Gary Edwards's Bookmarks tagged MSOffice →  View Popular

3.2.2.2. A pox on both your houses!

Hi Robert,

What you've posted are examples of MSOffice ”compatibility settings” used to establish backwards compatibility with older documents, and, for the conversion of alien file formats (such as various versions of WordPerfect .wpd). These compatibility settings are unspecified in that we know the syntax but have no idea of the semantics. And without the semantic description there is no way other developers can understand implementation. This of course guarantees an unacceptable breakdown of interoperability.

But i would be hesitant to make my stand of rejecting OOXML based on this issue. It turns out that there are upwards of 150 unspecified compatibility settings used by OpenOffice/StarOffice. These settings are not specified in ODF, but will nevertheless show up in OpenOffice ODF documents – similarly defying interoperability efforts!

Since the compatibility settings are not specified or even mentioned in the ODF 1.0 – ISO 26300 specification, we have to go to the OOo source code to discover where this stuff comes from. Check out lines 169-211. Here you will find interesting settings such as, “UseFormerLineSpacing, UseFormerObjectPositioning, and UseFormerTextWrapping”.

So what's going on here?

Google's search business will pass Microsoft's Windows business by early next year (at the latest). Good thing Microsoft has another huge, wildly profitable monopoly: Office. Add that to the calculation, and Microsoft can breathe easy for a few more years:

GOOGLE SEARCH vs MICROSOFT WINDOWS + OFFICE
Quarterly Revenue Q3 2006-Q1 2008

Of course, Google's visible in that Microsoft rearview mirror, too--especially now that it offers a product that is directly competitive with Office.

And then there's the most depressing comparison (from Microsoft's perspective). After 13 years of heavy investment, frequent doubling down, and--until recently--a browser monopoly, here's how Microsoft's online business is doing relative to Google's search business. Remember:

1. Google was founded four years after Microsoft launched its online business, and


2. Microsoft's search business is just a tiny piece of Microsoft Online.

When Windows has a real rival, Microsoft has real problems.

As Blodget notes, there are caveats: The unofficial Office monopoly should give Microsoft breathing room for a few more years. But even that could be threatened as Google's more-affordable Web applications improve.

This storm has been gathering for years. In 2005, we wrote a piece at News.com about Google's longterm threat to Microsoft. The impetus was a major management shuffle at MSN, but we had fun pulling out some old Microsoft memos about now-defunct Netscape in the early days of the World Wide Web. My favorite was a note written in 1995 by Microsoft engineer Ben Slivka describing a "nightmare" scenario for his company.

"The Web...exists today as a collection of technologies that deliver some interesting solutions today, and will grow rapidly in the coming years into a full-fledged platform (underlined for emphasis in the original memo) that will rival--and even surpass--Microsoft's Windows," Slivka wrote.

Microsoft didn't pay too much attention to the warning. Ten years later, another internal memo put a name to that nightmare--Google. Now Blodget has advanced that nightmare scenario a few more steps with his analysis.

Opposition Leader Martin Hamilton-Smith yesterday said the computer "blunder" saw thousands of Health Department computers loaded up with $675 versions of Microsoft Office software, which the computers did not use or need. Just 4000 of the 16,000 computers actually used the software, Mr Hamilton-Smith told Parliament.

Health Minister John Hill was quick to defend the decision and insisted that all of the licenses are in use (on "computers that monitored patients, analysed pathology data or kept patient records and staff records using specific software designed for those purposes"

simply: Microsoft is launching a synchronization platform that the company claims is technology-agnostic. That absolutely is not true. Live Mesh is Microsoft's attempt to turn operating system and proprietary services platforms into hubs that replace the Web. It's the most anti-Web 2.0 technology yet released by any company. Microsoft is building a services-based operating system that transcends and extends Windows and also the function of Web browsers. It's bold, brilliant and downright scary.

Microsoft has identified the right problem, synchronization, but applied a self-serving solution.

TCG Advisors envisions a new computing model for when the inter-enterprise becomes the basis of all IT infrastructure. Where
can we expect the most change?

All the action is going to be in the middle [layer] in preparation for a significant change at the top in about five years.
We are all [preparing] for a new business model: the inter-enterprise network value chain. For the inter-enterprise network
value chain, traditional business applications need to be re-architected so they can cross company boundaries. When people
look at this re-architecting, they see two huge barriers: the middleware, because our software doesn't work this way, and
the business process layer, because people don't have a lot of experience [with it]. There will be a fair amount of trial
and error before we figure this out. Even thought leaders are struggling.

There can be no doubt that OOXML, as a standard, has severe flaws.   It is incomplete, platform specific, application specific, full of contradictions, fails to adhere to existing standards, untestable, and presents a moving target for any IT worker.  There is not an organization in existence, including Microsoft, that promises to actually implement the full standard.  Much of this is due to the fact the final version doesn't actually exist on paper yet, but a large fraction is also do to the patchwork nature of the product.

The reason governments and companies wanted a 'office apps' standard in the first place was to release an avalanche of data from aging applications.  OOXML shows every appearance of being created to prevent this escape, not enable it.   The immaturity of the standard means that it remains a gamble to see if older documents will remain readable or not.  The lack of testing means there is no way to determine what docs actually adhere to it or not.  The ignoring of existing standards guarantees compatibility problems.  All of these factors are handy for the owner of the biggest share of existing documents, as it forces users to continue to use only _their_ application or risk danger from every other quarter.

OM MALIK: You outlined Microsoft’s software-plus-services strategy, but what I want to know about is the changing role of the desktop in this service’s future.

RAY OZZIE: I think the real question is (that) if you were going to design an OS today, what would it look like? The OS that we’re using today is kind of in the model of a ’70s or ’80s vintage workstation. It was designed for a LAN, it’s got this great display, and a mouse, and all this stuff, but it’s not inherently designed for the Internet. The Internet is this resource in the back end that you can design things to take advantage of. You can use it to synchronize stuff, and communicate stuff amongst these devices at the edge.

A student today or a web startup, they don’t actually start at the desktop. They start at the web, they start building web solutions, and immediately deploy that to a browser. So from that perspective, what programming models can I give these folks that they can extend that functionality out to the edge? In the cases where they want mobility, where they want a rich dynamic experience as a piece of their solution, how can I make it incremental for them to extend those things, as opposed to learning the desktop world from scratch?

What is to be done?

ISO has in a sense put itself in an awkward position here by
already approving the rival OpenDocument
format as an ISO standard. This makes it harder to reject OOXML, and
at the same time makes it difficult to approve OOXML, since it
competes with an existing ISO standard. Generally, I'm unhappy with
how closely these two standards are tied to existing software. What I
would really have liked to see was for OpenDocument and OOXML both to
be dropped, and the two communities to sit down and work out a common
agreed format that is not tied to any existing software. The Chinese
UOF
format, for example, might have served as the starting point for
this. ODA has
also been suggested. Unfortunately, this requires a political will
that does not seem to be present, and so this seems unlikely for now.

garyedwards's Discussions