October 3, 2005 1:13 PM PDT
Newsmaker: Microsoft says Office beta coming in November
See all Newsmakers
- Related Stories
-
Massachusetts moves ahead sans Microsoft
September 23, 2005 -
FAQ: Looking into Office 12
September 19, 2005 -
Massachusetts to adopt 'open' desktop
September 1, 2005 -
Microsoft gunning for Adobe's PDF format?
May 3, 2005
Microsoft has been gradually opening its Office formats for years, adding support for options such as Rich Text Format and HTML. But the pressure on Redmond to open things up further has continued, most recently with the state of Massachusetts issuing a mandate that its software purchases support a rival format, OpenDocument. This week, Microsoft announced that, with the next version of Office, it will support saving files to Adobe's Portable Document Format, or PDF.
In an interview with CNET News.com, Microsoft Senior Vice President Steven Sinofsky said the company gets 120,000 requests a month from people who want to save their Office documents in PDF format, making it one of the most requested features.
While logical, the move raises questions about how the PDF support will coexist with Windows Vista's move to its own page description format, known as Metro.
Some clues may emerge when Microsoft releases the first beta of Office 12, something Sinofsky said will happen in November. While clear on the timing, Sinofsky didn't provide many clues on what else to expect in the beta. Microsoft has talked about general areas it hopes to improve with Office 12, as well as the program's new look. However, the company has yet to release a reckoning of what new features the program will pack.
Sinofsky also addressed how Microsoft views the controversy surrounding Massachusetts' mandate for the OpenDocument standard.
Q: PDFs have been popular for a while. Why add them now to Office?
Sinofsky: We've had an ongoing investment in opening up Office, starting back with Office 2000 and the HTML file format, Office 2003 with XML, and recently the announcement of the open XML format for Office 12. We think it is just a natural fit with that evolution. It's been a feature area that has been under development for the whole product cycle; we just chose to announce it this past week.
How does this fit with Metro, the new document format being established with Windows Vista?
Sinofsky: Right now we are still in the process of talking publicly about different investments that we've made with Office 12. We have a beta coming up in November. This week we chose to talk about the PDF investments that we've made, in particular.
Obviously Vista will natively support Metro, so if somebody is running Office 12 in Vista they will have the ability to save and print using Metro. Is it too early to say if Windows XP users will be able to do the same?
Sinofsky: The way that we have talked about the (Metro) feature, it will work for all applications on the platform. For Office 12, since we haven't disclosed the whole feature set of the product, today we are really focused on telling folks about the PDF support that we've added.
You mentioned that there is a beta coming in November. What are people likely to see? How far along will things be by this point?
Sinofsky: When we come out with our beta, it will be our Beta 1. That's the first of the betas, so it will be in the kind of shape that people normally expect Beta 1 to be in.
Do you think this might open some doors in Massachusetts and other states that might be considering some kind of OpenDocument mandate?
Sinofsky: I can't speak specifically for any particular location. We're very excited about the investments we've made in opening up Office. This just speaks to our commitment for customers to have a choice in what types of open formats they want to work within the Office applications.
If Microsoft can add HTML and XML and now PDF-saving options, wouldn't it be fairly easy to support the OpenDocument format?
Sinofsky: I certainly wouldn't say it would be fairly easy. In fact it would be a very substantial undertaking. Frankly, we've had no demand from our customers for this feature.
We get over 120,000 requests every month for PDF support from our Office Online Web site. We chose to announce out PDF support to our MVPs (most valued professionals), a group of power users, writers, trainers consultants, VARs. They've been asking for this feature
See more CNET content tagged:
Office 12, mandate, OpenDocument Format, beta, Microsoft Office
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.
- Finally
- by Terry Murphy October 5, 2005 12:48 AM PDT
- After all of these years, three cheers to MS for finally embracing the
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(25 Comments)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."