Study Touting OOXML Over ODF Is Debunked

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.

Re:must not have been a hard job

[Finallyjoined!!!]

It's no problem de-bunking the report, Burton are obviously in the pay of the monopoly. /. readers know this. The real problem is that corporate high fliers will read it & take it for a "reasoned & studied, impartial report"

monopoly money well spent.

Re:Durr

[Anonymous Coward]

Peter O'Kelly is a friend of mine, and I could not pick a guy whose intellect or integrity I respect more, so I am just blown away by this. Do I believe he really believes what he's writing? Yes. Could a 12 year old find all the holes in this? Yes. I can't figure out the angle. Saying that people have to work with legacy files out there and OOXML does it better than ODF, so that's your answer... it's like saying, the guy already raped you so you might as well marry him. Posting anonymously for obvious reasons. I do not believe anyone bought Pete but damn....

Is this not false advertising ?

[Alain Williams]

Reports like this, paid for by M$, and made visible to those who may base purchasing decisions are tantamount to M$ advertising it's products.

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 ?

Baseless Accusations

[hardburn]

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.

Re:must not have been a hard job

[jorghis]

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.

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.

Re:must not have been a hard job

[Gyga]

4 years from now everyone working will still have used an earlier version of office (for school) so it would take very little to retach them (just bringing back old memories). Farther into the future you will start having the generation that grew up with computers, training costs for these people will probably be loads lower than today's current working class.

Knee-jerk reactions

[PCM2]

I know everybody wants to immediately jump to the conclusion that the Burton Group is in Microsoft's pocket, etc., etc., but while it is perfectly appropriate to question the methodologies and motivations of analysts' research, in my experience the Burton Group is as much of a "good guy" as an analyst firm gets. If you've ever been to one of their conferences, they are packed to the gills with useful information, and their analysts generally come off as being genuinely knowledgeable.

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 ... but for all I know, not having read the paper, the Burton Group never disputes that. Maybe they're just saying that anybody who insists on using ODF because Microsoft has a disproportionate influence over OOXML is fooling themselves, because the same can be said (to an extent) of ODF.

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:Durr

[Smackheid]

Peter O'Kelly is a friend of mine, and I could not pick a guy whose intellect or integrity I respect more, so I am just blown away by this.

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.

Maybe, maybe not

[walterbyrd]

Burton claims that they never got money from msft. Burton could be lying, but I think it's just as likely that Burton is being honest about that.

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?

Re:Knee-jerk reactions - DISCONNECT

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

You have a huge disconnect right there.

OpenOffice is not OpenDocument. There are multiple independent implementations of OpenDocument-based Office suites and programs that have absolutely nothing to do with OpenOffice or Sun. KOffice is the most complete example of this.

Sun may control OpenOffice, but they do not contol OpenDocument (ODF). Sun have representation on the OpenDocument committees, but by no means control. OASIS is the sponsor of, owner of owner and has control over OpenDocument, not Sun.

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?

Your basic premise is incorrect, so all of your meanderings from that point forward are way, way off the mark. Sun do not control OpenDocument.

Secondly, even if your "conflict of interest" musing is correct (conflict with what I might ask?) ... ask yourself how can Sun possibly hope for a successful anti-Microsoft strategy via OpenDocument that relies on Microsoft itself not implementing ODF. How can Sun possibly hope to force Microsoft not to implement ODF properly? No, Microsoft has done that all by itself, and just simply refused to implement ODF ... that refusal is not Sun's doing. If ODF is successful, and Microsoft have no decent support for ODF in their MS Office product, and hence lose profits ... then Microsoft have only themselves to blame for not supporting ODF.

Finally, in what way is Microsoft's OOXML not thouroughly tarred with the brush that you try to paint Sun with? To see this, turn your question around. Your question becomes: "What is the purpose of OOXML? Is it to empower users? Or is it a means for Microsoft to eliminate the possibility of open free-market competition with core Microsoft products?"

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.

Why on earth would you claim "that's probably true"? You have absolutely no support for such a speculation. Put it this way ... here is a lsit of software that implements ODF:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_software [wikipedia.org]

OK, what need is there that businesses might conceivably want that is not covered many times over by that list of applications?

Re:What about training users for new office versio

[merreborn]

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.

"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 employees some number of tens of thousands of dollars to train themselves.

And in reality, it probably takes most people more than 8 hours of experience with an application to get up to full speed.

Re:Durr

[Stephen Samuel]

Well, burton wasn't paid for the report, but Groklaw reports that "However, Burton analyst Peter O'Kelly, one of the report's co-authors, is scheduled to make a presentation at an Open XML press briefing that Microsoft plans to hold in the Seattle area on Wednesday."

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.

Re:must not have been a hard job

[MrNemesis]

Perhaps I've had a very sheltered life, but how in God's name does someone equate a corporate high flyer with someone who's capable of analysing data in a critical, rational, objective fashion? ;)

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 terrible third party maintenance so we were given alot of free reign with what we (temporarily) broke in order to get to a stable and maintainable platform, which we did. We were later bought out by a huuuge corporate who had a large (100+) IT dept. and were very much an MS shop. Fair few people there who've used Linux (indeed, all the DBAs are RHCE's for Oracle plus we have a couple of pSeries boxes for the big fat DB's and apps, plus we have some Linux SANs and lots of ESX boxes), but the level of ignorance about Linux and OSS in general has frequently been staggering:
If we use Linux, then we have to open source all our data
Open source is just used by people too scared to pirate
There's no-one to support it (this made the DBA's laugh, the RH support contract must cost a fortune)
You can't expect users to have to use a command line for everything?!
Plone and Zope? Never heard of them, but we'll have to get rid of them since they won't run on windows

Now I'm very much a "best tool for the job" man, so obviously it'd be idiocy to attempt a conversion to Linux on any part of the org because everything's too entrenched. But if seasoned IT pros (a job, I thought, that prized rational, critical, logical thinking above pretty much everything else) can't even realise that maybe tht upstart OS has a use in some business niches I shudder to think what the (rule of thumb: generally an order of magnitude less tech acument than the contractors on the support desk) honchos at the top migh act like when presented with a problem they generally don't understand.

Yeah yeah, I must've been born yesterday to equate an IT pro with someone who's rational, critical, logical and technical... ;)