IBM Slams Microsoft, Calls OOXML "Inferior" 238
cristarol sends word that Microsoft's accusation, that IBM has sabotaged Redmond's attempts to have the Office OpenXML format approved by the ISO, has drawn a heated response from IBM. Ars Technica has the story. "'IBM believes that there is a revolution occurring in the IT industry, and that smart people around the world are demanding truly open standards developed in a collaborative, democratic way for the betterment of all,' IBM VP of standards and OSS Bob Sutor told Ars. 'If "business as usual" means trying to foist a rushed, technically inferior and product-specific piece of work like OOXML on the IT industry, we're proud to stand with the tens of countries and thousands of individuals who are willing to fight against such bad behavior.'"
Re:we've come a long way (Score:5, Informative)
Help! I'm stuck in the eighties (Score:4, Informative)
"Oh wait, maybe we're not. Not yet. Give us a couple of decades or so..."
IBM has gotten its act together, or at least its rhetoric. When will Microsoft join the rest of us in the 21st century and stop foisting rushed, technically inferior and product-specific work? What will it take, Microsoft's version of the Microchannel?
-mcgrew
Re:we've come a long way (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What doesn't make sense (Score:2, Informative)
Of course if I had my way I'd never have to use anything other than LaTEX for any serious document writing (especially with the rather handy LyX frontend) and be happy in the knowledge that I would never again have to give over hours of my life in order to write what should be a fairly simple document.
with a little further left to go (Score:3, Informative)
Our management forced us from subversion to clearcase. I am not impressed. Most painful was the loss of the goal stat-scm in subversion that allowed me to (with a few keystrokes) weekly publish the results and standings of all the classes, members and files in the projects. We're talking heat maps, personal performance, unit test case coverage and just about anything--ANYTHING--you could ask for in metrics. And the amount of work I did to achieve that functionality was negligible. On clearcase, I can't even get a lines of code count. Nothing.
So off I went looking for ways to interface with the clearcase VOB to poll this data from the server. Wouldn't you know it, I came up empty handed. I called up my toolsmith and he told me I was trying to "make ClearCase something it's not." It was clear then, I was working for the tool, the tool wasn't working for me. If you are the 'staunchest defender of openness' don't you think you'd publish specs on how to communicate and gather meaningful data from the ClearCase server & VOB for your users? If they do, I haven't found it. Don't even get me started about ClearCase having a dying embrace on my piece of crap Windows work box's kernel land. Why that needs to be modify kernel files (for some reason it shows up in my control panel) to be installed, I'll never know.
Don't get me wrong, you're right in that they've come a long way. Hell, look at how they defined UML 1.0 and opened that up. But there are some types of files in Rational Rose that I still can't figure out how to write or produce in a reporting manner.
So until they open their file formats and communications protocols (I really hope it's just a matter of not having it adequately documented), please don't go around titling them among the 'staunchest defenders of openness.' They may have that title commercially but I could list a number of individuals in the open source world that would easily win that title.
I support the software as a service model and believe that all our tools should be shared and open source. IBM promotes that in certain areas as best I can tell but there is definitely room for improvement.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What doesn't make sense (Score:5, Informative)
And the scary thing (for MS) is that it being free changes, well, everything. At my company, we used to have a few people who needed a word processor, so they got Office. When OOo got good enough, we start giving it out to everyone on our standard deployment. Have a PC? You're getting OpenOffice. Now we find ourselves in the position where OOo is our standard suite, and only a couple of people get MS Office (mainly because of legacy documents, like complicated spreadsheets etc.).
In more recent news, my little Eee PC ships with OpenOffice. A few million units later, a lot of people will have OOo who never knew such a thing existed before. Free-of-charge isn't a huge selling point for large corporations where maintenance costs are more important than initial purchase costs, but it's extremely influential everywhere else. The thin end of the wedge is already in, and now it's starting to split the market wide open.
Re:we've come a long way (Score:3, Informative)
Now, everyone repeat after me: Please re-send the file in a readable format, such as PDF, ODF or even Word 97/2000. Thank you.
Whenever you receive a .docx file, just reply with the above line.
Re:we've come a long way (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Yes, you are not qualified to name them (Score:3, Informative)
And no, "Space this like Word 95" does not require an extension.
If you're going to call BS on my statements I'd like to direct your attention to this page, in particular to the autoSpaceLikeWord95 element (which can be found on pages 1378-1379 of the Draft 4 for OOXML if you really like reading 6,000 page document format specs). http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=2007011720521698 [groklaw.net]
Then you reveal that you actually don't know of features that ODF doesn't support that Microsoft "requires" but you have "friends" who you trust who tell you what to think. It's always easier to argue your case when you actually do your own primary research and don't rely on hearsay. The rumour mill is active enough without people posting allegations without facts. Oh damn - I've just realised I'm posting this on Slashdot...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
P.S. WAG - Wild Assed Guess, most likely. Just a WAG you know ...!