RSSMicrosoft's Matusow and Mahugh on Office's move to open format support
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published May 21, 2008, 6:28 PM
"We feel we are achieving parity in how Office treats the format, by making them all part of just one simple list of formats supported by Office," said Microsoft Office Product Manager Doug Mahugh, in an interview with BetaNews.
For the history of applications up until now, the specification of the format used to encode documents was defined largely and almost inescapably by the functionality of the programs which utilize them. A format represented what an application was designed to do, and that format changed when the application changed.
Today, that fact changes. The document formats used by the world's pre-eminent applications suite will now be determined by a standards body, of which Microsoft is a member -- a consequence of Open XML's acceptance by the International Organization for Standardization. But now, and certainly more importantly, the applications suite in use by far more offices in the world than any other general-purpose product, will no longer stipulate any single default format -- not even Microsoft's own -- beginning with the release of Office 2007 Service Pack 2 during the first half of next year.
It is a monumental change in how things will work from here on out; and yes, there's no question that one reason Microsoft did it was to ensure the continued survival, and probable dominance, of Microsoft Office. The one effective bit of leverage its competitors had against it up until this year was the notion that using Office locked users, offices, businesses, enterprises, and governments into a single way of encoding documents whose methodology was subject to change by a private enterprise for reasons of its own making. Now, that leverage is nullified. The reason for challenging Microsoft Office on the basis of fairness, is gone.
BetaNews spoke at length with Doug Mahugh, Microsoft's product manager for ISO 29500-based products -- as the company now refers to them, and Jason Matusow, the company's director of corporate standards. What we saw from them was a complete and thorough response to a challenge made by the company's competitors years ago, to truly move toward "openness." Today, they dare anyone to define Microsoft's policy as anything less than perfectly transparent.
Secondly, we're going to be joining the OpenDocument Format Working Group within OASIS. We're also going to extend our work and our commitment to working within AIIM, where PDF is being maintained and developed. And we're going to continue to work in ECMA, where currently XPS is being worked on; and then finally, our work in China around the UOF document format, which is the Chinese XML-based format, which is being standardized there, Microsoft will continue to engage with the government and with the Chinese standards organizations to continue the progress around UOF.
In fact, Microsoft will be so open that it may be impossible for anyone else to break away from the company. As an active part of OASIS, and with Novell and Sun already working with Microsoft on Open XML, it may be impossible for others to have an "open" conversation on document format strategy without Microsoft's direct involvement.
Next: Where Open XML and ODF differ, which one gets the advantage?
If this is real, and not just another MS publicity stunt, then there is no reason for more governments and organizations not to start mandating the use of ODF and the phase-out of MS-OOXML. If you are not using ODF today, you should be.
Too bad Microsoft didn't recognize this ISO certified open standard long before now and save themselves a lot of money and embarrassment in their Pyrrhic, obama-like (rigged) approval of the kludge that's MS-OOXML.
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Zaine, with all due respect, I know you have a huge grudge against microsoft since your late move to linux, but please explain WHY (In your own words, not paraphrased things you have read) OOXML is a bad thing?
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He has to make up his *own* original words just to answer your point? ;-)
Here's one to start the ball rolling - "kaedois". We can work out the meaning later...
OR perhaps if some other people have made good points I see no reason why he can't paraphrase them.
We don't exist in a vacuum, you know.
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We don't. He does. The only complaints Ziane has had with OXML have been in the form of cut&paste quotes ripped directly from Wier and Upgrove.
Hardly what anyone would call unbiased sources. One might think he has his own views on it if he were capable of say, expressing them without resorting to playing puppet to the Authors above.
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Exactly, all one has to do is read every site that Zaine posts on to include his own blog, donationcoder.com, and various other sites to realize that zaine rarely posts a thought that is his own on any given topic. He merely summarizes what was said in each article without going into any further research. Further more, he never replies to any post questioning or inquiring into a post he makes. He cannot be taken seriously.
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Yeah you should quit criticizing things you don't know about.
OOXML hasn't got a single implementation, and the specification hasn't even been published.
You shouldn't criticize things that don't even exist.
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Name one exact implementation of ODF.
Go on...
Still waiting...
Any day now...
Right. Criticizing one format for a fault common to all. How cute.
OXML is in transition and Office was released well before even that. What's OpenOffice's excuse, eh?
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Heh...
This should be highly entertaining.
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Yep.
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****me,
Yet more "entertainment" from Softie, nothing constructive, more snide albeit obtuse disparragemnet! No doubt when eating your own excrement in the diveway of your trailer park, you can be quite honest with your smile "a s*** eating grin", look what I done Pa!
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