PlexNex

BRM Diary #1

What is OOXML?

OOXML ("Office Open XML") is far more than an intentionally confusing acronym and a new structured format for Office 2007, it is the lingua franca for Microsoft's assault on Cloud Computing and the Internet. The format plays in so many other new Adobe- and Google-killing mechanisms (XPS, Silverlight) and links to so many of Microsoft's new products (Sharepoint, Exchange, Windows Server, SQL Server, Windows Live, Facebook, among others) that anti-trust regulators have another 10 years of work cut out for them and naive enterprise CIO's letting this stuff in their house will be freezing procurement until their retirement -- so intolerant is this software of non-Microsoft innovation.

What is ODF?

The OpenDocument Format is the default file format in Sun's OpenOffice.org and IBM's Lotus Symphony office suite applications. ODF once had promise as a Universal Document Format, but Sun & IBM (with Google, Oracle and others supporting in the wings) have made it into a marketing & political force of opposition against OOXML, devoid of technical merit toward real-world interoperability. ODF beat OOXML to the punch of ISO ratification (2005), so we will be lucky if National Standards Bodies ("NB's) his week do not put OOXML into play as an ISO standard just to rectify a past mistake -- or rather to correct a hopeful move that became subsequently nullified by vendor manipulations. Here, all vendors have behaved badly -- not only Microsoft.

Current thinking of the Format Cognoscenti

The standards silverbacks have said all along that these things usually degrade into harmonization efforts in which the two opposing standards are merged; however, if centimeters & inches can hold out a few hundred years, I'm not convinced about these byzantine formats. The Harmonization crowd have appointed the German standards group DIN, who have asked the Fraunhofer Gesellshaft to write a long paper -- presumably in a standard language -- about harmonization possibilities (an odd 15% of the thousands of pages of ODF's and OOXML's specifications rigidly do not overlap); early news is they will have to throw in the towel on harmonization of the two formats ("a technical impossibility") without harmonization of the applications ("a commercial impossibility").

It's wait and see if at the BRM ISO should reject OOXML ("... and never come back!"); in such a case we'd have some breathing room. If OOXML is conditionally accepted, we'd better start getting our goodbyes to the Internet made orderly. The most likely outcome is an impossible to comprehend conditional approval or continued meetings scheduled to draw OOXML's fate indefinitely into the future. 

ISO BRM Press Release

National delegations from 37 countries will be participating in a ballot resolution meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, on 25-29 February 2008 on the draft international standard ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML file formats.

BRM FAQ

'BRM' is not even in TheFreeDictionary yet. Read up on the arcane procedures of the International Standards Organization, which are so convoluted they cannot be enforced unless everyone is on birthday-party behavior -- which is decidedly not the case.

Sutor arrives in Geneva for panels wearing a sceptic's hat.

Some interesting questions ...

(Q) Why is it so important to Microsoft to get OOXML approved by ISO (when they are not the slightest bit threatened by ODF)?

(A) Brian Proffit, Managing Editor of Linux Today, says the answer is in the Cloud.

(Q) How will we be able to distinguish real misbehavior at the BRM from the shrill, incongruous & unsupported cries of fraud coming from Roy Schestowitz' Boycott Novell?

(A) You won't.

Sharpen your pencils, it's going to be a snoozer.

Microsoft Concedes They've Been Cheeting All Along

Joe Wilcox hits it hard -- all good wood -- in his spot on assessment of the shadow interoperability measures just announced which were supposed to rock our world ...

Ozzie said that the information disclosure demonstrates "our commitment to an open and level playing field." I find the statement hugely perplexing. How is that commitment defined? Microsoft will disclose Office and Windows information that is available to the company's other product groups. So, interoperability—a "level playing field"—means that third-party developers will get the same information access that Microsoft developers already have.

What the hell? Ozzie's statement means one of two things, and neither reflects well on Microsoft's interoperability commitment. Either the information was already available or it wasn't. If it already was available, then there is nothing new here and Microsoft is blowing PR smoke. If the information wasn't already available, then Microsoft is conceding that US and European trustbusters were right all along—that the playing field wasn't level, that Microsoft developers had access to information not available to third parties.

Microsoft: still a bunch of gangsters.

Did somebody grant Microsoft immunity for releasing these APIs? Do I smell the Mother of all Class-Action suits?

Remedies for Microsoft's Non-Compliant Browser Habit

Microsoft are still trying to break the Web.

Håkon Wium Lie -- Opera's CTO and a co-creator of CSS -- speaks for me when he lists five clear remedies the EU competition authorities can use to force Microsoft to better respect Web & browser standards in its forthcoming version of its Web browser, Internet Explorer 8 (beta upcoming).

1. Support Acid2 and Acid3, by default;
2. Support the underlying Acid specifications;
3. Provide documentation;
4. Drop mode switching;
5. Commit to interoperability;

I would add that the EU should immediately force, once and for all, the unbundling of IE from Windows. Although a browser is the new programming platform; it is not a natural part of an operating system. Only sophistry can be used to pursue that point.

What also caught my attention in the article was howcome's subtle point that Microsoft's rigidity in not bowing to firestorms of customer & developer pressure to a) kill IE8's mode switching (a Microsoft excuse for non-compliance with Web programming standards); and b) continue selling Windows XP are prima facie evidence of monopoly.

In other words, if Microsoft had to compete, the company would have rapidly changed tack to eliminate mode switching and keep XP available on the market. They do what they want & don't have to compete, ergo they are a monopoly.

If it walks, talks, balks & stalks like a monopoly ...

In the US, having a monopoly is not the punishable offense but using it to accrue unjust profit is. Accordingly, website owners should be enabled to charge Microsoft for the extra Web programming time|expense it takes to make their sites work on IE as well as Firefox or Opera (for example).

Perhaps President, Barak Obama, with the help of New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer and Congressman Larry Lessig, can help us up the pressure on the recalcitrant software abuser.

File Format Fatigue Sets In

On the eve of ISO's notorious BRM week in Geneva (when national standards bodies try to find reasons to pass Microsoft's format, OOXML, as an international standard like ODF v1.0), we are visited by a strange call for truce from the ODF side's Patrick Durusau -- Sun's employed editor of the OASIS ODF v1.2 (and friend of the erstwhile interop player & my very own, the once and ever, OpenDocument Foundation, the Foundation having joined the august company of Disgruntled OASIS ODF TC Alumnae including Arbortext, Boeing, Corel, Speedlegal, Stellent|BEA|Oracle & others who tired of beating their heads against Jonathan Schwartz's erected brick wall).

Perhaps the most telling part is that Patrick chose to publish his letter in Adobe's PDF fixed file format, so thoroughly has the ODF v OOXML debate deteriorated into distraction from the main point -- which was and still is interoperability ... or rather the lack of it: the inability of word-processors of different vendors, vintages and varieties to open, read and edit files with business-process-level fidelity ... like e-mail and web pages. (The need is for a true interchange format -- what we've called a Universal Document Format for editable documents. Peter Seebach gets right to the point in "OOXML: What's the big deal?" | IBM Developerworks | 19 Feb 2008)

PDF is the real winner here.

click the image for Adobe's James King's insights: "Bits & Pieces"...

At least we have that: a great & useful, open-enough & archive-able fixed document format with aesthetic document layout-presentation nous. This alongside the other news that Blue-ray has won out definitively against HD DVD in the hi-def video medium war. There's reassurance in at least some finality -- somewhere.

Not so lucky are we here in the document format war -- where all conclusions are certain to be inconclusive and the uncertainty has a 50-percent chance of carrying the years 2008 AND 2009.

Patrick's letter, among other things, is a loser's cry for help (with CV attached) because even the EU-sponsored harmonization directive on ISO to work with the German standards body, DIN, parented by the Fraunhoffer braintrust to report on the harmonization potential of ODF & OOXML is proving a waste of time, the directive likely about to produce the conclusion that merging ODF & OOXML is a technical impossibility even if the sponsoring applications -- OpenOffice.org & Microsoft Office -- are harmonized too (a commercial impossibility given how tightly Microsoft, Sun & IBM covet the office application market shares).

The calls for civility, patience, calm & restraint appeal nicely to all parties at this point, tired of personal attacks, misdirection, mud-slinging, character assassination, vitriol & pointless emotionalism. The calls appeal to Microsoft most of all, which moves forward in its new phase of dominance of the web with a brilliant ramp of the truly brilliant & actually innovative Office 2007 product suite -- which implants a version anyway of the OOXML format which is the questionable case before ISO.

Eyes and ears with any interest in new balance in software markets must now ignore everything on the table in the Document Format War as it is being dished today, must look ahead -- skate to the puck (as Gary Edwards says) -- to documents and the Internet.

Here, the only place to look is the W3C. But given the high stakes in owning formats, there's a real risk that the argy-bargy visited by the vendors upon us in the ODF-OOXML Cycle (2005 - 2008) will encumber, subsume & overwhelm the W3C in future days.

Let's hope not, for documents ought to be open & free if we are to have data-sovereignty and if basic applications are ever going to work for us(ers).

TimBr's "XML People"

Tim Bray's "XML People" is a great read for all of us in the file format corner. LOL at his personification of Microsoft ...

Mick is a domineering, ruthless, greedy, egotistical, self-centered, paranoid bastard. Whether or not he’s actually a crook is, as they say, currently the subject of litigation; but he’s not good company or a good friend. The ruthlessness and greed would not be so irritating (we swim, after all, in late-capitalist waters) were they not accompanied, at all times, by Mick’s claim to speak not in his own interest, but selflessly on behalf of his millions of customers, whose needs only he understands. Thus, anyone who disagrees is conspiring against the interests of the world’s computer users.

Mick’s other really irritating habit is constant grating prating about “great” products and “innovation”. Certain Microsoft executives are going to spend eternity fleeing around the bolgias of Hell from demons wielding branding irons on which “great software” and “innovation” glow white-hot. A very large majority in the computing trades think the products are mostly pretty poor, and see the company as the single greatest roadblock to innovation in our profession.

"Mick" is obviously Microsoft in the Brayian world while "Ned" is Netscape. TimBr's talking circa mid-1990's here ...

While Mick got with the XML program, Ned steadfastly ignored it.

This statement is supported deep in the terrific book, Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web (Third Edition, Addison-Wesley 2005), by Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos. Lie & Bos wrote the First Edition in 1997 while at W3C. (Lie is now CTO of Opera Software, the book covers CSS 2.1).

If XML is all about content and content portability for the Web, then the yin to XML's yang is CSS, a portable layout standard for Web documents.

Marc Andreesen (NCSA Mosaic, then Netscape) didn't get either XML or CSS. Here's Andreesen in an e-mail ...   

In fact, it has been a constant source of delight for me over the past year to get to continually tell hordes (literally) of people who want to -- strap yourselves in, here it comes -- control what their documents look like in ways that would be trivial in TeX, Microsoft Word, and every other common text processing environment: "Sorry, you're screwed."

... from Chapter 20 (or Chapter 18 in the Third Edition), "The CSS Saga".

'Harmonization' Synthesis

Dennis Hamilton, alias Orcmid, has an interesting comment with links on the many views of ODF & OOXML harmonization.

Lessig Expains Obama

Take 20 minutes out to watch Larry Lessig's inspiring voice-over-deck (using The Lessig Technique) on why Barak Obama is the right person to lead us now.

I voted for Barak Obama because of his compassion, his intelligence, his generosity, his alertness about technology, and because he embodies racial resolution -- and because of his consistent position against "Iraq" (when it was a difficult position to hold).

Lessig's piece makes it clear why Clinton  -- and her "Rovian" tactics (which, ironically, Democrats believe is the thing we need to "change") -- would be another mistake.

Lessig's most important & inspiring point, though, is about the necessary peace.

Super-Tuesday Review

Who else but The Economist has such an efficient review of what happened in politics yesterday?

CNN's coverage was quite good during the evening, too.

Zimbra: a Hidden Facet of Yahoo!'s Value

Yahoo! acquired Zimbra, the open source e-mail company, last year for less than a billion dollars. So Zimbra doesn't factor much in the discussion or in any body's thoughts concerning Microsoft's $45 billion approach to Yahoo!'s shareholders.

"Going Offline With Yahoo!'s Zimbra 5.0 Suite" | Jim Offner | Linux Insider | 6 Feb 2008

Not until yesterday when Zimbra launched ZCS -- "Zimbra Collaboration Suite". It's not so much what ZCS itself does on top of Zimbra's existing Ajax e-mail system, but the timing of Yahoo! drawing attention to the fact that it is the only company with a credible competitor to Microsoft's flagship enterprise mail platform, Exchange & Outlook.

This means competition authorities will view Microsoft's potential take-over of Yahoo! in a different -- the appropriate -- light as an anti-competitive absorption of its chief e-mail competitor.

Yahoo! will do what it takes to avoid acquisition by Microsoft. Roy is working on it.

IBM's | Sutor's Dissonance

Bob Sutor's Warsaw deck (6 slides, PDF) is to-the-point & true with regard to this magic word, 'interoperability'. Too bad ODF isn't an interoperable format and a harmonization effort, if successful, would take another 3 years.

It reminds me of the good feelings Simon Phipps' words inspired when we could hear him talk about Sun's commitment to open source back in 2003 & 2004 when OpenOffice.org was all promise -- and Sun hadn't yet discovered its allergy to GNU/Linux.

Both parties speak well, but the evident intent on both Sun's & IBM's parts to create an alternative office suite monopoly -- a DUOPOLY (Sun & IBM on the one side, Microsoft on the other) -- through the force of rip&replace political mandates is disgraceful, and the execution lame.

Doc Searls said the great thing about open source and Free Software is that the users have taken over their own supply ("DIY-IT" | Linux Journal | 1 Feb 2004). It is high time this became true in the document space, for CIOs and policy bureaucrats who have signed up for ODF are going to get a Massachusetts comeuppence when the difficulty of deploying OpenOffice.org in a decentralized enterprise is acknowledged. (By now it would be easier to go straight to Ubuntu.)

CIOs & policy bureaucrats! Look past the ODF & OOXML miasma to the Internet -- where the problem of document interoperability can reasonably be solved.