PlexNex

Is 2008 Already the "Year of MS Office | OOXML"?

It's official! Recovering from hangovers, people are yawning back to work or just returning from their two-week holiday breaks and before the year 2008 has begun we can safely put it to bed as "The Year of Microsoft Office & OOXML".

Not two days into the new year and Microsoft's indefatigable marketing machine has ticked over twice -- through the rote, pre-set drills of service pack and new product roll-outs from the Office department.

On January 2nd we were accosted by the news that ...

"Microsoft Office Drops Support for Older File Formats" | Scott Gilbertson | (Wired News, January 2nd, 2008)

And just this morning we find out that ...

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac will be available to bricks-and-mortar on January 15th for just under $400!

... [the] service pack 3 release for Microsoft Office 2003 contains a hidden "feature" — it disables support for older Microsoft Office formats. If you've got any old Word, Excel, 1-2-3, Quattro, or Corel Draw documents hanging around your hard drive you'll need to delve into the Windows Registry to open them.

Even though the lingua franca, the fuel of Microsoft's whole new software stack -- that format called OOXML -- is struggling to gain approval at ISO, they are selling it through as a hidden component within that famous Trojan Horse called Office 2007 and Office 2008 for Mac. (Yes, I said hidden because despite the very public blogging about it and the efforts within the trade to counter the format phenomenon the general buying public are blissfully ignorant of the toxicity embedded within this software.)

What do these marketing events mean? Why are they doing this?

OOXML is being reviewed in an ISO process called the BRM (Ballot Resolution Meeting) that's scheduled for a week in February. The OOXML format specification is so bad that it failed an ISO voting round back in September 2007. And when the howling died down and the fruits & vegetables were cleared from the stage Microsoft immediately proceeded to set up a website and process to start dealing with feedback on comments so numerous (over 1,000 unique comments) and objections so material that they could not be dealt with in the few hours allotted to the BRM meeting in February. Consequently, ECMA (the OOXML format's responsible development body) is announcing the changes or feature deprecations planned for the OOXML specification.

Trouble is these changes to the format will never make it into the Office 2007 software products -- which are shipping as we speak. And Microsoft has never intended for the new XML formats (with file extensions .docx, .xlsx, .pptx) implemented in Office 2007|8 to fully reflect the OOXML specification.

Along with disabling the legacy document formats in Office 2003 through service pack 3, these measures together represent on their face Microsoft's "Customer Pull-Up" strategy designed to coerce customers to move into the company's next-generation lock-in tank. The Pull-Up is insidious because customers, under what appears to them to be their own free will, purchase new Microsoft software fearing that to be without access to Microsoft's newest document formats they will not be able to do work.

Apart from OpenOffice.org & ODF and a few almost-finished "Office 2.0" Web applications (Gdocs, Buzzword, Zoho, et al.), the only thing we have to stop this is the quixotic & flaccid "Just Say No" campaign.

Even if Microsoft's efforts to get OOXML passed at ISO fail this coming February, Microsoft will keep trying. This will add to indefinite uncertainty ahead for IT decision-makers. A better outcome might even be to have OOXML succeed in February! Such an outcome would probably create such a frenzy of standards reform that all existing ISO standards would be put under question.

Our only practical hope for finality is to put a bullet in the temple of OOXML.

The Imposition of .docx

Joe Wilcox made an aside in a recent post on Microsoft Watch ...

Today, an editor called to say that he couldn't open a story that I e-mailed to him. He asked if I had saved it in an Office 2007 format. I used Word 2007 to write and save the document, but distinctly recalled using the standard .doc format. Turns out, that Word's auto-recover feature led to a format change. While working on the document, Windows Vista mysteriously shut down. When Vista restarted, I opened Word, which provided a recovered version of the document. I worked in that version and saved it, without realizing that Word 2007 reverted to the default behavior of the new .docx format. Please insert your favorite curse word here: _______. Microsoft is way too heavy-handed about the new file formats. The default setting should be to the older formats, which everybody uses.

If you can't open a Word document, look for the filename.extension and ask the sender for an appropriate format -- .doc (or .pdf) -- if you get one of these unopenable .docx documents.

It's not your fault. You're not a bad person. Don't blame yourself. It's unfair, I know.

It's broken okay? The system. We're doing our best to make it right. A lot of people want it to stay broken. We're working on it as hard a person can.

Whatever you do, do not react by purchasing a new version of Microsoft Office (that's 2007) for $700 or $300 or whatever. That doesn't help the problem. Go and get OpenOffice.org for free (for Windows, Mac OS X or Linux).

Microsoft Breaks the Plugins

Tiffany Maleshefski at eWeek Labs is giving the Plugins the once-over-twice and she kindly put up the slides of her experience with Sun's faulty attempt.

Observe the trouble Sun Microsystems' engineers are having getting their ODF plugin to work in MS Office. See the presentations here...

Sun is having trouble because Microsoft is breaking interoperability deliberately through hi-jinks with the Dynamic-Link Libraries ("dll") in Windows.

From Sun's Malte Timmermann's blog...

Q: Why doesn't it support Office 2007?

A: Well, basically, it does, but there is an issue in Word's 2007 Filter API handling. You can save to ODF, but when you try to open ODF, Word ignores the installed filters and tries to open with it's own filters. Of course Word can't, so you get an error message "The Office Open XML file <name> cannot be opened because there are problems with the content". This even happens if you explicitly select the ODF filter! I hope Microsoft will fix this issue with the next service pack. If not, we will work around this bug by doing the same kind of integration like in PowerPoint and Excel.

As marbux says, "Welcome to dll Hell!"

Microsoft's Brian Jones innocently says 'Gee I can't imagine how that's happening?'

You're making me laugh, Microsoft.

You went to the DoJ for this behavior in Netscape. This is going to add to your fines in Europe. We know how you're doing it; we're going to tell on you.

If Brian Jones is obviously looking in the wrong place and can't grok what's happening it's because his head is buried in XML (within the files) and it's the Windows Department who are playing fast & loose with interoperability: the file-association behavior of Office 2007 was working for the OpenDocument Foundation's da Vinci Plugin with Office 2007 Beta and broke in the Final version (yes, we've known about this for about 6 months).

Y'all are some dirty mutherfuckers.

Give me your markets, or I'll take them from you.

Paste me an e-mail

The other day at work, I tried to send a coworker a copy of some long text, like 3 pages, in an email.  It was the first time I used MS Office 2007 because it's what's installed, even though I tried using Thunderbird before, long story (at the time, and possibly still, it was unable to process Outlook / Exchange meeting requests... it lead to an embarrassing story) (Yes, I know of Entourage, but still, I got work to do :)  ).

Exhibit A:  Compose an e-mail in Outlook Express:

Exhibit B:  Compose email in Thunderbird:

These might seem like I'm showing how menus look, but they're the only images I could find!  You'll see what I'm getting at here (and from the title)

Observe Exhibit C:

The "Paste" button is where the "Send" is supposed to be!  It's very frustrating.  By the time I found it while sending my coworker the email, I noticed I had pasted the long text 3 extra times.  I just said f@%# it and hit the send button finally.  I just told him "Umm, Office's interface is confusing... you only have to read around 1/4 of the email I sent you."  He said that he also found the new position of the send button to be totally unintuitive based on behavioral conditioning.  I express sincere discontent about this because, as a software developer, I have to make things as familiar to idiot users (like myself) as I can, even if creating something completely new.  Outlook, on the other hand, adds in no new functionality, but completely reworks the interface.

I guess we just have to use the Alt+S or whatever send is on most email clients... if they haven't changed that to Ctrl-V on us.  At least it'll be an ongoing joke, when we say things along the lines of "Yo, I pasted you an email, did you get it?"

Plan B: No-Vista Policies about to Proliferate

Okay.

The world is about to announce its "Plan B". Now that ISO is moving ahead to fast-track MOOXML, the world is voting with its feet. I'm hearing accounts in the UK, Europe are joining the list of US Federal government agencies who will not be procuring Vista/Office2007 anytime soon.

It's a full-blown Vista boycott. The market is making itself heard loud & clear.

Open Standards Mandatory in Denmark

John Gøtze kindly brings to our attention a new development in the Danish government's progress toward open software standards.

Now, having gotten past the preliminaries of whats, wherefores, hows & whys, the Danes have progressed to the question of implementations. This always reflects a watershed moment for government leaders, staffs & citizens who will be effected. It reflects a body of people coming through a process of understanding and it shows their confidence.

This reminds me of nothing more than Peter Quinn's meeting of vendors in the Massachusetts State House in June of 2005 where he said,

"Open document formats: I get it! But how do I get there? Discuss."

The difference now is that we are dealing with a whole country, Denmark, which according to scale is something like the size of Massachetts within the larger body, the European Union. In contrast to the Massachusetts situation, other parts of the EU are already migrating ahead of whatever policies or regulatory guidelines are being established. These include agencies in France, the UK, Germany and Belgium among others.

There is an interesting similarity to Massachusetts. The policy memorandum, ETRM 3.5, which fostered the ODF debate there was similar to this Danish plan in its underlying motivations and intent.

When a government gets past identifying the ideal scenarios that are possible, those which exist and are ready to implement -- in this case they include open standards like XHTML, CSS, ODF -- and moves on to the questions of how to get them used, there is always a large number of impediments to the final result. These include recalcitrant software monopolies (who are constantly trying to undo good policy work), general inertia against change, decentralized structure of multiple agencies with different ICT systems, leadership and beliefs about what works, and the difficulty in establishing an authoritative, credible but also flexible recipe for pushing change without increasing cost, stress & disruption.

That's why these policy frameworks look so alike: every bureaucracy gets to this same difficult place eventually -- 'How do we get there?'.

Says John Gøtze...

The implementation plan is presented in a report which suggests that “open standards should be implemented gradually by making it mandatory for the public sector to use a number of open standards when this becomes technically feasible”.

What has happened?

The existing Danish Interoperability Framework (in Danish) has become mandatory. Separately, the report lists a number of open standards which should be implemented by Jan 1, 2008, through the normal course of system upgrading (unless the transition is deemed disruptive).  Gøtze mentions a few...

• Standards for data interchange between public authorities
• Standards for electronic file and document handling
• Standards for exchanging documents between public authorities (Open Document Format and Office OpenXML)
• Standards for electronic procurement in the public sector
• Standards for digital signatures
• Standards for public websites / homepages
• Standards for IT security (only within the public sector)

Around a dozen standards: Compliant XHTML or HTML, complaint CSS, WAI Level 2, OCES (digital signature), XML 1.0, XML Schema 1.0, NDR 3.0, FESD (docuument management), OIOUBL, UNSPSC, and DS484 (ISO 17799).

We're interested here in ODF. Here's what the report says about document formats...

With regard to standards for exchanging documents between public authorities, the report proposes that “it should be mandatory to use at least one of the document standards Open Document Format or Office OpenXML”, and that it is up to the individual agency to decide what they want. The report explains that a study will be conducted this year with “the purpose of obtaining the necessary experience with these standards before 1 January 2008″.

So, the Danes are looking at a mandatory shift to either or both of the two XML-based document formats. You say ODF AND MSOOXML BOTH! EEEEEEK!

This gives me no anxiety whatsoever. MSOOXML has already been thoroughly de-bunked vis a vis its repudiation of other existing standards; it is in perhaps a perpetual deep-freeze at ISO (from which Microsoft will not seek or wish to remove it, since "ISO status pending" is all they need to sell it; the alternative is to re-wire their entire new catalog of software); under further use testing and scrutiny in Denmark, its repudiation of the basic intentions of XML will be highlighted; and under scrutiny in Denmark the thorough dependency of MSOOXML documents upon the Microsoft stack (Vista, Exchange, Sharepoint, Outlook, MS SQL Server, IE7, Office 2007, Groove, etc.) and their lack of interoperability & compatibility outside the new Microsoft stack will be underscored and well understood. The Danes will find that MSOOXML is no solution.

Regarding document interoperability the Danes will learn on their own about the three possible solutions, two of which are free and one still requiring funding...

1) the Microsoft-Clever Age-Novell "MCAN" Translator (at sourceforge and being integrated into only Novell's version of OpenOffice.org)

2) the Sun Microsystems Plugin (still in development and promising document exchange fidelity equivalent to OpenOffice.org, which Massachusetts originally deemed inadequate for its decentralized migration)

3) the OpenDocument Foundation's Interoperability Suite (not funded but promising 100% document fidelity delivered through a) Plugin [Windows client], b) InfoSet API [server] and c) OpenOffice feature-set governor [OOo-side client])

Standards Push-Back in a Nutshell

FT's Richard Waters sums up the Microsoft ISO contradiction situation with a crisp economy on the FT Tech Blog...

...it is at the least inconvenient for Redmond, and potentially more worrying, that the International Standards Organisation has just added another three months to its review of the matter, following representations from the UK (and possibly other countries.)

A perceptive comment to the post gets right to the heart of the matter...

Given that MicroSoft needs the "standard" label to get contracts, but doesn't actually want interoperability (which would increase competition and drive down prices), it shouldn't come as a surprise that they're encountering resistance from the standards bodies. I would expect them to create the worst possible standard they can get away with. It's the rational thing to do, and the people who run Microsoft are very skilled.

- S. Dolgoff

Feel free to go on and comment.

Office Feature Mis-Match

Response to"ACME 376" has been strong, as we had hoped.

We have fielded some very useful questions at the OpenDocument Foundation as well as quite a few sample documents from enquiring customers. Let me address this one immediately...

Question:

How does the plugin cope with features from MS Office that are represented in the legacy .doc files that OpenOffice.org, for example, cannot handle?

Answer:

This is a question about document format compatibility with different appliations. If viewed from a more holistic point of view, it's a quesiton about system interoperability around a document format.

Yes, there are features in MS Office applications which are represented in the .doc format which OpenOffice.org does not duplicate. (And it is reasonable to assume that there will always be some form of feature mis-match between applications. Life isn't perfect.)

In short, the da Vinci ODF Plugin for MS Office loads into your Office | Windows installation (precisely as you have seen it can in your testing work with "ACME 376"). da Vinci intercepts the in-memory representation of a (working or outputted file), sends it through the da Vinci ODF conversion engine and tags the elements in the file that OpenOffice.org does not recognize with a special tag. Such a tag preserves the information so that the file can go back from ODF to its original format back in the Microsoft application where all the data will have been preserved & where it will be recognized there. This is what we call a "high-fidelity round-trip".

One day, when applications are ODF-Certified through an automated system (which we have yet to develop), high-fidelity round-tripping will be the standard practise and will work successfully for infinite round-trips across any & all Certified systems. Meantime, round-tripping needs to be minimized because standardization around a single format is so immature.

(Please keep in mind that da Vinci files that are generated/originated in ODF cannot be viewed in the current OpenOffice.org v2.0 [which is compliant with ODF spec v1.0] because da Vinci is designed to work with ODF specification v1.2, which is due to be represented in a version of OpenOffice.org later this year.)   

I hope this general example indicates how the Plugin is faithful to the FORMAT of the original document, that the incompatibility is with the APPLICATION. It is the very best and all a format can do until the application is designed to deal successfully with specific features. (Unrecognized elements will iteratively be recognized as application development moves forward. If your organization has specific features or elements requiring mapping into OpenOffice.org, then the OpenDocument Foundation can engage with you to write an effective spec to have the work done if the OOo team is not responsive.)

As you know, feature mis-match is a problem that arrises when working with legacy files which is not a real-world problem when files are generated/originated in the ODF format in MS Office or OpenOffice.org. The example above permits us to say "perfect fidelity" because the integrity is total at the format level -- if an application cannot read an element that's represented properly in the format, that's the application's fault.

If applications are not made to be compatible, then in this open source world it is incumbent on the customer to make sure the work is being done to satisfy the requirement. This is why the ODF Tool Kit is critical and needs to be funded too.

FYI, on the ODF-compliant server-side, the OpenDocument Foundation is also working on the ODF InfoSet API & SDK which is targeted to businesses seeking to integrate da Vinci-quality ODF capabilities into web applications, for example, in the office 2.0, the messaging and the CMS areas. Are you listening Google, Zoho, JotSpot, Alfresco, Zimbra & Lotus Notes?

da Vinci as you know was made to address the requirements of Massachusetts ITD.

This is a generalized response to a question that deserves a detailed explanation using real-world examples. We'll be in the best position to have a productive discussion of document compatibility and system interoperability with you if you send us sample documents that represent compatibility issues for you.

Excel 2007 Surprises & Vista Disappoints

IBM's Rob Weir found some unpleasant surprises in Excel 2007.

There were crashes -- upon every exit! There's really awful backward compatibility with unknown elements being dropped when not saving to the old binary format...

click image

There's a nice user-friendly wizard in the File->Save As path with an imposing & confusing array of file format choices, leaving more questions than answers...

click image

And lowe & behold -- much to our utter surprise -- there's a new binary format. Not just backward compatibility with the old "BIFF" .xls format. But one we've never heard of before (a new "BIFF12" version of .xls).

What on earth do they think they are doing? And why has this been hidden from public discourse?

Run like bloody Hell from these proprietary dependencies, these audacious lock-ins! (Looks to me like part of a strategy to kill off ODF by getting Microsoft's XML format ratified at ISO and then bringing everyone back to the old binary slavery paradigm. They really hate defaulting to XML -- as the Europeans are demanding.)

Format politics aside, the conclusion this suggests is consistent with John Welch's findings in his (6 Jan 2007) InformationWeek piece comparing Vista to Mac OS X. Welch makes a great -- no, great -- set of analogies: "Operational Philosopy"...OS X is the English butler, quietly getting things done; Vista is the overexcited Boy Scout on caffeine, overeager to tell you unnecessarily what's going on...

To put it simply, you can work on a Mac for hours, days even, and only minimally need to directly use the OS. With Vista? The OS demands your attention, constantly.

Microsoft still can't manage to make something simple and easy to use. Vista reeks of committee and design by massive consensus...

What interests me is that Microsoft has built a system in response to five years of frustrated customer feedback on the insecurity and other weaknesses of Window XP while the world has moved on to an OS where we don't need to even think about it or be conscious of what it does. The OS has moved on to morphing into the background just as Scott McNealy used to say it would -- like a "dialtone".

[Note that I've segued smoothly from talking about Excel and its file formats to talking about the problems of the Vista operating system design. This is technically bad form, an inconsistency, but users don't make the distinction.]

Meanwhile Microsoft's head has been in its own world, mainly trying to overcome the amazingly bad designs of its early systems. Well, they're on their way to solving those problems with Vista...

...but they're no longer the relevant problems of a world flush with open source and open standard software. (Note, please, that Mac OS X is based on the BSD code which is among the most secure operating systems known. Within the decade, Windows -- if it survives -- will do so because it got a complete rewrite to BSD.)

Novell's "Danaergeschenk"

Free Software Foundation Europe's George Greve writes a precise assessment on Groklaw of Novell's commitment to Microsoft's "interoperability." This takes place upon the eve of Ecma's rubber-stamping of the Microsoft XML format and its handoff to ISO and upon the eve of the announcement that Novell has inserted the Clever Age ODF translator into its patent-protected build of OpenOffice.org software.

From a naive stance, having two standards for documents may not seem so bad. But when considering that only ODF really is an Open Standard fully supported by multiple office applications and that the OpenXML format will be pushed with all the power of the dominant desktop vendor, it becomes obvious that accepting both ultimately means undoing the political efforts on Open Standards that have been undertaken in the past years.

Please! A Must-Read for CIOs, state gov't policy-makers and the File Format Cognoscenti.

George Greve | FSF Europe | Groklaw (8 Dec 2006)

Hiser on Don Marti's LinuxWorld Podcast

Don Marti was Editor of LinuxJournal during its long and important middle phase. He's now back at LinuxWorld.com as Senior Editor.

MP3 (24:02)

Don & Gary Edwards and I spoke together a few weeks ago about the GPL-ing of Java and the conversation turned to our file format work on ODF at the OpenDocument Foundation. This led to the LinuxWorld Podcast, which Don recorded late last night after my return from Boston.

Hiser...

"We have to stop being coy...if we're serious about the success of Linux in the market-place -- either desktop or server -- we have to be realistic about aggressively attacking some of the choke-points these gorillas are exerting..."

Don's questions were excellent -- they're questions we've been hoping to field from the Linux sector for years now. I ramble through the points (am fixing that), but the conversation represents our views clearly,and hopefully for a wider than usual audience.

Business is Business

Business is business in the office suite monopoly.

Bob Sutor has an interesting synthesis of Microsoft financials (referring to Tim Bray's comment a year ago)...

"[From 2006 reports]...this 'information worker' segment of the business generated about 26% of the revenue but about 50% of the operating income for Microsoft."

...with the fresh news of Microsoft User-Interface license which excludes GPL software.

The Nexus of Competition

Anyone serious about affecting balance in the software markets in the last ten years has had to address the need for another office suite to compete with Microsoft's Office franchise. Anyone, by turns, who is really serious in this objective has naturally and rightly gone one step further, to address the need for another format for documents to compete with Microsoft's .doc, .xls, .ppt and other formats.

Sun Microsystems rose to the challenge in acquring Star Division and in (almost) open sourcing the code to OpenOffice (the project has never been open enough to solve some of the more vexing technical problems of document interoperability). And everyone who has pitched in on OpenOffice, for better or worse between 1999 and the present, has risen in their own modest way to the call. Similarly true of KOffice and, now, of the AJAX-driven office suite services.

In the last few years the battleground, or rather the emphasis, has shifted away from the software applications themselves to where it should be. The XML-based file format originated in the early versions of OpenOffice/StarOffice got a name change -- to "OpenDocument" -- and got into the ISO ratification process in May 2005 and was ratified as an ISO standard a year later. ISO ratification generated a surge of interest in the format, fresh belief that an alternative could exist, and kicked off IT policy conversations in government offices around the world. These conversations have borne fruit in places like Massachusetts, Minnesota, Denmark, France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Malaysia, Norway, Germany -- to name the ones who have permitted their processes to be public -- and such conversations have successfully and naturally drifted into actual policies as well as plans for implementation of ODF where it counts on the desktops PCs throughout the offices of governmental agencies.

These are extremely positive developments for renewing competive balance in software markets, particularly since a year ago not a soul predicted such a level of rising interest in something as arcane as a document file format standard. And the trend is more likely to expand than contract -- even despite the possibility that Microsoft's upcoming XML-based file formats may get ISO approval, too. (IBM's Bob Sutor -- a mathematician by background -- said deep in his blog somewhere that the Standard Deviation of our year-ago expectations for ODF versus reality has been exceedingly wide; and it will likely to continue to widen even as we ratchet up our expectations.)

Looking back on where we were, where we've been, what we thought and said, I'm still surprised that it has taken so long for the emphasis to shift to the file format -- where the market control-points actually reside. However, I take solace in the reminder that we are talking about real Diffusion of Innovation. If we consult Rogers, Moore & Christensen on the topic, then we recognize that we are in the midst of a historical shift in the way people do things. Populations, particularly large populations in the hundreds of millions, take time to absorb new methods, new habits, new customs and new ideas.

Looking back, as I was doing, I found an article from Spring 2002 by Aaron Rouse in the Inquirer; that online journal was early to recognize the meaning of OpenOffice and of what OpenOffice and its format meant. (The OpenOffice 1.0 launch came only two months after this article, which you might say was three or four years ahead of its time.)

The Rouse article is really worth reading because even in 2002 Mr Rouse was sensitive to the importance of the file format, and the article walks the reader briefly through his experiences of particular software dependencies which drove his offices in certain directions. Business processes, he said in 2002, are at the heart of how Microsoft engineered a form of behavioral control over the wide market. And it will serve us well today to recognize how the mechanism works if we are going to unwind this particular Equilibrium.

The nexus of competition in the software markets is the common document format. Eyes are on the prize.

Don't Bet Against the 'Net

Google's Schmidt...

Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, has said he believes that the rise of advertising-supported Web services will increasingly undercut Microsoft's model, which is to use a proprietary software development system and sell shrink-wrapped applications.

"Almost no pure PC software companies are left (all is on the Internet), most proprietary standards (I'm thinking of Exchange e-mail and file systems protocols from Microsoft) are under attack from open protocols gaining share rapidly on the Internet," he wrote recently in an internal company memo titled "Don't Bet Against the Internet."

John Markoff | NYTimes & Int'l Herald Tribune (8 Oct 2006)

IBM's Rob Weir Gets to the Point

Rob Weir's last three posts to his blog, each concerning his reading of Microsoft's file format activities, bear wide attention.

"A Game of Zendo"

Much is hidden. Because Microsoft legacy file format specs remain undocumented the ECMA spec, which claims "backward compatibility" as a goal and points into private documentation, cannot be verified to be faithfully compatible. We'll never know.

Rob asks, is this for the benefit of Office 2007 developers only? If so, it suggests that the MSECMAXML standardization process does not satisfy the requirements of a standard because it is not a collaborative process, driven by public consensus, but a consultative process that's been driven by legacy technology that's tied to single-vendor functionality.

"Lost in Transaltion"

Looking at spec documentation and performing file operations, Rob finds the ODF Translator project to be lacking some key ingredients in file conversion and having an underwhelming set of goals.

If Microsoft is "supporting" this project, why are the usual ODF dark-spots (bullets, numbered lists) still dark? It suggests that objectives for the Translator are low-fi. 

"Traduttore, Traditore (Translator, Traitor)"

Rob looks at the interface design of the suggested ODF Translator and finds that the format is not given fair billing. When using the Translator for which Microsoft claims "support", ODF a) cannot be made the default format; b) documents can not be round-tripped; c) documents are not accessible via the familiar keyboard shortcuts for opening and saving files (Control-O and Control-S); d) documents pay a performance penalty for having to be indirectly converted via Draft Office Open XML rather than via native support.

Close inspection indicates Microsoft's messaging does not match their plans & actions.

What Does the Plugin Accomplish for Organizations?

There is a lot of speculation about an MS Office plugin that enables the legacy office suites to work in the OpenDocument Format (ODF). What I don't see is informed discussion from the point of view of Microsoft enterprise customers (including governments) about what the Plugin would achieve for them.

There are two important things the Plugin accomplishes for large & small organizations that are already entrenched in MS Office software on the desktop:

A -Ends Version Madness.

B -Introduces a durably open file format for documents without a disruptive change of software.

(A) is self-evident to this readership. Among the sappers of office-worker productivity is MS Office Version Madness, which describes the document incompatibilities arising from Microsoft's customary changes to its document file format recipes in Word 6.0, Office 95, 97, 2000 and XP which make documents inaccessible with various permutations of office suite versions and make everybody enormously frustrated and which also harm productivity in just about every office setting. (I needn't go into it because the experience is universal among this white-collar PC-using audience; however, I might add that the end of Version Madness is also a very attractive prospect to individual PC users at home, school or SoHo.)

The Plugin ends Version Madness because it provides a single, unified file format in which all modern versions of MS Office can work -- file conversions going both ways -- as well as handles repeated round tripping smoothly. 

(B) deserves a bit of explanation. For state governments, like The Commonwealth of Massachusetts which was the very first organization to put out a call to hear if any such Plugin might exist, the move to the open standard OpenDocument Format is intelligent and wise. The strong case for ODF in the document-centric business processes of regional, state & municipal government will eventually be universally obvious.

The case for it, in fact, is overwhelming; ask the EU, ask the Danish, ask the UK, ask the German Ministries, ask around. News to the contrary from Microsoft officials (Jason Matusow, for example) and from Matusow Bootlicks (Matt Asay, for example) is either malintentioned disinformation or ignorant and self-involved cow-towing. 

The trouble, though, for these organizations is how to implement ODF without changing software. They need ODF, but a rip & replace of MS Office runs afoul of the interests of disabilities organizations which rightly assert the fear, cost and difficulties of substituting desktop software that breaks exisitng Assistive Technology integration with MS Windows & Office. (It's not ODF's -- the format's -- lack of integration with Assistive Technologies as much as the lack of present Assistive Technology integration with OpenOffice or StarOffice -- the application. (A format itself has minimal inter-course with AT devices and applications compared to the significant involvement of AT devices and applications with the productivity applications themselves.) Confusing the format with the application has been central in Microsoft's fatuous strategic path in The Commonwealth; hiding behind complexity, a perennial & skillful gambit of Bill Gates and his company's leaders.)

The Plugin resolves the Assistive Technology problem for ODF-minded organizations. This is true simply because the Plugin leaves MS Office, with all its functionality (to which all users are accustomed) and all its Assistive Technology integration (on which disabled people depend to get work done), on the desktop.

The Plugin achieves ODF implementation with no threat to people with disabilities. The disability card is thus removed as an argument for organizations to stay away from ODF. How many more excuses can we remove for you, now?

Brian, it is about formats.

Brian Jones is a Microsoft programmer working with the XML file formats that will (ostensibly) be released late next year with Office 2007/2008. Last week he took the opportunity -- Hey, let's start talking about the technologies and what kind of solutions we can build! -- of recycling some more FUD against ODF by regurgitating the words of M. David Peterson, a .Net programmer and interested party / slave to the Microsoft value-chain.

Wrote Peterson, for O'Reilly Net's XML.com, referring to the unfortunate amount of resources spent on lobbying politicians,

'"Whether anyone on the ODF side is willing to admit it or not, this isn't about document formats."'

For one thing, it is ironic that a Microsoft sycophant should find fault with Microsoft competitors for lobbying. By no means are other parties lobbying in Massachusetts anywhere near as hard as Microsoft. (To say nothing of the Grand Slam your Chairman performed getting Ralph Reed and Jack Abramoff via Preston Gates & Ellis to influence the Bush Administration's removal of the prosecutor AND the judge in the DoJ case. Not to mention not to mention that the new judge was a card-carrying laissez faire Capitalist Tool. Masterful! Bravissimo!)

And, Brian, you need to understand that OpenDocument Format is a format. This conflict is about formats. In light of The Commonwealth's Request for Information about an MS Office plugin for legacy applications to work in the ODF format, permit me to inform you that your assertions are misleading and unwise. The Commonwealth's ETRM 3.5 policy is about open standard formats and only about open standard formats; and you're words to the contrary indicate that you must be unaware that Microsoft has continually been invited to integrate ODF with Office. Well, it looks like we're going to have to do it for you.

Hey, let's start talking about the strategic blunder of the new century: Microsoft trying to get your closed & proprietary "open" XML file format ratified by the ISO! Bwaah hah hah hah hhhhaaaaaahhhh. A 2-year distraction.

Brian, your work on another XML format, a second XML format for office documents, is worse than redundant; it's moot.

The market today has no tolerance for Microsoft's so-called "open" formats when they do not meet the commonly agreed requirements of an open software standard. Vista is just too much to swallow and, with your formats and their "optimized processing" tied irretrievably to your own code at the application and operating system levels, you are digging a hole from which you will never come out...and not the hole, as you hope, from which your customers will never come out...since they won't be your customers much longer.

Plugin Prompts Torrent of FUD

Disability groups in Massachusetts and Microsoft's army of lobbyists and its network of disinformation agents have sparked up a new round of FUD against The Commonwealth's ETRM 3.5 open standards policy.

Microsoft is scared shitless of The Plugin, a piece of software that will install on Windows and with MS Office to enable MS Office to work with files in the OpenDocument format. The Commonwealth last week issued a Request For Information to find out if any such software exists (this is customary procurement policy to ensure all vendors participate), and there was at least one interesting response in the affirmative from The OpenDocument Foundation, Inc. 501(c)3 (of which this author is a member).

So far, the FUD contains the same old factual errors we saw spreading around last Fall which are comical in their lack of depth but difficult to set right in the public mind: confusing open source with open standards; confusing standards policy with procurement policy; and setting up a negative framing of the issues.

Bob Sutor does a great job addressing one piece of FUD in particular from The Initiative for Software Choice -- another Microsoft-sponsored Astroturf organization. As the name suggests, The Initiative for Software Choice is about keeping choice AWAY from software markets.

Yeah. There's just no way to posit with any sense of self-worth that ETRM 3.5 is a pro-open source policy. It's an open standards policy; and Microsoft HATES those when they interfere with the company's control of markets its control over household and enterprise budget decisions which always flow into their avaricious, gaping and drooling mouths. Hell hath no fury like a corrupt corporation scorned.

Who's Your Daddy?

A while ago, while I was OpenOffice.org Marketing Project lead and full of fire-in-the-belly to evangelize OpenOffice through local retail establishments, I had an edifying series of encounters on the Mean Streets.

At the time -- this must have been back in the Autumn of 2002, the year OpenOffice.org 1.0 came out in that May with our big globally coordinated PR push led by the wonderful Zaheda Bhorat (ex- of Apple & Sun, now at Google) -- Members of NYLUG and elsewhere were rather interested in the idea of an OpenOffice boxed set to fill the shelves at retail. This conceptually was the bricks & mortar version of colleague, Anthony Long's, Flexeity Software: selling OpenOffice CD's bundled with pre-paid email & online support. Here's Anthony's Z-Shop at Amazon, still up.

On my own reconnaissance mission in NYC, I went down to some retailers and took the temperature of the store managers' attitudes to giving shelf space to a $19.95 to $49.95 boxed version of OpenOffice.org 1.x. There were also discussions with some college book stores (Columbia, Yale & Princeton) about a possible unobtrusive countertop display -- like the nicely designed & branded cardboard holder that Ubuntu ships with each substantial ShipIt shipment -- holding free OpenOffice CD's or those including OpenOffice and other great free apps from The Open CD Project (which Canonical, Ubuntu's pecunious parent, has since "acquired"). The two retailers I visited were CompUSA and Tekserve, the latter being the most successful Apple retailer in the world which has the best support shop to prove it (still offering 10-cent Cokes from an old-fashioned Coke machine, while you wait for your number).

Long story short, the response from retailers about OpenOffice was tepid, ranging from an Academy Award-winning glassy-eyed stare of feigned ignorance to overt hostility and threats of violence. It took me a while to process the meaning of this -- I mean, shouldn't the world, tut monde, love a cheaper alternative to MS Office? But it hardly takes an MBA to figure out the problem. It's Retail 101 from the OldSchool: the problem is retail margins, i.e, at our price-point and market share we had nothing in the long green department to offer retailers.

If OpenOffice -- or Sun's StarOffice, for that matter -- wanted shelf-space at retail, it would need to dice & price the same as MS Office and its myriad versions (in order give the retailer an equal dollar profit on each unit) AND pay additional marketing spiffs to the retailers just to get on the shelves. This, to say the obvious, is beyond the means of the duct-taped mailbag toting rabble of students, college professors, save-the-whales do-gooders, office suite hackers and dot-com refugees who made up the OpenOffice Marketing Project at the time. Tea & toast as well as the one step above dial-up DSL plan was about the extent of our individual resources in addition to lots of time for endless threads of opinionated, often directionless, chat across time zones at weird hours of night and weirder hours of the day.

In retrospect, our intention that OOo would penetrate through retail channels, catch fire and overtake Mindshare in the general populace was Quixotic. It was the manager at Tekserve whose laconic cocking of his head (like a less excited version of my dog when I'm speaking to her) first disabused me of this enterprising daring do. When I asked him if the shop would like to offer free OpenOffice CD's on the counter, which I would happily re-stock regularly, he said, "Ah, no," as if (I now realize) he was only pretending to consider it.

In CompUSA, I got a really enthusiastic young guy who loved the idea to pitch it to the Manager; they were over there together for 10 minutes. The young attendant was gesticulating with his arms ('...but can't you see...it's so great!...). The Manager was looking up at me from their conversation like I was a homeless person and he was about to call the police. The young attendant came back and simply told me the news: "Uhm, you see. We make over a hundred bucks on each box of MS Office Pro...ya get it?" Following the math, I now can hardly believe the level of my own naivete'.

My experiences at the college bookstores were similar, if not actually life-threatening. At one -- which shall remain nameless (the one in NYC with no undergraduate social-life) -- the store manager yelled at me and saw me out with a large security guard checking me with repeated nudges past the t-shirts, coffee mugs, baseball caps and shrink-wrapped boxes of MS Office (priced low for edu). After gathering my mail bag and my cell phone which had skittered across the floor under the Alternative CD display, it took me a while and a bit of research through my connections in Registrar's to realize that part of the university agreements with Microsoft prohibit alternative software to be sold at the universities' on-campus bookstores. So much for our liberal bastions of free-thinking. The truth would make Larry Summers run swiftly and even apologize.

The MS Office alternatives like OpenOffice cannot crack the Mindshare Bind by naively accumulating users and developers alone until they can offer something like real cash to the retail channel or until some courageous or foolhardy soul sues the universities and Microsoft for having made illegal agreements. Same with the OEM channel. Open source must be able to replace the vigorish coming from Windows & MS Office if our new, new thing is going to play hardball.

The commercially inept open source projects won't ever go there successfully and, thankfully now that OpenDocument is taking off in its own right, they won't need to. Google is going to come in with Writely and whatever OpenOffice code they need and fund a competive office suite web service that will catch on and provide the necessary sprinkling of the retail and OEM channels to bump the other guy. It was Jason Calcanis who I saw speculating that Google will be able to cut a revenue share of the ads delivered via Goolge Desktops on Dell, hp or other OEM PCs. Perhaps Jason wasn't the first to make this point.

With regard to interrupting the influential cash flows that sustain the Microsoft Kairetsu, Google is the only open source entity with the dosh and the intent. Watch how quickly Dell, hp, Fujitsu Siemens, Lenovo and the whitebox chorus leap to Linux when Google demonstrates where Daddy really lives.