Microsoft "Supports" ODF

The headlines should read instead, "Microsoft Supports Self with ODF".

The entire press of the world -- including CNet, ZDNet, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and others -- have consumed this whole, almost at face value. It demonstrates at once how obscure the file format topic is and how desperate the press are to read into the scene now another ODF win. But they're getting the real and the visionary all twisted up in a bunch. Even technology analysts who have demonstrated a basic understanding of file formats in the past are getting this quite turned around.

Everyone -- to a man -- is saying that Microsoft has caved in to ODF. It's simply not the case if anyone examines the facts.

The Microsoft press release talks about this as "...developing bidirectional translation tools..." If anyone takes the time to go to SourceForge, where this project is posted for development and download, they will notice the project consists of a single Office add-on for Word 2007, a product that does not yet exist on the market. They will further notice that the tool -- singular, so far -- is in fact uni-directional.

Open XML Translator provides tools to build a technical bridge between the Open XML Formats and Open Document Format(ODF). As the first component of this initiative, the ODF Add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 allows to Open & Save ODF documents in Word. [emphasis added]

 

And scratching the surface a bit more, the curious observer will note that the tool consists of a few eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) scripts which change ODF's open XML content into MSECMAXML's corrupted, tokenized, non-expressive & non-human-readable XML. That means Office 2007 -- a product not in circulation -- will one day be endowed with the ability to open an ODF file and save it as the Microsoft "Open XML" format. XSLT is nothing special: it is a common way to transform data in ODF to just about any other format, including HTML, XHTML, DocBook, what have you.

The translator project does not yet EXPORT to ODF, demanding a shaded interpretation of "interoperability" here. What's more, questions will persist if this "open source" project will ever be open in spirit (that is, attended by individuals driven by practical self-interest)...or interoperable. Chances are, not, if we interpolate from past Microsoft behavior (Microsoft's contrived rejection of PDF export | Groklaw). Eyes of the cognoscenti are peeled.

It takes pause. Think a minute. ODF files are being shifted into MSECMAXML, possibly the most proprietary format ever proposed in the history of standards. MSECMAXML is a private implementation of open XML so clogged with binary flotsam & jetsam, to which only Microsoft customers will ever gain access, that the attempt to pass the translator off as a good thing should raise further questions about Microsoft's intentions.   

Through the obscurity of arcane, black-art file format techniques, Microsoft have made something beneath trivial into a revelation of interoperability with the intention to freeze the balance of the global public sector from following in the footsteps of Massachusetts, Munich, France, Denmark & Brussels. It's a skillful (even creative) bit of PR but in software terms, a cypher. So powerful is the ODF concept to the business of government that I don't believe California, Minnesota, Bristol, Podgorica, Rome, Kuala Lampur, Tokyo, or even Beijing would be deterred by this whafer-thin gossamer of FUD.

Revealed then is Microsoft's intention to avoid -- it seems at any cost -- actively supporting the OpenDocument Format in its software. This is the true message to take home.

 

Bob Sutor on Thursday compiled a useful mix of early reactions which were each mistaken in tone, emphasis, proportion and fact. 

Comments

[Wesley Parish]

I'm treating it as a version of gamesmanship. They blinked - admittedly not a lot - but they blinked, so I would say they're still in the game, at least in their own estimation.

The code isn't too bad, either. This French company's not bad. Still, they've got a very long way to go before they get it even close to complete. And that's from reading their own goals as expressed in their readme.txts.

But remember OSI? Versus TCP/IP? Which one was first to market? Which was "more complete"? Which one only existed in the form of a few additional files in 4.4BSD and a few other places? Which one's forgotten?

Microsoft's full of hardworking programmers whose work's getting wrecked by senior management whose grip on history is sadly lacking. It's hard to laugh for crying; it's hard to cry for laughing!