Microsoft gives in on OpenDocument
July 6, 2006 9:09 AM Subscribe
Microsoft has announced sponsored plug-in for OpenDocument after months of FUD. OpenDocument beat Microsoft's format to ISO Standardization and has been considered by the governments of Belgium and the State of Massachusetts. The existence of a pug-in should ease concerns that adoption of ODF shuts out workers with disabilities. The plug-in is available on sourceforge. (Requires .NET 2.0 and Word 2007 Beta)
If they make this back-compatible to Word '97, I'd personally tryst with Gates and/or Ballmer.
posted by pax digita at 9:23 AM on July 6, 2006
posted by pax digita at 9:23 AM on July 6, 2006
Thanks to the mod for the clean-up.
Of course support for earlier versions of MSWord is still vaporware. I suspect that what happened is that the issue was forced on them when the ODF Group gave Mass. a plugin for MSWord 97 and up.
Really though, I found it to be extremely frustrating in that sharing documents between applications should not be that difficult. ODF is also nicely hackable with DOM and SAX.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 9:29 AM on July 6, 2006
Of course support for earlier versions of MSWord is still vaporware. I suspect that what happened is that the issue was forced on them when the ODF Group gave Mass. a plugin for MSWord 97 and up.
Really though, I found it to be extremely frustrating in that sharing documents between applications should not be that difficult. ODF is also nicely hackable with DOM and SAX.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 9:29 AM on July 6, 2006
I just found it exceedingly odd that MS kept saying, "we won't support it because there is no demand for it" while multiple markets were saying, "we want support for this."
Well, I don't find it odd, I find it typical of the way MS tries to force standards issues.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 10:04 AM on July 6, 2006
Well, I don't find it odd, I find it typical of the way MS tries to force standards issues.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 10:04 AM on July 6, 2006
It's interesting that they are willing to level the playing field and try to compete with OpenOffice purely on features and quality. They can't compete on price and now they can't rely on file format lock-in. OO still has a some way to go in the realms of stability and speed as compared to MS-Office but you can't beat the price.
posted by octothorpe at 10:36 AM on July 6, 2006
posted by octothorpe at 10:36 AM on July 6, 2006
With Office, Microsoft is already ahead on features and quality - if openness is excluded from "features". But I don't think they've given up on lock-in yet. Maybe after exhausting all other tactics.
More likely this is just a shift from FUD (spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt) to one of their other favorites, "embrace, extend, extinguish". They'll make Office read and write ODF, but only inconveniently and with loss of features - always arranging the incentives to favor native Office formats and discourage ODF use.
posted by jam_pony at 11:00 AM on July 6, 2006
More likely this is just a shift from FUD (spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt) to one of their other favorites, "embrace, extend, extinguish". They'll make Office read and write ODF, but only inconveniently and with loss of features - always arranging the incentives to favor native Office formats and discourage ODF use.
posted by jam_pony at 11:00 AM on July 6, 2006
I seem to recall that there are some pretty fundamental problems in converting between ODF and Word, having to do with how Word implements styles. But my retrieval system isn't working very well this afternoon. Anyone else recall anything on those lines?
I lean toward jam_pony's 'embrace, extend, extinguish' account. There's always the argument that ODF compatability removes the major barrier for OOo users (MS users can read their documents natively now!), and that argument makes sense when you read it. But in practice, whenever MS has adopted a format, they've tended to overpower the competitor whose format they're adopting. Viz, WordPerfect.
posted by lodurr at 11:44 AM on July 6, 2006
I lean toward jam_pony's 'embrace, extend, extinguish' account. There's always the argument that ODF compatability removes the major barrier for OOo users (MS users can read their documents natively now!), and that argument makes sense when you read it. But in practice, whenever MS has adopted a format, they've tended to overpower the competitor whose format they're adopting. Viz, WordPerfect.
posted by lodurr at 11:44 AM on July 6, 2006
OO still has a some way to go in the realms of stability and speed
This is very true.
The example of Firefox gives me quite a bit of hope, though, it's a kickass browser by any measure now, it wasn't always.
posted by sonofsamiam at 12:15 PM on July 6, 2006
This is very true.
The example of Firefox gives me quite a bit of hope, though, it's a kickass browser by any measure now, it wasn't always.
posted by sonofsamiam at 12:15 PM on July 6, 2006
AFAICS, FF only really became a kickass browser after the Mozilla Foundation killed Mozilla. It was only then that the more quality-focused people (who were working on Mozilla) went over to working on Firefox.
There's a lesson in resource allocation, there, I suppose, but it's not really germane to the current discussion so I'll just sort of trail off right now....
posted by lodurr at 12:25 PM on July 6, 2006
There's a lesson in resource allocation, there, I suppose, but it's not really germane to the current discussion so I'll just sort of trail off right now....
posted by lodurr at 12:25 PM on July 6, 2006
lodurr, I've been a user of Firefox since 0.3, when it was still called Phoenix, and IMO, it was a better browser even then.
posted by breath at 12:49 PM on July 6, 2006
posted by breath at 12:49 PM on July 6, 2006
Well, not to start a browser war ;), but: I used it back then, too. It was slower, didn't render pages well, and used more RAM than Mozilla. Oh, and it crashed a lot. And you sometimes had to do a lot of manual finagling to upgrade from one version to another. But other than that, I suppose I can see what you mean.
I'm not the browser tart that I used to be, but back in the day I used to have and use Moz, Phoenix / Firefox, Opera, Netscape 4, Netscape 6, and whatever the current IE for Windows was. It's true that Mozilla never did get to be blazingly fast, but it was faster than Firefox was when Mozilla was killed. The best rendering speed AFAIK is still IE on a good fast Windows machine -- though for clean, not overly-complex pages, the rendering speed differences are usually imperceptible, these days.
I've just always found it ironic that the Phoenix project was originally founded with the goal of "fixing" the rendering engine, and ended up using the rendering engine they were ostensibly trying to fix. It was pretty clearly all about the Phoenix guys wanting their own stall in the bazaar; performance was just their hook.
posted by lodurr at 1:04 PM on July 6, 2006
I'm not the browser tart that I used to be, but back in the day I used to have and use Moz, Phoenix / Firefox, Opera, Netscape 4, Netscape 6, and whatever the current IE for Windows was. It's true that Mozilla never did get to be blazingly fast, but it was faster than Firefox was when Mozilla was killed. The best rendering speed AFAIK is still IE on a good fast Windows machine -- though for clean, not overly-complex pages, the rendering speed differences are usually imperceptible, these days.
I've just always found it ironic that the Phoenix project was originally founded with the goal of "fixing" the rendering engine, and ended up using the rendering engine they were ostensibly trying to fix. It was pretty clearly all about the Phoenix guys wanting their own stall in the bazaar; performance was just their hook.
posted by lodurr at 1:04 PM on July 6, 2006
MS seem to have revamped their office formats immensely in the last, say, 5 years, but if ODF and MS formats are based on fundamentally different premises (whatever those may be) then the notion of losing features or preferring the native implementation is not a matter of some sort of evil business scheme, but rather one of technology.
Of course MS has the resources to force the issue and support the hell out of ODF. The question is whether they have the business reasons.
Until the number of groups demanding ODF compatibility represents a user base with money to spend, MS is making the right business choice by providing the buying-criteria of compatibility (cheaply) when the using-criteria of first-class support would take a lot more (expensive) work.
Given that ODF users may not represent (at this point) a large pool of money, the business folks see more value in a blacker and shinier UI or simplified menu structure. It's not that people aren't demanding ODF, it's that those people don't translate to dollars in MS's view.
posted by abulafa at 2:49 PM on July 6, 2006
Of course MS has the resources to force the issue and support the hell out of ODF. The question is whether they have the business reasons.
Until the number of groups demanding ODF compatibility represents a user base with money to spend, MS is making the right business choice by providing the buying-criteria of compatibility (cheaply) when the using-criteria of first-class support would take a lot more (expensive) work.
Given that ODF users may not represent (at this point) a large pool of money, the business folks see more value in a blacker and shinier UI or simplified menu structure. It's not that people aren't demanding ODF, it's that those people don't translate to dollars in MS's view.
posted by abulafa at 2:49 PM on July 6, 2006
Mozilla isn't quite dead yet (cue Monty Python jokes). It's now spun off as Seamonkey. The reasons for its fans' loyalty include some interface differences - for example I find the bookmarks UI far superior, and it's more configurable with more options exposed. It's much faster now too.
/way OT
posted by jam_pony at 2:55 PM on July 6, 2006
/way OT
posted by jam_pony at 2:55 PM on July 6, 2006
abulafa: Well, depending on the winds of political change, OpenDocument could be a HUGE factor that translates into millions of dollars. When a government like Mass., Denmark and Belgium adopt a document standard, then you have hundreds of businesses who need to adopt that standard as well. Those businesses exchange data with hundreds of other businesses.
The EU has been increasingly skeptical of Microsoft's attempts to justify it's business practices as the "technical" best method for users. So adoption of the ISO standard might well be necessary to get into the European market.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 3:58 PM on July 6, 2006
The EU has been increasingly skeptical of Microsoft's attempts to justify it's business practices as the "technical" best method for users. So adoption of the ISO standard might well be necessary to get into the European market.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 3:58 PM on July 6, 2006
But in practice, whenever MS has adopted a format, they've tended to overpower the competitor whose format they're adopting. Viz, WordPerfect.
It's a little misleading. Wordperfect was by far market leader and ended up (like Lotus) resting on its laurels, which allowed Microsoft to come up with a much (at the time) superior program. The ability to read and write Wordperfect files was just what the consumers who wanted to switch to Microsoft for many other reasons anyway needed.
With this development, it's the opposite. Microsoft isn't offering a better alternative to the folks who already use OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, etc. In other words, OOo users have other reasons for not using Word other than the fact that it didn't write in an open format.
posted by hoborg at 4:15 PM on July 6, 2006
It's a little misleading. Wordperfect was by far market leader and ended up (like Lotus) resting on its laurels, which allowed Microsoft to come up with a much (at the time) superior program. The ability to read and write Wordperfect files was just what the consumers who wanted to switch to Microsoft for many other reasons anyway needed.
With this development, it's the opposite. Microsoft isn't offering a better alternative to the folks who already use OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, etc. In other words, OOo users have other reasons for not using Word other than the fact that it didn't write in an open format.
posted by hoborg at 4:15 PM on July 6, 2006
I seem to recall that there are some pretty fundamental problems in converting between ODF and Word, having to do with how Word implements styles.
That's because Word styles (at least through Word 2000) are broken. It should not be possible to screw up paragraph numbering so badly that your only recourse is to copy and paste plain text to another document in order to restore some semblance of order. Yet that's a faily constant problem with Word files with any level of complexity in using paragraph styles / numbering.
posted by Caviar at 4:45 PM on July 6, 2006
That's because Word styles (at least through Word 2000) are broken. It should not be possible to screw up paragraph numbering so badly that your only recourse is to copy and paste plain text to another document in order to restore some semblance of order. Yet that's a faily constant problem with Word files with any level of complexity in using paragraph styles / numbering.
posted by Caviar at 4:45 PM on July 6, 2006
KirkJobSluder: totally agree, however all of those things are "going to" or "in the future" which business folks are notoriously bad at rolling into a budget.
Sep 2008 in Belgium, for instance, which means that those very business types are going to make a call whether it's cheaper to rev the office formats wait out the EU programs which may or may not come to pass (two years is a long time in EU leadership).
Caviar: agreed, broken as hell. I'm not under any impressions the organically-built MS format is superior to one purpose-built from the ground up to handle the notions of DOM, style, first-class revisions and so forth.
I will however quibble with statements like "It should not be possible" since users' diverse demands, business priorities, and the pitfalls of a one-size-fits-all mutli-use technology seem to evolve their way right around anything I've ever tried to make impossible, right or wrong.
posted by abulafa at 6:28 PM on July 6, 2006
Sep 2008 in Belgium, for instance, which means that those very business types are going to make a call whether it's cheaper to rev the office formats wait out the EU programs which may or may not come to pass (two years is a long time in EU leadership).
Caviar: agreed, broken as hell. I'm not under any impressions the organically-built MS format is superior to one purpose-built from the ground up to handle the notions of DOM, style, first-class revisions and so forth.
I will however quibble with statements like "It should not be possible" since users' diverse demands, business priorities, and the pitfalls of a one-size-fits-all mutli-use technology seem to evolve their way right around anything I've ever tried to make impossible, right or wrong.
posted by abulafa at 6:28 PM on July 6, 2006
I'm not the browser tart that I used to be ...
Isn't that the first line of a country song?
posted by krinklyfig at 8:57 PM on July 6, 2006
Isn't that the first line of a country song?
posted by krinklyfig at 8:57 PM on July 6, 2006
I will however quibble with statements like "It should not be possible" since users' diverse demands, business priorities, and the pitfalls of a one-size-fits-all mutli-use technology seem to evolve their way right around anything I've ever tried to make impossible, right or wrong.
Sure, but given the inscrutable way in which the default (normal.dot) settings interact with the current document settings, combined with the haphazard way in which numbering/outline/bullet styles are assigned to paragraph styles means that you can actually break a document beyond any rational hope of repair. I've done it, and MS experts (certified ones, even) were unable to help. Stupidity of users and interconnection features aside, I stand by my statement that that shouldn't be possible. There should always be a "remove that broken thing I did and try again" function. It seems like OpenOffice is better about that, but Word itself certainly isn't (again, at least through 2000).
posted by Caviar at 5:32 AM on July 7, 2006
Sure, but given the inscrutable way in which the default (normal.dot) settings interact with the current document settings, combined with the haphazard way in which numbering/outline/bullet styles are assigned to paragraph styles means that you can actually break a document beyond any rational hope of repair. I've done it, and MS experts (certified ones, even) were unable to help. Stupidity of users and interconnection features aside, I stand by my statement that that shouldn't be possible. There should always be a "remove that broken thing I did and try again" function. It seems like OpenOffice is better about that, but Word itself certainly isn't (again, at least through 2000).
posted by Caviar at 5:32 AM on July 7, 2006
Caviar: What would go a long way toward helping to fix that kind of crap is a "reveal codes" mode.
You know, like WordPerfect and AmiPro used to have...
posted by lodurr at 7:24 AM on July 7, 2006
You know, like WordPerfect and AmiPro used to have...
posted by lodurr at 7:24 AM on July 7, 2006
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