Microsoft Lashes out at Massachusetts IT Decision 525
scoop writes "Infoweek is reporting that the plan to eliminate the use of Office by the Massachusetts state government (previously covered on Slashdot) has not gone over well with Microsoft. Microsoft's Yates said the company agrees with the adoption of XML but does not agree that the solution to "public records management is to force a single, less functional document format on all state agencies." Microsoft also states they will not support the OpenDocument format. Looks to me Microsoft is scared their biggest cash cow is in danger from a free alternative. Soon I'm sure we'll see a Microsoft funded comparison between Office and OpenOffice."
Flexibility? (Score:5, Insightful)
And this customer chooses OpenDocument, an XML schema. So, it would appear that either MS Office or Microsoft is not flexible enough to actually "support any XML schemas that a customer chooses". Microsoft spokesman lying through his teeth, sun rises, sun sets, film at eleven.
Microsoft now in the humor business (Score:2, Insightful)
From the article:
These articles are delicious with irony. I sometimes find it difficult to believe these are real! Do any of the Microsoft PR people ever sit down and read statements they've made?
Anyway, so now Microsoft thinks it knows best what constitutes (irony) the best solution for a government. Certainly Microsoft knows better than any company about ..., force a single, less functional document format... .
Of course the obvious solution (and I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't figured this out, though we may see this in the next article) is for Microsoft to purchase Massechussets and force their document format by fiat. With that approach they get the convenient side effect of being able to foist the format on the state's populus by law.
It's about ideology not flexibility (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they deliberately misunderstand the issue. The issue here is not functionality. Yes opendoc may actually be less functional than the word-format but guess what Microsoft? I haven't used any of this additional functionality since 1997 and neither has the US government.
The battle for features is over and what's replaced it is a lot more important. What we have today is a battle of ideology. Don't you think there's something a little perverse in a government investing huge amounts of tax payers money in creating all this intellectual property but having made this tremendous investment in time and resources they have to pay a private corporation to get the tools to access that investment?
To be fair, it's not just Microsoft who are perverse like this. Sage Line 50 is a great example of corporate greed. You pay £800 for the piece of software but lord if you want to insert or update information in a third-party program you need to pay around £1500 a year for the developer license. It was this that made me wake up to the reality of the situation: Our company is paying nearly a hundred thousand pounds a year in accountants who enter data in to your software package yet we have to pay you AGAIN to update that data? It's us that paid money to put the data in there in the first place, why should we have to pay you again just to use it from a homegrown program?
It's this greed that the US government is rejecting. In the early days everbody wanted software to help deliver the tremendous savings that computers can bring to a business. They would be a license from whatever vendor they would sacrifice much to get it. Now companies are starting to expect software to deliver a return on investment and they're not willing to tie themselves in to one company. Having many suppliers after your business drives down prices. This is as true with IT as it is with any other sector. The way to ensure you can get many suppliers knocking for your business is to make sure it's easy to switch. Open Office might be a pain at first but the opendoc standard will make it easier to switch. It's a good move in the long run.
Microsoft, Sage or any other company do not have the automatic right to make a profit. The lesson to Microsoft is simple: you were beaten here not because your product was inferior but because you failed to allow people to compete with you effectively. The role of a government in a capitalist society is to promote competition not subtract from it. In this case Massachusetts has done everyone a favour by telling Microsoft that it can cram its vendor-lockin into a bloody big pipe and smoke it.
Simon.
So, let me get this straight (Score:5, Insightful)
So Microsoft's official position is that a format for public documents that is readable for everyone without exceptions is a bad thing?
Nice to see that they believe in one of the fundamentals of democracy: open access to government information for all citizens.
MartLess Functional? (Score:4, Insightful)
Less functional document format (Score:4, Insightful)
The goal of a document is to document. Since about version 2 of every document application, it has been able to do that (OpenOffice is not at version 2, but at version 8 if you count StarOffice releases). So if you take a program from the seventies (nice frontend: textmode!) it will also do the trick.
Now looking at modern document formatting applications like MS Word, OpenOffice, Word Perfect and many great others, what does MS Word offer which is so much more functional in document format, so not in general functionality, but just document format?
This is one for Ask
Re:Results are in early (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Results are in early (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been given OpenOffice.org trainings to people who had never used it before, and all of them were very impressed by the program. They think the interface is almost completely the same at first sight. There are just some small differences in the way you use it (related to styles etc), but it's only a matter of a few hours to explain these differences. After that, people are at least as productive with OOo as with MS Office. Some are even more productive, because during the training they learned things they did not even knew in MS Office!
I guess Microsoft did not know (Score:5, Insightful)
Open standards increase competition. (Score:5, Insightful)
Consumers are starting to realize open standards give them more options and that is a GOOD thing. Businesses are starting to realize the risk (and long term cost) of putting all of their data in a proprietary format. Proprietary formats often make it harder to
* Interoperate with other systems
* Switch to a competitor
If a proprietary format offers NEEDED functionality not offered by an open standard then I say maybe replicate the data for that use.
It is time for gov't agencies to require open standards for data.
Always the bad guy (Score:5, Insightful)
MS will keep fighting, claiming that much of Office's functionality is closely related to their format (which is both true and false), and saying that an open format delivers less value to customers. However, they always risk making people understand they dont need (the advance functions of) office at all, because it is far too complicated.
Naturally, word processors and spreadsheets are 20-year-old inventions - why should a single company be able to keep making huge money from this year after year, with no useful innovation? They simply shouldnt! And they wont. But as long as people believe an office suite should cost $500+ MS will be able to charge that amount. Isnt much they can do when people stop believing that though
Supporting other formats will just increase the speed that people replace MSOffice (because it makes it so much easier to replace it then). So, MS will never support open formats, and will always be the bad guy - which they deserve!
Re:quite stupid decision (Score:2, Insightful)
To offer it for free and moot any TCO points.
-dZ.
Battle of ideology? (Score:3, Insightful)
Those using MS Office start questioning: what do we get for our dollars. The value is not there, and closed proprietary formats are good for no one but MS. So people will switch, because they can, and it is the only responsible thing they can do.
When companies get to big (Score:3, Insightful)
I think this is a very good example for what happens if a company gets to big.
Imagine a small software company would do the same: "What, you want us to support OpenDocument? No, I think that's a very bad idea. We won't do that."
What would be the customers reply: "Thank you, Sirs. We think that we try it with one of your competitors."
How can it be that a software company tries to totally ignore a customers wishes? Hey, guys at MS: The customer is the one who pays. You're the one that wants money from customers. Either listen to what your customers want or go to hell!!!
Unbelievable! Sheesh!
D.
I can't help but wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
But seriously, we are seeing what was predicted with Netscape in the late 90-ties slowly becoming real. When Netscape decided to open their source code many believed (including me) that the open bazaar of OS developers would wipe out then clunky and not to be taken seriously IE. It turned out we were wrong, but only about the timing. Look at the situation now - it's IE which has to catch up.
Back 6 years ago, when I tried Star Office for the first time it clearly wasn't a match for MS Office '97. It simply wasn't good. Now I'm using Open Office 2 beta and I must say it is closing very fast on Microsoft. It's not as polished and not as smooth to use, especially if you are accustomed to MS Office's way of doing things but it improved immensely since Open Office 1 - and that was pretty usable already. I think that now for most of your average office or home word processing or calculations etc. you just don't need MS Office anymore.
And, furthermore, we are dealing here with the same phenomenon that many other industries went through. Word processing and all the other components of office software are becoming common place, just like plumbing, transistor radios or cars. It's not high tech anymore, it's not a big deal, anyone can do it. It's commonplace. And for that you just don't pay premium prices, especially in the field that doesn't deal with material goods.
So the problem Microsoft has with Open Office is twofold. On one hand it's the normal evolution of the technology's acceptance in the society that makes them less and less indispensable. On the other it's the same problem they had with Mozilla - it's not a company, so they can't hurt them by throwing piles of money on the problem. Worse, it's not animated by greed. And, let's be frank, MS guys don't think beyond money - software is their tool for making money, not a way of making a difference. That is a cultural barrier that makes it hard for them to understand those who have different motivation.
Beware of Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
However, don't be surprised if Massachusetts backpedals on their decision after Microsoft's promises free copies of XP for the schools, or a new computer lab for "underprivileged" children. Microsoft is a pro at getting their way by any means possible. Massachusetts pols will have to get up pretty early in the morning not to be out slicked by Microsoft's professional grifters and con-artists.
Massachusetts citizens need to let their elected officials know that this decision has popular grassroots support. By the way, RMS is a citizen of Massachusetts, isn't he?
Okay... (Score:3, Insightful)
Because everybody knows that Microsoft does not want to force a single, closed document format on all state agencies.
Re:Results are in early (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, don't wonder - look at the Keynote and compare it to Powerpoint.
Re:Open standards increase competition. (Score:2, Insightful)
All it takes is for Microsoft to offer the software for a substantial discount, or even for free (it has been known to do this) to the state of Massachussets, for the local elected officials -- you know, the people who have a vested interest in "justifying" to their constituents that the should be re-elected in 2 years -- to re-consider their decision.
The same with consumers: All it takes is for an apparent immediate savings, like mail-in rebates, price discounts, etc. for most of them to completely forget about interoperability, freedom of choice, and corporate misbehaviour.
-dZ.
So everbody (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's Real Power (Score:3, Insightful)
As we move into a post PC era, large accounts like government organizations will become even more important to Microsoft as the consumer business begins to shrink. So they're going to fight very hard to keep Office in play. So expect a really sweet licensing deal for MA. The funny thing is that MS Office is still a strong enough brand that even if they supported OpenDocument, it probably wouldn't cost them a lot of Office sales and it would avoid the true losses that a hardline stand seems guaranteed to result in. Maybe Gates will realize this and step in...
Big Win for Citizens and Open Source (Score:5, Insightful)
I do think it's Microsoft's refusal to support OpenDocument is just making their problems even bigger. Let say f the state government sends some document to school system. Now receiver has to install OpenOffice to open that document instead of just using Word. Having said that I have a feeling Microsoft isn't going to just go away without a whimper. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft sues the state over something like this in attempt to intimidate or delay the migration. Perhaps Microsoft may threatens to audit every government desktop computers for license violation. They already pulled this sort of stunt with Oregon public education and I don't see this sort of tatics as being outside of their usual playbook.
Re:Embedding VoIP in documents (Score:2, Insightful)
To truly embed VoIP in a Word document, the first thing to do is embed the IP, and the voice can just follow.
Quite why you'd want to confuses me though: it's not like Word documents can have conversations back, so we're basically down a sound file with some IP headers for no good reason.
Re:Less functional document format (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Flexibility? (Score:5, Insightful)
What they fail to understand is that *shocker* governments should use a unified format for very specific reasons. Anyone from any branch can read any document from any other branch of the government. And, such format should be 100% open, so that should a future format come along that they want to change to, they can write up their own free utility to automatically update all documents.
Wow, that mean that governments can actually move away from the days when every department used its own forms/formats, and paper copies had to be made of everything because every system was proprietary, so the only way to transfer information was to print it out, hand it over, and re-type it in.
That would sound amazing if it had said it in 1995. Its about time that governments stepped up to the plate. Such changes are long overdue.
And, they obviously can't choose a patented/DMCA locked format by MS, which is what MS wants. With the MS Office suite looking to use DMCA to lock out their documents from open source solutions, governments will have high barrior costs to ask MS permission to unlock their documents for them.
MS on the other hand sees such as a way to lock in customers, and exact ultra-high fees to unlock the documents. Anything less, and MS will tell you you're a Commie bastard who's not open to "freedom of choice".
I think it's a given that we all know what MS's definition of "choice" is. Choice is only that which chooses (or by default) to use MS products. Everything else is obviously not choice, because it slaps MS's hand away from your wallet.
By the way, the political opposite of communism, is naziism. I think I'd MUCH rather be called a Commie.
XML yes but PDF no? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well XML is one thing, but PDF (which is the other half of the policy) is a fairly inflexable format for most people. Opening a pre-existing pdf document, edititing, and saving it is not a common-place operation for most office suites. Try googling "free pdf editor" or "gpl pdf editor". You will get links to a bunch trial pdf *writers* and a few evaluation versions of editors. I don't know of a completely free (as in not an evaluation version) PDF *editor*
My other bitch about pdf is that some morons don't know the difference between a scanned (i.e. picture of text without ocr) document that has been saved as pdf and a actual text document that has been written to pdf. Ofcourse, with the actual text, you can atleast highlight, copy, and paste into a new document. No such luck with the picture of text.
Re:Flexibility? (Score:5, Insightful)
For people who have never used a word processing program that supports OpenDocument (OpenOffice.org being the predominant contender here) -- they would read these claims as "OpenOffice.org cannot put pictures, audio, video, etc. into its documents" which is certainly not true.
Re:Results are in early (Score:3, Insightful)
F**cking force them to support OpenDocument! (Score:2, Insightful)
A lot of institutions worldwide have tried to force MS into a less monopolistic role. People have tried to get refunds for unused copies of Windows which they had forcedly bought. People have tried taking MS to court. The EU has tried to make MS behave nicely by forcing them to make a Mediaplayer-free version of Windows and there are several other examples, but they all failed to catch the main issue.
Microsoft's monopoly is not built on forcefully sold, pre-installed copies of Windows, nor on some Mediaplayer application, nor on Internet Explorer or even Windows.
Microsoft's monopoly leans on Office, and almost exclusively that. The Office file formats are secret. MS has - in a very clever way, namely by letting people pirate Office in the beginning without shouting bloody murder all too hard - made half the world use Office, on way or another. And now loads and loads of documents are in the MS Office format, people can't switch.
By forcing MS to adopt the OpenDocument format (MS _is_ a member of oasis [oasis-open.org], by the way) Microsoft monopoly is broken. Boom. With one computer batch-converting old MS Office documents to the OpenDocument format and all other computers running {$anyOS} with {$anyOfficeSuite} you can both choose your own software, save money and be free. Or not, your choice.
If the politicians want to break the MS monopoly, let them break it where it counts: in the MS Office document format area. That's where it matters, hardly anywhere else.
So, this leads me to draw 2 conclusions:
1) Politicians do NOT want to break the monopoly, sadly and ununderstandable. 2) Bill will have nightmares for the rest of his life if the Mass. idea catches on in the rest of the US and the world. I hope it will, though - in the light of the vast marketing budget of MS - I doubt it...
more (Score:3, Insightful)
c.f. POSIX, HTML (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words, I don't ever expect to see full-featured, comprehensive support of OpenDocument from MS.
OO less functional? Yeah, Right (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Flexibility? (Score:2, Insightful)
To make the full roundtrip, Open Office alredy exports to MsOffice propietary formats.
Don't you just love scriptable environments
You missed one (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Word DOES destroy docs (Score:3, Insightful)
to put it politely... BOLLOCKS... word throws a wobbly and sticks red crosses in for no apparent reason... even if the embedded object is inside the document (such as an equation, if it's lost the internal bitmap representation, then what you'll see is a BIG RED CROSS. I get it all the time at work with big documents and I'm heartily sick and fscking tired of it... I get the case where there are BIG RED CROSSES in the page view, yet it prints out fine... WHY??? why does it get it together for printing, but cannot get it together for normal viewing... and don't get me started on Word's propensity for completely bollixing up automatic paragraph numbering for no apparent reason...
I'd love to get off word onto OOo 2 at work, but we're trapped in our own fscking morass of obfuscated custom-macros and Access database links that were written ages ago and no one knows how on earth they work... cos the genius who fscking wrote them didn't document them cos he was worried about his job security and wanted to make himself fscking fireproof... pity he left of his own volition and took his knowledge with him...
RTFP (Score:3, Insightful)
That's why the policy reserves PDF for read-only publication.
Re:Some areas where Writer is worse than Word (Score:5, Insightful)
Tables of contents are pretty shambolic in Word too. Try embedding a Visio flowchart in Word then generating a TOC and it creates a copy of the Visio chart as a TOC entry. I mean who the hell thought that piece of genius up.
Auto text is also broken, what it's supposed to do is when you type the first four characters it brings up what it could complete it with, you hit enter and it saves you typing a very long string. However what it quite often does is have the string flicker and when you hit enter it does a CRLF.
So although I'm not defending OO Word is very far from perfect and only sells because there aren't any real alternatives.
Re:Flexibility? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is probably just me being stupid, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Voice-over-IP in documents and archiving? Does that make any sense at all?
Of course, maybe he means recorded conversations since he also seems to classify "audio" and "voice" separately, but if you have to call the same content by three different names to make it sound like you're offering more features, then he's really not offering as many extra features as he wants customers to believe.
Business tactics backfired on them this time (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't think the rest of the states will not follow it is in the best interests of the people. Yes they have plenty of bribery money but it is a no brainer to support a open document format.
Re:Flexibility? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a non-issue. The only things that will come of this is more sloppy MS programming, a whole giant heap of security problems, and another feature that's barely used, but adds 30MB to the distribution, and 10MB of RAM use.
I hope these kind of lies on MS' part does not make Mass. sway. I'm pushing open formats through in my town, and having the State do the same makes it a whole lot easier.
So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
XML Means Nothing! (Score:3, Insightful)
See aren't you glad I took that complicated string and enclosed it in XML? Fantastic work! Now all you need to do is fine the encryption string for it to reveal the secret password.
The point is, XML is only useful in complicated schemas to the program that wrote it. Sure you _COULD_ program something to recognize Word's XML, but you're going through recognizing every tag for bold, tables, paragraph marks and so on. That's not really open because it's in XMl. It's open because they publish a clear and easy to use schema for us to implement into other programs.
XML has become the new buzzword but to Microsoft it's nothing more than an ability to stick proprietary data between some XML open/close tags.
-M
Wrong Question! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the question is, why would you put voice-over-ip into a word processing document? The purpose of a word-processing document (text of, e.g., laws and regulations) is entirely different from the purpose of a video or audio record. No need to mix 'em in a single document that citizens need open access to. You can't print video, so keep it separate from things in printed form. It's much easier to access the pieces separately (video players and text processors don't fundamentally need to read one another's formats, and are available separately in platform-agnostic forms.)
Simplicity and ease of public access are best served by uncluttered document formats; all this every-dang-media-format-conceivable-in-a-single-d
Swami predicts: Microsoft will change its mind (either very quietly, or by claiming that this was always their intention) when the cost of stubbornly snubbing the open format becomes insupportable, as other governmental users start mandating open formats.
Re:Flexibility? (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect the Microsoft spokesperson is well aware of the distinction between what he said and reality, though. What he said has the potential for perhaps someone to re-evaluate the decision. If he had properly represented the deficiency of the format, he would've been ignored because the people making the decision should've already realized they were giving up on the deep Microsoft integration features.
Re:Yep (Score:3, Insightful)
Video game consoles are literally sold at a loss becaus the profits that can be made on teh software (i.e. game) is much higher. The console still costs quite a bit but it wouldn't surprise me if companies offer free game consoles in 10 years.
Even the valuation placed on Google (although I'm not sure if Google is a tech company or a media/advertising company) by the stock market sort of indicates a new trend where software companies make money, while hardware ones struggle.
I think Bill Gates will turn out to be right. I don't know if hardware will be free per se, but it will be very cheap comapred to software...
Re:XML Means Nothing! (Score:3, Insightful)
How is it different than having an escape bit with a code following it to enable or disable bold. Is text better than #254btext#255b ? Not in the slightest.
XML is nothing without a schema supported by an application, and M$ can make a format with XML as a part of it all they want, but it's still a format that has some random binary OLE object in it that nobody can open. It's still a format that has encryption (optional) on it. It's still a format that M$ just adds and removes support for select codes all they want.
So how are my two examples different? One of them lets you say it's XML... but you still need an interface and to follow M$'s programming practices in order to apply this to your own editor.
XML makes transfering data between two interfaces which are programmed to read the schema rather easy, as you don't have to write the parser. Fine. But that assumes both programs can read/write the data that it parses out... which is where all the work is. Parsing is easy. Applying the data is another story.
-M
Breaking the MS Monopoly (Score:2, Insightful)
Millions of dollars saved on fruitless lawsuits, perhaps millions more generated by innovative suppliers who employ people to create such software (or who provide paid support for the existing FOSS office suite(s)). Anyone who wishes to interact with the government from that point forward will also have to have the capability of reading and writing documents in the new format.
Problem solved.
This won't work in all cases, perhaps, but when a viable, well-supported open standard exists (tcp/ip vs. SNA, anyone?, Ethernet, perhaps? Maybe a little HTML/XML?), why support a proprietary standard which does nothing but enrich a monopolist and locks you into their format to boot?
Re:Battle of ideology? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't play games as much and I've been focusing more on Java, Firefox and PostgreSQL. So, there could be a time soon where I can work on Linux and deploy to my customers to any flavor they want, assuring them that their 'office' documents could be open by any other program besides MS Office.
Sounds scary to Microsoft but is going to open more oportunities to the small and independent developers.
Maybe finally we can move on to the 21st century!!
Microsoft's Next Move (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, Microsoft doesn't have to be nice about it. My suspicion is that any OpenDocument file opened in Word is going to be somewhat broken, and likewise any Word document will be somewhat broken as well. This is all due to OpenOffice being a broken format, obviously, and not Office's fault.
Of course OpenOffice will probably do just fine converting between OpenDocument and Word, or at least better than Microsoft Office anyway.
But I do agree that it is important to get a good Outlook killer on board.
A wolf in the hen house? (Score:1, Insightful)
But Microsoft is at a disadvantage here: it's quite rare that a government or corporate IT professional in this country doesn't just sit back and suck-up to MS's bullshit. Up until now, Microsoft has rarely needed to explain itself to it's customers, or (gasp!) evaluate the validity of it's own products. This case shows just how out of practice they really are. An almost historic occasion where the "nobody got fired for choosing Microsoft" idiocy finally checked itself at the door. Here's hoping it won't be the last.
Re:Flexibility? (Score:2, Insightful)
The truth is that Microsoft hasn't much to say for its product that can't be countered, so all they can do is bleat into the wind about their own "standards", such as they are, and hope that enough fools will be taken in before the dollars stop flowing. And unless they do something about their business model, sooner or later, stop they certainly will.