Study Touting OOXML Over ODF Is Debunked 203
The Burton Group, an IT research company, published a study urging that enterprise organizations adapt OOXML rather than ODF. Their reasons include things like "ODF is controlled indirectly by Sun," "MS Office is cheaper than OpenOffice.org," and "OOXML improved many problems of DOC." The Burton Group also claims that although ODF is well-designed, OOXML is better suited for the specific needs of enterprise organizations. The study claims to be impartial in that Microsoft didn't pay for it. Ars Technica now has up a pretty thorough debunking of the Burton study. Ars wonders how the Burton authors can so blithely overlook Microsoft's vote-buying in Sweden, while wielding unfounded accusations of chicanery in Sun's direction.
must not have been a hard job (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:must not have been a hard job (Score:5, Interesting)
monopoly money well spent.
Re:must not have been a hard job (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think so. Recently with Office 2007 and specially Vista I've seen that companies are really trying to avoid the upgrades as much as possible. Maybe it's the recession, but the thing is that right now companies are really considering not giving Microsoft a load of money for upgrades that bring few worthy features many new problems, and are considering alternatives instead.
Nowadays companies are not blindly eating whatever Gartner et al. feed them anymore.
Re:must not have been a hard job (Score:4, Informative)
Burton are Microsoft boosters from way back.
They did a hatchet job [infoworld.com]on Google for MS not so long ago, and when they're not slandering Microsoft competitors, they're out flogging [michaelsampson.net] Sharepoint Services.
Re:must not have been a hard job (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps I've had a very sheltered life, but how in God's name does someone become a corporate high flyer without knowing that there's no such thing as a "reasoned & studied, impartial report"?
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I used to work for a small financial company, who saved a crapload of money by migrating much of our backend over to FOSS (file servers, mail gateways, internal webapps (Plone = rocks) - the company was only 18 months old when they joined and had invested heavily in an MS setup that was going badly wrong due to ter
Re:must not have been a hard job (Score:5, Informative)
License fees dont begin to cover the real cost of software. You need to have an IT department to support it, you have to train users on it, etc. A $100 dollar license fee seems negligable pretty fast when contrasted with the IT budget for a company and any productivity gains/losses that result from using different software.
This is often referred to as TCO (Total Cost of Operating) and salesmen love it cause they can always put up graphs that indicate that their product is clearly the best from that perspective. A lot of people roll their eyes when they hear this term because they dont think much of the aforementioned salesmen's BS. But it really is foolish to factor licensing fees into your decision about what software to use from a cost perspective unless those fees are truly exorbitant.
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Re:must not have been a hard job (Score:5, Insightful)
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Also, using the new file formats (which was the original discussion here) doesnt necessarily entail using the new software. You could continue using Office 2003 and use the newer file formats at the same time.
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That is true, no doubt. But it still isnt very cut and dry. What happens 4+ years from now when everyone and their cat knows Office 2007 (not an unlikely scenario) and every new employee needs to be retrained on OO.org? Then it becomes more expensive.
Maybe 10+ years from now... but even four years hence? The vast majority of the workforce today will still know how to handle OOo rather seamlessly. So unless you're talking about wet-behind-ears bottom-half-of-the-class college grads who don't know any different, Office 2k7 isn't going to represent any real paradigm shift in how documents are made and disseminated.
You also assume that world+dog would be using Office 2k7 - meanwhile, in 2008, half of world+dog are mostly using things like Office 2000 a
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In the meantime, people are starting to learn about open Office and -- for a starving student, even $100 for the MS Office Suite vs $0 for OO is gonna be the difference of a handful of beers, or meals .. or a bus pass.
For starving students, TCO =~ license cost, and -- since very few people are buying Office 2007 rig
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When did you "learn" to use a browser, or did you just play with it for 5 minutes and get the hang of it?
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You're right though. Most Office users are writing away at their documents, computing their departments next year budget and so on, after just 5 minutes of playing with Word and Excel.
Unfortunately, for the rest of us, this methodology shines through in the results.
Also unfortunately, most of these people never bother to get any better at what they are doing and further go on to preparing Powerpoint sideshows that we have to pretend to pay attention to.
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I wouldn't ever do my budgets with Excel. Specially as I have to buy for my company 850 software licenses that cost $77.10 each, which totals $100,000.00 [slashdot.org]!!!
Re:must not have been a hard job (Score:5, Insightful)
The same can be said of Office. What I want in an office product is features to be layed out in the same way so when I reach out for the "Make this line a header" tool, I'm grabbing the right tool first time. Now I am not a power user by any stretch, but if I spend more time "Learning" where they hid the (up the font size by 2, make bold and underline) key then I am not spending that time writing the paragraph below which contains job related information.
In short make your interface intuitive or if you can't manage that, make it the same as the last one. Office 2K7 managed to break both these rules. Open Office 2 has a very similar interface to all the office products before it.
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I've only been working with various computers since 1979, and it took me 5 minutes to figure out how to save a document using the Word 2007 interface.
Talk about frustration!
At least most of the old keyboard shortcuts still work, though - I touch that poisonous GUI as little as possible, and have learnt to tolerate it.
As I said to the guy who mandated it in our company - if I want a gay interface I'll use a Mac, thankyou.
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correct usage of styles, correctly setting indents, margins, automatic indexes, outline numbering...
from my experience, basically nobody knows how to use all of these.
they manually format everything (which bites them HEAVY at any large document), space pages using linebreaks, some even indent lines using spaces.
some know how to insert automatic index, but most of those still manage to break it and instead of fixing their headings or whatever is the source of the problem, they edit the index
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That is true, no doubt. But it still isnt very cut and dry. What happens 4+ years from now when everyone and their cat knows Office 2007 (not an unlikely scenario) and every new employee needs to be retrained on OO.org? Then it becomes more expensive.
No more expensive than when MS replaces ribbons for the next big thing in UI and then having to retrain everyone again. Or if they decide to stop backward compatibility of older file formats again [slashdot.org].
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Re:must not have been a hard job (Score:4, Informative)
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You can guarantee all you like, but there are two things that you don't have:
1. The management tools that Microsoft provide for automatically rolling out and configuring Office through things like GPO.
2. A 15 page typed report (which could easily be condensed into 1 page) from some random organisation calling itself "The ---- Grou
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yes about that, do you have any examples where the license cost justifies staying with MS?
if you're going to count support and training into the equation you can't just ignore liscense fees now can you? co
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Like I was saying in my original post any salesman can make it sound one that one is better than the other. If you go to MS's website you can find case studies where it was cheaper. If you go to Sun's website you can find case studies where their stuff is cheaper. Both have som basis in fact and both are going to be slanted slightly to favor their respective authors. If you really want examples just look at th
Re:must not have been a hard job (Score:5, Insightful)
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These tend to amount to two things:
1. Office has a plethora of management tools to ease rollout and configuration. When was the last time you saw end-users expected to configure Outlook themselves?
2. An assumption that the installation and management of a complete rollout of OpenOffice across a large business is significantly more compli
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With OOo, the license only places terms on distribution, it has no restrictions on how you can use it inside your company, so it doesn't matter how many systems you install it on, you can install it on every machine you have without worrying.
Also if you have any non wind
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Why don't you try sending files back to them as ODF? It's actually a more reasonable thing to do on a number of levels (you're only complying with an iso standard, the "upgrade" is free etc)
What about training users for new office version? (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW: I've worked in IT for 28 years. I never remember any company, spending any money, to train anybody, to learn any office product. I thought you supposed to pick that up by yourself.
Re:What about training users for new office versio (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's the "training", yes. (Score:2)
Re:What about training users for new office versio (Score:3, Interesting)
"Picking it up yourself" has a real cost in lost productivity.
Here's a hypothetical. You upgrade 300 workstations to the latest version of Office. Your employees spend the whole day after the upgrade just figuring out the new software. That's a man-year of productivity lost.
Even though you haven't budgeted anything for formal training, you've just paid your
Not really (Score:2)
I don't believe this, even for a thousand users of the office package.
Actually, I see 1,000 employees who've lost time reading
In one given day, most people productively *work* only for a couple of hours.
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30 pages of manual formatting ? good ! once generated, later manually edited index ? great !
mixed outline, paragraph and manual numberig ? wonderful !
so after some documents have been edited by several such persons, the mess in there is incredible. as a result quite a lot of time is spent hunting weird glitches and manually fixing them over and over again. and in the end there still are problems left. total time spent - a lot more t
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The parts of it that you can "pick up by yourself" amount to glitzy version of SuperCalc.
Money or time, its all cost (Score:2)
I fully agree though that going to Office 2007 is a huge step compared to going to OpenOffice.
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TCO for any single product may be negligible given support costs, but if you have to pay the same on either side, why add more for licensing? Paying for licenses without knowing if the best commercial vendor is actually any better than FOSS is foolish, to me.
This is where the "cost of support" and "market availabi
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A $100 dollar license fee seems negligible pretty fast
Except when you factor that cost per computer (not just employee). At a company size of 100 employees that only have one computer a piece, that gets to be a lot. Office 2007 Pro comes in at $347.99 (according to Amazon anyway... I was lazy to compare prices anywhere else). You're going to run into a cost of $34,799.00. When you're talking about that much money I think that OOo starts looking pretty attractive from a price perspective.
Also considering the level of proficiency, at my company anyway,
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Spoken like a true MS-Fanboy.
The best software does not not require much support. Users are more adaptable than you might think.
Maybe in the problem is you have had to spend too much
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Now moving from Microsoft Office to Open Office or even Star Office may entail some re-training although to be honest if you can use a Word processor or spreadsheet you can work on just about any Offic
Durr (Score:5, Funny)
Money, hookers or blow. Probably a combo of all three. Just a guess.
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Happens to all of us. Good friends and respected colleagues are as fallible as anyone.
it's like saying, the guy already raped you so you might as well marry him
Sounds like a soap opera plot point.
Re:Durr (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm betting that he's getting paid really, really well for (ahem) "the presentation" that he was, apparently scheduled to give even before he released his "independent" report.
Perhaps he was so excited about getting the Microsoft gig, that he 'forgot to check his facts and logic' before he released his report.
Why (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why (Score:5, Funny)
Parent is AC (Score:2)
And Craig Burton worked for Novell, right? (Score:2)
Indirectly *could* be a problem... (Score:3, Insightful)
While I can't agree with this being a problem due to Sun's having influence over the development, I could perhaps understand it to be potentially a problem due to the indirect nature, in that there is no central guidance. Whereas with MS software there is, potentially, a focused development path (I'm not trying to be modded funny, honest).
Ummm...no. I...no. The costs involved in OO.o are only, I think, due to the training issues for staff familiarised with MS Office. And I don't think that the cost of training each user, with group seminars, would be more expensive than the per-user license for using MS Office in a corporate environment.
Ah, corporate shills. They're funny guys...
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Especially for extremely large corporations, who have "unlimited" license packages... that is, they pay a flat amount for the entire organisation, regardless of how many licenses you use. In those scenarios, you get a new employe, yo
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For the rest, I'll leave it at: new Office versions don't require retrainings (the UI may change, but the stuff you'd actually TRAIN someone on doesn't, as opposed to switching to Open Office: the UI is similar, but the core changes).
And you probably missed the memo, but usually companies don't buy "licenses" of MS products. Its subscription based, which is why its insignificant: yo
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Sounds to me you're short-sighted. You already know that MS Office will make radical UI changes, MS Office will make radical format changes, and MS Office will force upgrades. MS has to do that because that's how they make money. OOo development, on the other hand, is use
sure, just like... (Score:2)
That's like saying that central planning is obviously better than a market economy, and we all know what the outcome of that was.
Not aimed at us... (Score:5, Insightful)
OOo *does* cost more (Score:2)
Yes, OOo costs more than MS-Office. Here's why.
MS-Office is the dominant office suite. MS-Office 2007 saves documents in a format that OOo can't read. Therefore, most people are saving their documents in a format OOo can't read.
Now, every time an IT guy has to go to a desk for the user who called and said, "I can't open this document," and then the IT guy has to go *back* to the office, get the clue-bat, return to the desk, and forcefully whonk the user with the clue
Is this not false advertising ? (Score:3, Interesting)
In the UK the Advertising Standards Authority [asa.org.uk] governs advertising and, amongst other things, insists that it not be misleading.
If we can firm up the paid-for-by-M$ link that we can take M$ to task for breaking the rules. Can anyone prove the link ?
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You can't fault Microsoft for somebody actually liking their products, even if they like it because they make a business out of using/supporting it. Fault them on some other practice, I'm sure you can find a legitimate one.
Baseless Accusations (Score:3, Interesting)
A shame that you can't access the original PDF report without a particularly invasive registration process. They could be sending that information on to terrorists groups looking for new recruits.
Broad accusations aside, I know Slashdot invented the 'RTFA' acronym, but it'd be nice if we could read the original without having to take Ars' word for it or having to reveal our company's annual revenue range. After badly mangling that Sony wireless USB thing, I'm not inclined to trust Ars without the primary source.
Wait a minute... (Score:2, Funny)
Wait... (Score:2)
Finally, if their arguments are so great, you'd t
"OOXML improved many problems of DOC." (Score:5, Funny)
The study is informative (Score:5, Insightful)
Wild Claims (Score:2)
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Knee-jerk reactions (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, I'd love to see the Burton Group get rid of the registration requirement on this PDF so I can see what they actually say. TFA is mostly paraphrasing, and I'm not certain they are taking every comment in context.
Some folks on here seem to be taking issue with the statement that ODF is "indirectly controlled" by Sun. But, as far as I understand it, that's pretty much the case. Last I heard, the vast majority of work on OpenOffice.org is done by Sun employees. The codebase is just too complex for amateurs to get their heads around. You could argue (and many do) that OOXML is directly controlled by Microsoft
The Burton Group's greater concern seems to be that Sun has a conflict of interest here. What is the purpose of ODF? Is it to empower users? Or is a means for Sun to erode the profitability of core Microsoft products? If the latter, does it make sense for a corporation to support it on that basis? Maybe you'd argue that it does make sense. Me, I'm not so sure.
As far as ODF "only supporting a fraction of what enterprises need," well, that's probably true. I doubt that ODF was ever designed to define a standard for everything that enterprise customers do with their office suites. Be that as it may, if an ODF application suite does not support all of the features that an enterprise might want, does it make sense to conduct a mass migration to a new office suite on the basis that the new suite uses document formats that are "open"? In other words, the Burton Group seems to be making the age-old case for sticking with the status quo, even given the understanding that it represents a capitulation to "vendor lock-in." Many customers may decided that open file formats just aren't worth the trade-off.
You can call it cynical, or self-interested, or just plain lazy, but given the opportunity to participate in a revolution, there will always be some people who will say, "No thanks." Some of them might be deluded. And others may merely be acting in their own self-interest. If they are deluded, however -- and sticking with the status quo really means trading long-term best interests for short-term interests -- then isn't it up to us to convince them of their mistake? Calling them "shills," claiming that they were paid off in "hookers and blow," and all the other stuff I see in this thread, doesn't strike me as a very effective way of making the counter-argument.
Nor, in fact, does the Ars article. It doesn't seem like a "thorough debunking" to me; more like a fairly well-reasoned opinion piece/editorial/blog.
Re:Knee-jerk reactions (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it relevant that Burton never disputed msft's direct control? Does that make msft's direct control of a supposed open standard all right?
> What is the purpose of ODF? Is it to empower users? Or is a means for Sun to erode the profitability of core Microsoft products?
Why not both? Is google trying to erode msft's marketshare by financial supporting mozilla/firefox? Should I reject firefox on that basis?
ODF is open, OOXML is not. By using ODF, I can insure my documents will always be readable, and avoid vender lock-in. If that's helpful to Sun, so what?
Don't forget, ODF can be used with msft products. And if msft chose to do so, msft could support ODF just as much as Sun. Msft is also free to contribute to the ODF standard. Therefore ODF does not give Sun any competitive advantage.
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>
> Why is it relevant that Burton never disputed msft's direct control? Does that make msft's direct control of a supposed open standard all right?
Absurd strawman. Nobody said that. What he's suggesting Burton was saying is the exact opposite. Why is MS's control cause for alarm but
Re:Knee-jerk reactions (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, a well reasoned comment that for the side I'm not on! :-)
I am not intimately familiar with either ODF or OOXML. I am passingly familiar with both. I also have an understanding of the culture of the communities they come out of.
As for ODF, I know Open Source. And I know the proprietary Unix world before it. And while Open Office is mind numbingly complex, the source is out there and I consider the source the ultimate arbiter of any protocol or file format. Standards documents are merely high quality documentation and not definitive. Additionally there are various other implementations that interoperate with Open Office via ODF to a greater or lesser extent, and I know there will be a lot of pressure to make that support more complete as time goes on.
And while Sun might be the major contributor to Open Office, they don't have the same kind of control that Microsoft has over Microsoft Word. And the existence of other interoperable implementations decreases the effect their influence on Open Office has on the ODF document format.
I also know the culture that OOXML comes out, though not as well. It's clear that Microsoft bought ISO votes, and this behavior is not unusual for them. It's clear from even a casual reading of the standard that it will be impossible to create an interoperable program without access to proprietary Microsoft source code. It's even clear that Microsoft themselves couldn't create an interoperable version without using their own source code. For example I doubt anybody knows how Word 97 formatting works in detail except to know that a particular block of Microsoft proprietary code implements it. Microsoft also has a strong history of having 'standards' they claim are open, but actually require Microsoft proprietary technology in some way to implement.
So this mysterious report by this well-respected group is interesting to me as they seem to be telling me that everything experience has taught me is all wrong. The kind of broad sweeping changes in both cultures required for my experience to be rendered obsolete surely couldn't happen without my notice. My first impulse is to figure out if they were paid to do it. My next impulse is to figure out if they have a strongly self-interested reason to do it. The latter appears to be the case. No matter how respected they might be, their bread and butter is threatened if Microsoft Office significantly diminishes in importance. I would expect the legion of string theory theorists to (initially at least, until the more intellectually honest ones among them really took the time to understand things) call anybody who questioned string theory a crackpot regardless of whether or not they were right, and I would also expect a company who makes the majority of it's money from the existence of the Microsoft Office ecosystem to react similarly, no matter how respected they are.
So until they can produce this mysterious report for public perusal, comment and dissection, I think that believing it to be total hogwash is completely justified by past experience and knowledge of the players involved.
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There is no "status quo" in keeping with .doc. The internals of .doc, .ppt, .xls can and will change at Microsoft's will. You should have been long enough at slashdot to have read about this (or was there a UID yardsale that I missed out on).
The non-openness of these formats creates immense and costly problems for the users (companies and employees). I once had a talk, e
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I'm not sure if anyone is literally concerned solely with influence and the degree thereof.
The closely related topic, on which there is a 100% binary on-off difference between OOXML and ODF is that Sun may dictate the standard, it is comprehensible to anyone and thus anyone can write software to read/write it,
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The closely related topic, on which there is a 100% binary on-off difference between OOXML and ODF is that Sun may dictate the standard, it is comprehensible to anyone and thus anyone can write software to read/write it, whereas Microsoft dictates the standard and is the only one capable of fully comprehending and implementing it. THAT is the issue that many have with OOXML, that it's faux-openness. It's a "standard" which depends entirely on Microsoft's proprietary implementations.
One option for ISO ratification of OOXML is to make the standard only apply to the non-propietary portions of OOXML (i.e. not for gems like 'space as done by Word 95') and have a utility that checks for violations of that standard. I don't see MS going for that.
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Some folks on here seem to be taking issue with the statement that ODF is "indirectly controlled" by Sun. But, as far as I understand it, that's pretty much the case. Last I heard, the vast majority of work on OpenOffice.org is done by Sun employees. The codebase is just too complex for amateurs to get their heads around.
Not true. While Sun "indirectly controls" the development of OpenOffice.org, the file format is owned by Oasis [oasis-open.org], which is a "not-for-profit consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society" (according to their own website). Although Sun is a member of Oasis, it's not alone there, so Sun will never be able to hijack the file format all by themselves, because the other members won't allow it.
Among the other members of Oasis is IBM, which,
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Among the other members of Oasis is Microsoft, which declined to participate in the process as regards ODF.
If Microsoft, which proclaims interest in interoperability was telling the truth in the matter, they would (and could) have added their $.02 to the process which resulted in ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (also known as Open Document Format ).
ODF is _not_ controlled by SUN. (Score:3, Informative)
Last I heard, the vast majority of work on OpenOffice.org is done by Sun employees.
You are obviously confusing ODF with OpenOffice.Org. OOO may be have a lot of SUN influence, but OOXML was developed independently of that process. Although it was based on the original OOO XML-based file format, it underwent extensive editing before it was accepted as a standard, and OO had to be changed to fit those changes. ODF is now controlled by ISO, and the various organizations that produce conforming software are expected and intended to follow that lead.
OOXML, on the other hand, is just a (rat
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If that is what they are saying, they are just plain wrong. Sun has influence over ODF because they participate in the ODF working group. They *participate.* They don't control, though they do have a lot of input, being a highly-skilled bunch of folks.
Microsoft doesn't have a disproportionate amount of control
...controlled indirectly by Sun... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, and who controls OOXML? Someone you trust more than Sun?
giggle: (Score:5, Informative)
I'm surprised that the authors don't expect to get laughed out of the hall when they present this report -- even if it is on Microsoft soil.
Use MS-OOXML and reduce confusion (Score:2)
[repost]
MS Paying their customers? (Score:2)
Money trail (Score:2)
Somebody claiming to be Burton posted on Ars forum (Score:3, Informative)
Sun indirectly controlling ODF (Score:2, Funny)
Think green.
Debunked? (Score:3, Insightful)
This article IMHO just stated that things are different, but does not provide a better founded truth, nor does it show the flaws in the original reasoning in a methodical way (again it's just stating the opposite).
I would not call this debunking, I would call it disputing.
My 2 cents...
Maybe, maybe not (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that most consulting companies don't like disruptive f/oss stuff. Maybe Burton has a good releationship with msft, and likes the status quo. Maybe Burton hopes to do more business with msft, or msft partners in the future?
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These lucrative contracts, of course, have nothing to do with the slant of the 'independent' articles.
Re:Paid by Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
For instance, if McAfee published a report that said that Linux and MacOSX are highly susceptible to viruses, and that virus infestations of such machines are common, it'd be pretty obvious that they didn't need to be paid off by MS to say these lies. Their entire reason for existence is the poor security and virus susceptibility of the Windows platform, so it's in their best interest to make people believe Windows is the best platform, and that every computer should have anti-virus software installed.
They are *not* both open standards (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Meh.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely, one of them strives to provide a format useful and usable by any maker of office software, the other strives to provide a format useful and usable by any maker of office software, so long as it's Microsoft.
Almost exactly the same.
Agree 1000%. It's just a schema! I mean who cares what it does or where it comes from. I say the same about books, too. My literature prof wanted to fail me because I read Mein Kampf instead of War and Peace, but I was all like, dude, what's the problem? They're both books!
Word! How come we keep getting our shorts in a knot about who controls our information? Next thing you know, some shirty, smelly little ACLU pinko is going to come along and start complaining about access to information and whining about data interchange and what will our grand-children say about us when they see the mess we made of everything just so we could keep some corporate fat cat in his limo for another few years!
Who needs this Open shit, anyways, huh? Sharing? Highly over-rated.
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So? How many folks fork open source projects because it doesn't fit their needs? How many just do it their own way themselves? MySQL is open source... PostgresSQL is open source... should I stick to MySQL just because it came first? (Ignore the fact that Postgres came first, please.
Hav
Is this specific enough for you? (Score:5, Insightful)
2) ODF is controlled by ISO, OOXML is controlled by msft, and msft *now* claims that msft will never give ISO control. Rather msft wants to give control to the ECMA - a group controlled by msft. This directly contradicts what msft first promised.
3) ODF is used by several different organizations. Anybody is welcome to freely use ODF. OOXML is used by msft, and novell - due to a very sneaky and secretive document.
4) OOXML is only being considered for an ISO standard because of msft bribing and ballot stuffing.
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Only other is a standard (ODF). OOXML is just a proprietary format (as long as it can contain binary blobs that are not documented) that isn't easily readable (6000 page specifications and the undocumented parts) for which Microsoft is trying to buy (they already confessed this) a standard.