millions of Office workers around the world, some who might already have Adobe, some who might have been thinking about getting it, will not have need of it anymore. OpenOffice isn't the reason they are doing this, I don't think Microsoft find OpenOffice a threat - would you if you were Microsoft? I think not. They are doing this half because they can take revenue from Adobe, a sixth because people have been asking them, three years is a long time, there have to be thousands of requests for it, and a third because they can.
Why would Microsoft want you to save a Presentation as a Flash File? OpenOffice can only save Documents as PDFs because their Document is worthless, PDF is the only document type of reasonable quality they can use. Unlike Office, where the quality of the document type is world renowned. They can only save Presentations as Flash because that is the only way Presentations from infected computers can be shown on uninfected ones in reasonable quality. Unlike with Office Presentations, where even if the computer its being shown on doesn't have PowerPoint, you can download a program that will play them for free.
CNet isn't five years behind, CNet is on the ball, but even if CNet was five years behind, it would still be five years ahead of OpenOffice.
Am I the only one who is sick and tired of shelling out money to MS for Office upgrades?
Office costs... $400? I don't know, something like that. For a three year period, at which point, it is half that for the new version! That works out on average at about $66 a year. Now forgive me if I am wrong, but using a Google Office let's say you'll get 660 Advert e-mails a year. It is a bit of a liberal guess, we all know you'd get more. Would you pay 10c per e-mail not to get spam? Would you pay $66 not to get spam? Would you pay $66 not to have your employee's attention taken by an advertisement?
I know I would. And we both know, maybe you don't like paying money to Microsoft for these upgrades; but ultimately in an advertisement based Google Office you would be paying them way more, in discomfort and advertising. Hence we get to the point; a Google Office would give you Advertisement based Constipation.
concept of WYSIWYG (even if they had to use someone else's
technology).
"PDF is by far and away a representation designed to be the printed
page, or "as printed." That's predominately the vast majority of
usage, well over 99 percent of it on the Web."