Microsoft Standing Firm On OOXML ISO Vote

christian.einfeldt writes "Microsoft has responded via the industry trade group ECMA to some of the thousands of criticisms of its submission of Office Open XML as an ISO standard. Open standards advocate Russell Ossendryver takes a look at those responses to see if Microsoft has made significant changes in either the substance of OOXML or the manner in which the OOXML specification will be maintained going forward. Ossendryver concludes that Microsoft's position has not significantly changed, but only hardened in place in advance of the Ballot Resolution Meeting which is to occur from February 25 through 29 in Geneva. While no one can say for certain whether Microsoft will succeed in having OOXML win the nod from the international community, Ossendryer thinks that Microsoft's firm stance is likely to backfire."

How 'Firm' Would You Stand For 20 Billion A Year?

I believe Microsoft made 5 billion in revenue from having customers worldwide locked into their proprietary office document format.

The vendor lockin from Office makes up almost half the company's yearly revenue.

Microsoft would cease to exist as we know it if the office document lockin revenue went away to an open format.

Fight? LOL! This is the type of shit Microsoft execs live for.

Fake grassroots efforts.
Standards body subversion.
Paid for media shills.
Shame studies.
Mysterious compatibility problems with the competition.

All in a days work.

Microsoft's Latest Trick

And here's their latest trick: sending all the JTC1 NB's a poorly-researched, demonstrably inaccurate study [robweir.com].

Re:Apple isn't proprieta- NO WAIT !

The fact that there are work-arounds for all of these things doesn't negate the fact that they were locked down in the first place.

The iTunes DRM is roughly equivalant to a false positive for piracy in Windows Genuine Advantage. They've purchased the product, but now there are these digital hand-cuffs keeping them from using it. I doubt anyone saying that "false positives in WGA aren't too bad - there are work arounds. [link]" would get modded up too far, though.

This is really quite the stupid move

All of the yes with comments votes now have it confirmed that their comments have noit actually been taken involved. The involvement of the EU in investigating MS's practices leading up to the fast track also means that they involved have to be more circumspect about gathering votes, so they really don't need to be annoying people like this.

Of course, the plan could just be to say "We would have got away with ISO approval, if it wasn't for that pesky IBM". It's a bit odd, but there we are. MS is losing the EU to open standards.

Here's for holding onto hope

MSFT has so badly screwed up ISO, I can see many parties who were going to vote yes to change it into No.

directly because of MSFT the ISO has done nothing but stumble around they can't get the majorities that they need in oder to pass standards. Everything is stagnate. Here's to hope that MSFT gamed the system so hard that it blows up in MSFT's face.

the file format is too important

the file format from global communications is too important to be left to a for-profit corporation that has a history of manipulating market for maximizing profits...

truly open file formats are the only resolution for ALL office documents used in business & government. for audio/video multimedia file formats too but office communications it is just simply too important to be left to a private corporation...

Have your say

Petition currently running at noooxml.org

http://www.noooxml.org/petition [noooxml.org]

Mental Image

All I could think of when reading this is a M$FT rep saying "Come on, we're Microsoft! You can trust us!" while hiding a +10 Spiked Club of Patent Trolling behind their back....

Dear Microsoft,

Guarantee to me in writing that you will update Office 2007 and Office 2008 so that the version of OOXML that they use will be exactly identical to your ISO submission in every way, and then carry out your promise, and I will join the OOXML camp.

Sincerely,

ODF supporter.

"Win the nod"?

What "nod" are they trying to win? They lost the nod, and they lost it bigtime, if you take a look at the countries who didn't show up just for that one vote. The only question is whether or not they paid enough to "buy the nod".

I'm hoping that the non-bought votes that voted "yes" last time figure out what's going on and vote "no" this time. We'll see.

Horse running, cart rolling out of gate

The horse has left without the cart. Office already saves thousands, if not millions, of documents in OOXML - today. MS cannot change their format - the spec is in the field. I'm somewhat surprised they haven't taken some things into consideration for future releases, but frankly the reality set.

  OOXML is not a standard. It cannot be used to shield any entity from MS's product changes. Also, OOXML extends into nebulous areas where other implementors or translators will be unable to replicate the viewers or editors like Office. Governments or corporations must take it or leave it.

PS
  I recently received a DOCX from an MS rep and wrote back asking for a DOC format (we've not upgraded). They sent me a PDF. Moral: OOXML isn't a standard. There's no turning back - its a conversion world, not an interoperable one.

 

Re:Horse running, cart rolling out of gate

Office already saves thousands, if not millions, of documents in OOXML

It's worse than that -- the MS-OOXML that Office saves documents in is not the same as the OOXML that MS spec'ed out to ECMA and got submitted to ISO. (This should be no surprise to anyone -- when has Microsoft ever produced software that matched the spec?) It's close, but different. Even if you could write software to the ECMA spec (doubtful since it is incomplete and ambiguous in places), it wouldn't interoperate well with MS Office.

ECMA an RIAA-like organization?

The "Deluge of facts KOs OOXML" article says that the "ECMA [is] a RIAA-like industry group dedicated to advancing its members' interests". wtf? Hardly!

We have discussed this.

We have discussed this before, and in the end it doesn't matter. Those DOCX Files are out in the wild. I see people at school saving their documents in DOCX all the time. The people using those MS Office can't open ODF Files. The Genie is out of the bottle. The ECMA can say OOXML is completely banned from becoming an ISO format ever and ODF is the true open format as it should be, in the end it makes no difference. M$ will just give the standards board the middle finger and people who use M$ Office will continue to use Office and like it because they have no other choice.

Re:We have discussed this.

But it does make a difference. Microsoft isn't doing this just to promulgate yet another document format. This is about the long-term viability of one of their major profit centers; the Office suite. Sure, docx is out in the wild, and sure we're all going to have to deal with until it's dumped and/or heavily modified version-by-version just as the Office 97 formats have been.

As more and more organizations, and in particular various government agencies around the world start mandating that all documents be saved in an open format, this is where Microsoft's viability in the long term comes into question. If OOXML fails at the ISO (as it appears that it has a good chance of doing) then Microsoft has got a real long-term problem. Adopting ODF means opening up Office to meaningful competition. It means OO.org, KOffice, Google Docs and who the hell knows what else is coming down the pike over the next decade are going to start to eat into Office's huge market share.

Now I think it's safe to say that in the medium term, Microsoft will continue with OOXML no matter what the ISO does, and it will, even if it adopts to some degree ODF try to mutilate by the "adopt, extend, extinguish" doctrine, and a good many government agencies, regardless of the mandate by politicians and senior bureaucrats, will roll over, but not all, and as long as a few major government agencies in North America and/or Europe refuse to recognize OOXML or whatever Microsoft comes up with next as an open format, the long-term viability of Office is in question.

We're not talking about next year, or even in the next five years, but I think over the next decade or so, if Microsoft can't fool ISO into accepting its worthless, unimplementable format, then it's going to have a real problem. The whole structure of company is built on the operating system and Office divisions keeping the money rolling in. Everything else doesn't matter, and probably loses money, existing solely in the interests of brand name placement.

The long-term solution I suspect Microsoft will move towards is some sort of rubber stamp standards commitee to compete with ISO, just like ECMA. The ultimate question is how long governments are going to let it get away with all of this. The EU seems to have a distinct hard-on against Microsoft at the moment, but the US doesn't currently give a damn one way or the other.

Czech Republic's expert disagrees wholeheartedly

Sorry, but this is bullshit.
Quoting from zmotula's post [slashdot.org]:
"...see the post [xmlguru.cz] by the guy who evaluated the OOXML specification for the Czech Normalization Institute. This means that Czech Republic is most probably going to vote for OOXML when the time comes."

Read that post and you see that nearly every one of the Czech Republic's objections has been addressed (the only one not satisfactorily addressed was the Czech Republic's complaint that part of the spec has redundant info). Let me quote:

ECMA already provided proposed resolution for 75 comments (out of total 75 Czech comments). This means that 100.00% of Czech comments were handled by ECMA.

90.67% of comments were satisfactory resolved.

8.00% of comments were resolved only partially.

1.33% of comments were not satisfactory resolved. ... ...
In fact I was really surprised how many "green boxes" are there at the end. I was expecting that ECMA will properly address only part of our comments. The vast majority of Czech comments was addressed by ECMA so it is time to say yes to OOXML.

Re:well...

Which OOXML most certainly isn't. There's real doubts that even Microsoft could implement it as it currently stands.

It's a scam, pure and simple.

Re:well...

Which OOXML most certainly isn't. There's real doubts that even Microsoft could implement it as it currently stands.

It's a scam, pure and simple.

So what do we do?

That's right: whenever you receive a .docx, .xlsx and other .*x documents, send them back, asking that they be converted into a readable format.
Include a link for Sun's ODF plugin for MS Office, if need be.

Fight fire with fire.

Re:well...

They have partial implementations. Quit making things up. Not even Microsoft has an implemented ECMA-accepted OOXML product out there so how can you justify what you're saying.

Re:

IE, it being based around how they designed MS Word...

I make a point of nat being a grammar nazi, but there does come a time where the meaning you are trying to express is obscured by grammatical errors. IE in terms of Microsoft usually refers to Internet Explorer. IE in terms of ISO means Ireland's TLD. In

Re:Whats the problem?

Why not let it be a recognised standard?

Many reasons:
1. There is already an ISO standard for this same purpose.
2. There are exclusions in Microsoft's Open Specification Promise, meaning Microsoft can sue over other parties writing implementations of some of the things that the OOXML standard references (ActiveX and VBA are examples).
3. OOXML is designed so that fully-compliant applications can only be written by Microsoft, and mostly-complaint applications can be written by other parties but only to run on a Windows platform. Therefore OOXML is not inter-operable with other applications and especially not with non-Windows platforms, and the whole purpose of making something a standard is to facilitate such inter-operation.
4. OOXML is technically very inferior to the existing standard, ISO 26300. For example, OOXML specifies three different implementations of "a table", instead of just one common to different Office applications. This means that you cannot write a "table handling class" as a library, but instead you have to duplicate equivalent functionality several times over.
5. OOXML includes deliberately mandating bugs (such as dates before 1900) just to pander to errors in Microsoft software.
6. OOXML is controlled by just one corporation ... ISO 26300 belongs to ISO.
7. ISO 26300 already has many implementations by many vendors on multiple platform. OTOH even Office 2007 running on Windows Vista does not implement OOXML ... there is not one compliant application for the OOXML that is being proposed as the standard.
8. ISO 26300 even works with Microsoft Office (up to Office 2003) using a free plugin written by Sun. Microsoft deliberately broke Office 2007 file filters so that this plugin (or any other plugin not written by Microsoft) would not work in Office 2007.
9. ISO 26300 has a compliance test suite. You can use this test suite to make sure a given application works properly with ISO 26300. No such thing exists with OOXML.
10. It makes no sense to have "choice in standards" ... that just costs everybody a lot of money. It is fine to have "choice in applications" ... but ideally they should all read and write to the same standard file format ... and ISO 26300 is by far the best choice for that.

Re:OOXML, ODF, and FUD

Since, clearly, different competing standards are bad.

Of course they are. There is, for example, only one ISO standard for paper sizes, ISO 216. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size#The_international_standard:_ISO_216 [wikipedia.org]
This standard is used in all countries bar two. Becase there are two countries that use a competing non-ISO standard (they use an ANSI standard instead), it causes all sorts of un-necessary costs all around the world.

For example, ODF apparently has only a weakly defined formula syntax, inhibiting ODF spreadsheet implementations based only on the spec (supposedly most implementors just use whatever de facto syntax OO.org decides on). To claim that one format is universally hailed as technically "very inferior" is rather misleading at best.

Actually, it is you who is misleading here, and your anti-ODF FUD is from brian Jones in 2005 (when OOXML also lacked any definition of formula syntax). ODF version 1.2, which is currently going through the approval process, has a far more detailed definition of formula syntax, known as OpenFormula, defined by an independent body. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFormula [wikipedia.org] This is what will be formally agreed in the upcoming version of ODF, but it is backward compatible with the (admittedly vauge) syntax definition in earlier versions of ODF, and it is also what all of the ODF applications actually now use.

OpenFormula is indeed technically superior to the formula syntax of OOXML, for the following reasons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFormula#OpenFormula_Attributes [wikipedia.org]

That's a circular argument.

No, it is not. Before it was an ISO standard, it was an OASIS standard, and Microsoft were part of OASIS. Microsoft were invited to join the development process of ODF, which began in 2002, but Microsoft refused. Apart from the solitary exception of Microsoft, however, ODF otherwise has full industry consensus. In fact, after a long review period where comments from a broad array of interested parties were invited and incorporated, the ODF specification was put to a formal vote for OASIS approval, and it was passed unanimously. Yes, as an OASIS member, Microsoft approved ODF. Further, after that vote, ODF was submitted to ISO for approval as an International standard, via the long-winded PAS process (not fast-track), and after world-wide solicitation of comment and incorporation of recommendations, it was again approved unanimously. Yes, Microsoft approved it a second time ... then refused to implement it.

That is just plain wrong, and FUD to boot. Not only does a 10 second Google search show that the Sun plugin does support Office 2007, but Microsoft apparently also sponsored their own open-source ODF add-in (hosted on Sourcefourge) for Office, which also supports Office 2007 (& below).

It wasn't wrong for the original release of Ofice 2007. Full plugins were borked in that release. I'm pleased to see that Microsoft fixed it (now that Office 2007 has a foothold) in SP1. As for Microsoft-sponsored ODF convertors ... they are convertors, not plugins. You cannot use Microsoft's convertors to open & save as ODF ... you must have an OOXML version of your document first, and then you can import & export it as ODF. Microsoft convertors do a terrible job compared to the Sun plugin, and of course you cannot set Office 2007 as the default for .odx file extensions because Office 2007 can't open them directly (without Sun's plugin).

Anyway, now that Sun's plugin works for Office 2007 ... all the more reason to use ODF (ISO 26300) format and not OOXML.

Ho

Re:Whats the problem?

They actually hold multiple patents (18 [noooxml.org] currently held, or pending) that apply to OOXML. My worst fear however, is that they'll maintain the format, and change it continually, not warning anyone when they're going to make a unilateral move. Leaving everyone else who wants to read documents sent to them in that format in the dark.

Can we get some *new* anti-ODF FUD too?

OOXML and ODF are both thin veneers on particular application products.

OOXML may be (or pretend to be), but what application products were you thinking of for ODF? Were you aware that KOffice (no relation at all to OpenOffice.org) also uses ODF as its native document format? The old StarOffice/OpenOffice.org formats (.sxw, .sxc, etc) were vaguly similar to the ODF formats, but not the same. (And of course native formats aside, there are plenty of other office apps that can read/write ODF.)

The "thin veneer" argument against ODF is just Microsoft FUD.

Re:Can we get some *new* FUD, please?

Relying on current application behaviour is not bad per se. It is bad not to reveal what the application does. Things like autoSpaceLikeWord95 are referenced but not specified. This is objectively bad. Just think of it: I give a new screw standards paper to the ISO. It simply says that the screw can easily be driven in with my old Bauhaus 95 screwdriver. However, the spec doesn't say what the dimensions of my screwdriver actually are. Do you think ISO should make this a standard ?