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.'"
Not much for megacorps, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM Are Right (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see no case at all to support Microsofts point of view that it's better to use a document format which is supported by only one company that can only be guaranteed to work with their products and where this guarantee is not set in stone and could be subject to change at the whim of the company.
From a business point of view anything which maintains the lock in to Microsofts Office products is good for Microsoft and anything which is truly open benefits IBM and as I said above I think what the customer wants in this case is also the same thing IBM want which means IBM are going to be getting a lot of goodwill for pushing their point of view.
It will be interesting to see just how far MS are willing to go to defend their office lock in and whether they will see sense, give in and rely on Office ( which is a good product IMHO ) to compete on a level playing field with it's competitors.
Standard reply.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:we've come a long way (Score:5, Insightful)
IOW, IBM's 'ulterior' motive is profit, and their profit goals happen to be in alignment with what's best for the IT industry and the greater IT community.
Re:IBM Are Right (Score:5, Insightful)
Anything which maintains the lock-in to MS Office &c. is good for Microsoft and Microsoft alone.
Anything which is truly open benefits IBM as well as the rest of the world.
With two sides such as these, there is really no question as to which side I'm on.
Of course, should IBM become too greedy, nothing would stop me from loathing them as much as I loathe Microsoft nowadays.
Re:we've come a long way (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:we've come a long way (Score:5, Insightful)
What doesn't make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:we've come a long way (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, that's very true. But they are OPEN STANDARDS. You don't have to give IBM oodles of money, you can just figure it out for yourself.
IBM will continue to make money as long as there are people (or companies) around who are willing to pay their rates, I'm guessing because they feel they get their money's worth.
Re:Not much for megacorps, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft mostly gets money from its software, they thus need to make sure they will keep selling it. Then they can make even more money with consulting when customers are locked in.
IBM mostly gets money from consulting services, they thus need "open" environments where they can charge high price for advice vs software.
So what you think is the right side is actually the opportunistic side to them. This is still the right side for us though.
Re:we've come a long way (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not much for megacorps, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
I support the
~Dan
Re:we've come a long way (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Battle of giants (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:we've come a long way (Score:5, Insightful)
The quote that was most telling for me was this one, from Tsilas:
"[Mandating open standards in government] is a new way to compete. They are using government intervention as a way to compete. It's competing through regulation, because you couldn't compete technically."
That quote is, frankly, hilarious. Finally they have found that they are uncompetitive in something, and boy do they find this difficult. They've been so used to forcing the market to use their product that when the market finally corrects itself they're not sure what to do. Thus they try to fast-track a technically inferior standard.
The end result is that the exact opposite of what Tsilas asserts is happening. The ODF format is technically superior, but because it won't work with old Microsoft "features" (read: bugs), Microsoft cannot compete.
Re:Battle of giants (Score:5, Insightful)
The Microsoft Way is what's on trial here (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the problems I have with the whole MS Office file design is that it includes both data and executables in the same file. There is no way to separate the two. Now, I suppose I'm out of step with the rest of the world, but those should be in separate files. As long as the data is fully documented, and has all the appropriate pieces for the purpose (style definitions, mathematical formulae), any program should be able to operate on it. IMHO, we should not be encouraging the mixture of (for example) a spreadsheet document that contains the calculations for a company's PL statement with the code (e.g., VBA) used to control data entry into that document. Simply loading the document should not put someone at risk for malware infection, because it should contain no programs in the first place. I like having powerful macros as much as the next guy, but I believe it has gone too far.If you need that much control, then write a separate program that operates on the data, and keep the data separate.
Here's a wild idea: Replace all the data files (and only data files -- no macros or exe's) on a computer with entries in a SQL database (with appropriate security, of course, to restrict sharing), so any application, from any vendor, can easily read and write it. As Microsoft proved when it tried to put SQL into the OS, this isn't as easy as I made it sound. But this may have more to do with their inability to add the old vulnerabilities into the scheme than making the whole thing work right.
Microsoft wishes to enshrine all of its past mistakes in the new format, and continue its malware-friendly development philosophy. That is wrong, and the Office 2007 file format is too flawed to be seriously considered as a universal standard (intellectual property issues aside). It's good to see a company the size of IBM fight against its acceptance.
Re:Battle of giants (Score:3, Insightful)
IBM is influential with knowledgeable people. (Score:5, Insightful)
True, but IBM is influential with people who understand Microsoft's abuse. See this quote from the Ars Technica article:
A ZDNet article published late last month quotes Microsoft officials who claim that IBM is solely responsible for ISO's recent decision to deny OOXML fast-track approval. "Let's be very clear," Jean Paoli, Microsoft's senior director of XML technology, told ZDNet. "It has been fostered by a single company--IBM. If it was not for IBM, it would have been business as usual for this standard."
I'm glad we don't have "business as usual", as defined by Microsoft.
Re:Not much for megacorps, but... (Score:1, Insightful)
You forgot hardware and software (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:we've come a long way (Score:3, Insightful)
2007 users who don't know better, send these formats to 2000 and 2003 user who can't open them, thereby creating an artificial need to "upgrade."
I think IBM is trying to call MS out on this practice.
Re:Battle of giants (Score:3, Insightful)
It's perfectly true that many companies only care about the practical aspects of IT. They have accounting and word processing to do and that's the end of it.
The same applies to fax machines, copiers and telephones.
However, they DO care about the bottom line. They aren't cellphone experts, but they WILL avoid the provider that "everyone knows" drops more calls than it completes and costs twice as much as the others. Likewise, they will avoid the OS that "everyone knows" is annoying, user hostile, and costs way more than the others. Especially if "everyone knows" the BSA will come busting in and waste everyone's time checking for those little bits of paper that come in the box.
Most business people know instinctively that the more dirty tricks a vendor pulls, the more likely their own product is to suck. MS's antics are getting large enough and frequent enough that people outside of IT who don't read /. or groklaw are starting to notice.
Over-extended and fighting on too many fronts (Score:2, Insightful)
IBM is fighting lock-in by OOXML. Google has MSFT on the defense in the internet services arena. Linux has a dominate presence in the server space. Mozilla is a growing and viable alternative to IE7 and Apple, though a bit player in TOTAL sales, is making strong gains in the desktop market and the iPod continues to stomp the Zune. Sony and Nintendo have ensured that Xbox won't make real money for years to come, if ever.
I suggest MSFT has fallen victim to a classic blunder. The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: you can't fight an entire industry, even if you're the biggest punk around.
Re:we've come a long way (Score:2, Insightful)
Choice of battlefield (Score:5, Insightful)
That might be the battlefield that Microsoft would like to have chosen but it isn't the one that IBM is playing on. For IBM, the money is in the middleware. For Microsoft, the money is on the desktop.
Before I go on, yes, I work for IBM. What follows is entirely my own opinions and is not a formal statement of IBM policy.
ODF is a huge enabler for middleware document services because it removes barriers at the desktop end and allows significant freedom for customers to choose solutions. IBM already has plenty of XML integration ticking in its products (such as pureXML integrated in DB2 and the Content Manager products) and ODF fits very nicely into that scenario. IBM would like to be able to go to customers and offer a complete end-to-end document/content management system. Why do you think that IBM would produce the Symphony products and integrate Document editing into Lotus Notes 8?
While OOXML also fits into the XML-on-middleware approach, it necessarily ties itself to a set of Microsoft clients because only Microsoft will know what the next version of Office will support with respect to OOXML and even the most assiduous followers of OOXML implementations outside Microsoft will be months (or more likely years) behind the latest OOXML version.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
What doesn't make sense? Let me spell it out. (Score:3, Insightful)
But Microsoft doesn't want to compete with OO. They would much rather have a monopoly based on a de-facto document standard that is incompatible with other software. After all, you make more money with monopoly sales and monopoly markup than you do in a competitive market, even if you're the market leader.
If Microsoft fully supported ODF, then it may happen that a great deal of people who would not consider anything but MS Office today due to requiring Office compatibility would decide that OO does what they need well enough and has the right price. Already many people who don't require perfect MS Office compatibility have made the same decision.
And if you don't need MS Office, then maybe you don't need MS Windows. The entirety of the Microsoft business model is built upon these two monopolies reinforcing each other by being incompatible with anything else. If either of these monopolies is broken, if software compatibility means that MS Office or MS Windows are merely choices rather than requirements for the majority of people, then MS' days of dominance are over.
This is absolutely bog-standard MS thinking, it's how they've operated for the last twenty-plus years. They always prefer to monopolize over compete, and only compete when absolutely necessary (with very mixed results).
So that's all there is to understand -- competition is anathema to MS, and they will protect their monopolies at all costs. ODF, an actual standard juxtaposed with their de-facto standard, threatens their monopolies. They will fight against supporting it tooth-and-nail.
Re:Misread that (Score:3, Insightful)
Being an all-MS shop is irrelevant (Score:3, Insightful)
And this next generation of applications is going to be OS-agnostic-- you can run WAMP just as easily as LAMP, and you can view an html-based application on any browser on any type of desktop/kiosk/cell phone/... . That is really all that IBM and many others want: interoperability so that customers can choose the solution that is best regardless of who everybody else has chosen.
They want this, of course, because their systems are better and they know that companies will move to them.
Re:Battle of giants (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not going to trot out the license costs because, as you point out, retraining is the real cost.
Instead, I'll bring up that Vists is DIFFERENT and so are the new office suites. Perhaps they're different enough that retraining will happen even to stay with MS. As long as that cost is going to be there anyway, might as well call it an opportunity to step gracefully off of the MS treadmill and get an environment that is more concerned about doing the user's bidding than the *AA's (should be irrelevant in a business environment, but Vista will still happiny burn cycles on it) and of course, MS's.
Based on what I have seen of a typical business user's grasp of things, even a minor change to button/menu placement is no less traumatic than switching to KDE or Gnome with Open Office would be. The only real difference is that users feel stupid claiming that the new version of the same software has completely confused them, so they're less vocal about it.
Actually your real problem will be the software. (Score:4, Insightful)