PlexNex

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.

Contradictions of the Compass

It was a week when much turned in the balance. The date, February 5th -- coming up about two weeks from now -- sets the end-point, the close of the contradiction period when ISO members hear from knowledgable sources if there are any problems with a certain standards submission currently on their desks. The public won't know until after Feb 5th whether the voting members of ISO in each country have actually voiced concerns within the body.

This week on Tuesday (23 Jan 2007) an influential document went live on Groklaw, "Deadline Looms to Express Concerns about ECMA 376 Office Open XML"; citizens will use this information to express concerns to their regional voting members at ISO. The document outlines in detail an extensive list of objections found by members of the ODF and software standards communities about the Microsoft Office Open XML specification work that was submitted to ISO last month (Dec 2006) for fast-track approval by Ecma International.

The article's length and depth of technical detail is a deterrent to its consumption by normal folks who haven't time in the Attention Economy to catch up on standards arcana. Allow me to provide a table of contents here that will make the document more accessible as well as summarize its basic points. ("Ecma 376" referrs to the Microsoft Office Open XML specification document, which can be found here.)

Introduction & Summary

Ecma 376 contradicts numerous international standards

Ecma 376 is immature & inconsistent

Ecma 376 uses bitmasks, inhibiting extensibility and use of standard XML tools

Ecma 376 relies on undisclosed information

Ecma 376 cannot be adequately evaluated within the 30-day evanluation period

Ecma 376 cannot be reasonably implemented by other vendors

Ecma 376's full name confuses the marketplace

Related Cases

Ecma 376 raises serious issues as to the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade

There is an eerie quiet as all the material supporting these points is digeted by people in every country. Even though February 5th is the close of the contradiction period, many of the meetings by country voting bodies have taken place this week. Communications & decisions are in process.

If ISO members concur that these issues & contradictions are meaningful, it will set Microsoft's process to standardize its document formats back in time because fast-track process will be denied and the company will need to address fundamental restructuring of either the formats or the manner in which it presents them to ISO.

There are a few constructive ideas we've seen that would permit Microsoft to adopt ODF and require the relevent office suite applications to cross-incorporate the necessary missing feature extensions. But Microsoft's headache would extend throughout its software product catalog to the many products in this important new generation which have been designed to use features in the Microsoft Office Open XML formats that are likely to be denied under close scrutiny by the standards bodies. Affected products would include Office, Windows Vista, Internet Explorer, Exchange, Sharepoint, Windows Server, SQL Server, MS Dynamics, VSTO and the many versions of each of these categories as well as others not mentioned.

The setback could be devastating to Microsoft's plans this year. New product launches will go forward, but major architectural alterations will be known to be required even before the first public purchases of products in the catalog.

All this depends upon ISO's disposition to the Ecma 376 formats.

Bub-Bye.

Microsoft's Philanderings & Contradictions

PJ at Groklaw airs out the reasons ISO voters are going to need to consider carefully this month their votes for fast-tracking the not-open Microsoft Office Open XML formats.

She quotes our colleague, Marbux...

JTC-1's role includes ensuring that such vendor favoritism does not creep into the preparation of international open standards. Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade,supra, section 2.2 ("[m]embers shall ensure that technical regulations are not prepared, adopted or applied with a view to or with the effect of creating unnecessary obstacles to international trade"); ISO/IEC JTC-1 Directives, section 11.1.2 (members may may appeal JTC-1 action or inaction that is "[n]ot in the best interests of international trade and commerce"). A single vendor's development requirements do not necessarily create a market requirement for a duplicative standard, particularly when a proposed standard would have "the effect of" granting a single vendor a monopoly in the full-fidelity conversion of billions of legacy files to and from the supposedly open EOOXML.

There is a lot substance here, and very little common sense to support ratification of the Microsoft Office Open XML formats at ISO.

Pamela Jones | "Searching for Openness in Microsoft Office Open XML and Finding Contradictions" (18 Jan 2007)

Press Clips: Ecma

In last week's news about the Ecma vote to sign off and pass OOXML on for a year's (or two years') process at ISO, we'd like to separate the wheat from the chaff. Here are a few selective press clippings to highlight some of the subtler points...

Bob Sutor
IBM

Make sure you follow how well the Novell and Corel implementations do...If they falter, watch out for those who try to blame those companies or open source itself, when the root
of the problem may be with the Microsoft Office OpenXML spec in the first place.

Martin Veitch | IT Week (UK)

Simon Phipps
Sun Microsystems

Ecma is a coin-in-the-slot standards organisation...The OpenXML [submission] is 6,000 pages. Imagine what it takes to implement that specification.

Martin Veitch | IT Week (UK)

Sam Hiser
OpenDocument Foundation

The ECMA spec stacks up on a desk as high as your shoulder...It can cost $1,000 just to print it out.

W. David Gardner | InformationWeek

Microsoft's Alan Yates got to respond a day later to the ODF press blitz-krieg and had this to say...

Clearly OpenXML and ODF serve different requirements...ODF takes more of a Greenfields approach, while OpenXML takes more of a practical approach toward documenting compatibility and interoperability.

Peter Galli | eWEEK

What Mr Yates refers to as OpenXML's 'more-practical approach' follows the reality theme with which government & enterprise customers are very familiar. The reality is that Microsoft owns the document formats today, so we might as well lie down and accept the status quo for another 5 to 15 years, goes the resigned thinking of the CIO (nearing retirement).

Any one taking a sincere evaluation of the goals of ODF -- the universal & portable document format -- could easily draw the contrary conclusion: that ODF is the more practical approach.

Standards Smackdown!

Jeff Kaplan clears some confusion about the file format standards conflict, which is now going PrimeTime.

Ecma's approval of ooXML will increase confusion in the marketplace. Consumers and companies now face two different document standards. One is a proprietary-encumbered standard, the other an open standard. Both are endorsed by standards organizations and industry allies.

More -->

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)

IBM's Rob Weir Finds another Rusty Needle in the ECMA Hay Stack

In his recent post, "Cum Mortuis in Lingua Mortua," (With the Dead in a Dead Language) Rob asks, 'Is it better to reuse existing software standards or to use non-standards?' His careful reading of the Microsoft's 4,000-page ECMA spec reveals Microsoft's weird attempt to revive a dead standard, VML (Vector Markup Language) when SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) -- an established W3C recommendation -- would leverage prior work and permit better resource allocation for the future.

There will undoubtedly be an engaging explanation coming from Microsoft as to why VML is superior to SVG. But it will fall on deaf ears.

Further reading of the ECMA spec will turn up examples in Microsoft's file format work which demonstrate that company's view that it is the only company qualified to make software and its surety that its customers are stupid. Stay tuned to An Antic Disposition.

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.

Microsoft Swallows Treadmill

Bob Sutor is comparing spec documents by page-count. MSECMAXML at the new version 1.3 weighs in at over 4,081 pages versus OpenDocument's 706 pages. It's significant because the MSECMAXML specification started last Fall at about 1,900 pages.

Now, that's actually a fair reckoning of how bas-ackwards the Microsoft's "community process" is for developing its "open" XML file format (which won't get through ISO, if ever, until late next year).

Says Sutor, in rare form:

"I compare this to going to the gym and working out to build muscle tone and bulk up a little bit. Conversely, weighing in at 4081 pages means you went to the gym and you swallowed a few treadmills."

Why does page-count matter? In this case, it reflects the sheer amount of features and the sheer number of ways the format is tied to application and operating system instructions, otherwise known as system calls, that are unique to Microsoft's stuff. The MSECMAXML format will not do the same things on other people's stuff, like with a multitude of competing applicaitons or, say, on Linux, for example.

This means that MSECMAXML breaks a few of the key definitional requirements for a format that's called an "open" standard: Thou shalt not have single-vendor features or functions. MSECMAXML, therefore, is not an open file format -- even though it has XML in it. Their great new format is not portable, as we say in the software trade. Portability is what you need for modular architectures ("SOA") which will permit you, as never before, to own the budgeting decisions on ALL THE SOFTWARE IN YOUR HOUSE.

Once your organization opts into the Vista stack and overpays handsomely for this bloated version of MS Office 2007 with its wafer-thin format (NOT!), it's a terminal decision from which you will never emerge...Microsoft's FINAL SOLUTION.

Mind your air supply on the next upgrade.

Minnesota Joins the ODF Cat & Mouse Game

PlexNex welcomes Gary Edwards, a founding member of the OASIS OpenDocument TC and also of the OpenDocument Foundation, Inc., as a guest contributor.

Courtesy of our good friend and ODF freedom fighter Andy Updegrove, we learn that in the State of Minnesota a bill was recently introduced that would require all Executive branch agencies there to:

"use open standards in situations where the other requirements of a project do not make it technically impossible to do this." ("Bill Introduced in Minnesota to Require Use of 'Open Data Formats'")

Andy goes on to say,

“On its face, the amendment is vendor neutral. It does, however, include one provision that may have been directed at Microsoft, which has at times been criticized for adding proprietary extensions to otherwise standards-compliant product features. That provision is found in the definition of an "open standard," and requires that if a standard, "allows extensions, ensures that all extensions of the data format are themselves documented and have the other characteristics of an open data format..."

This begs the question: Is MSECMAXML a kind of SOAP for the Windows-integrated stack of proprietary interfaces, protocols and messaging methods?

Some quick comments about SOAP: The SOAP protocol is often described as an XML wrapper around a content-data payload that may or may not be binary. As such, SOAP, (Simple Object Access Protocol) is also a way for programs to communicate with other programs, using XML. SOAP uses XML to encapsulate the data that needs to be sent to the remote subroutine. And, of course, XML is used to return data from the subroutine and to return notification of any error condition that might have occurred ("SOAP" - XML Cover Pages).

XML can be used to transfer data from one program to another, but the degree of interoperability still depends on the dependencies of the information within the SOAP container. Ah Hah! By using an "Open" wrapper for platform-bound and application-dependent "content," Chairman Bill gets to have his cake and eat it too.

It's strange that Microsoft blooger and co-chair of the MSECMAXML committee, Brian Jones, made a big deal out of the effort to strip MS XP Office 2003 MSXML of it's proprietary dependencies - including the infamous binary key first identified by the European Union's Valoris Report on Open Document Formats (PDF). Brian claimed that all dependencies had been removed. But what Microsoft submitted to ECMA is something else: the "ECMA Spec" is 1,900 pages of dependencies; some going as far back as the busted and highly insecure Windows 3.0 WMF implementation for rendering thumbnails in PowerPoint and Windows Explorer.

Considering the Minnsota Bill, you've got to love the term, “restricted file format,” which occurs repeatedly in this document. According to the Bill, the use of restricted file formats has to be “justified” and reviewed on a timely basis. For sure, someone (in Minnesota) has been paying attention to the cat and mouse game playing out between Microsoft and governments seeking to move to bi-modal analog/digital-capable information infrastructures based on SOA principles:

• The EU makes the move to Open Standards, Open XML technologies, and ODF.

• Microsoft counters with open standards – open XML promises.

• Massachusetts grabs the baton, and runs one of the most impressive legs in this marathon rush to computational consumer sovereignty.

• Microsoft counters with a well funded but vicious and politically corrupt personal assault and intimidation campaign.

• The Australian government comes out with the National Archives of Australia , the open source XENA Project, and the comprehensive GovDex Report.

• Microsoft has yet to respond.

• The State of California Air Resources Board offers to all other government divisions their documented and proven experiences with the many advantages of open source – open standards-based systems. (This involves expert advice, technology assistance, open architectural blueprints, proven migration methodologies, and the shared resources to make the migration possible.)

• Microsoft has yet to respond.

• Denmark announces their “Open Standards” definitions as the basis for all RFP's and systems procurement requirements.

Clearly, the governments of the world are set on using Open Standards - Open XML requirements to build migration paths to a future of highly inter-operable and open information infrastructures. Microsoft's “collective” response has been to submit a soaped up XML wrapper of proprietary Windows-integrated stack interfaces, methods and protocols to ECMA for ratification as a standard. It's not open. It's not interchangeable. It's not inter-operable. Indeed, MSECMAXML breaks the most fundamental promise of XML. But hey, it's “XML”.

And now we have the State of Minnesota countering the below-the-belt MSECMAXML counter-punch to ODF, specifically calling Redmond out exactly where they tried to side-step the Open Standards – Open XML requirements box on which so many governments agree. One thing's clear: Microsoft is at war with their customer base, and, the customer base has no intention of accepting anything short of total surrender to their demands for meaningful and truthful open standards-based systems. Microsoft has the money, the means, the corporate-wide inclination to deceive and the ruthless take-no-prisoners determination to persist: control of the file format is the key to more than half of their $40 Billion in revenues. That the State of Minnesota would step up and join this brewing blood bath is something to behold.

The stakes in the game of maintaining the incredibly enriching monopoly that is Microsoft just got higher.

~ge~