Favorite Files

No favorite files added yet

Recent Posts

1. Comment - Microsoft: Office Format War Over

   (Mar 7, 2007 - 1:43 PM)

   Last I checked, MicroSoft required an NDA to get their .doc format documents. Further, from those that I know who have accepted said NDA, they were incomplete. The terms of the NDA were such they felt they couldn't tell me anything more specific.
   
   Now, I admit - I haven't checked lately. I don't deal with Microsoft except when I have to - I'd like to think I'm not crazy, and anyone who's watched how the company behaved from 1990-2000 would have to be insane to still do business with them. From what I've seen in the news since, they haven't changed. The only difference is that now they must at least claim to be open in order to continue to do business - but they appear to be fighting that at every turn.

2. Comment - Microsoft: Office Format War Over

   (Mar 7, 2007 - 1:35 PM)

   If you're starting a company, you're fine. If your changes to existing standards cause too many problems, people will prefer the standard to your implementation, simply because it works better.
   
   Once you achieve market dominance, our laws require one to play nice. Microsoft doesn't. These laws were put in place to protect competition - if one company achieves such dominance that there are no other companies which compete with it, that company has no incentive to do anything more than maintain their position. Of course, the free software movement has shown that one can compete in the software arena without corporate backing - the cost of entry is insanely low.
   
   The only reason that Microsoft still exists today as a single company is that there are still some old-time Microsoft competitors out there. If Apple had also gone bankrupt - which it didn't only because Microsoft had bailed them out a few years back when Apple was about to go under (I think this was a presence-of-mind manuever - there was anti-trust legal activity at the time, and Apple was their oldest still-existing competitor), and if a few other companies had ceased to be rather than having been bought out by other players several times (such as Word Perfect), no amount of White House support could have prevented Microsoft's sundering.

3. Comment - Microsoft: Office Format War Over

   (Mar 7, 2007 - 1:22 PM)

   The ODF committee followed an open process. There was a Microsoft representative who was part of that process (he only observed, but he was there). As such, if ODF lacks anything, it's MicroSoft's fault.
   
   Given what's in the OOXML spec, I doubt Microsoft's ability to support it, let alone anyone else - they have tags to support legacy bugs from other companies' proprietary applications, and to support the embedding of other companies' proprietary files. It's also not well designed from an XML perspective - there are many tags that affect what follows them, rather than what they bound. In XML, if a tag affects other content, it should have an open and a close, and all the content it affects should be between those. OOXML doesn't do this. (Note that I use 'should' in the way standards frequently do - it's not something that causes OOXML to not be XML, rather it's only loosely considered to be XML.)
   
   Given that ODF is an open format, it shouldn't be too difficult for them to point out exactly what features are missing, and work with the committee to extend ODF to handle those features. But they're not doing that, so it continues to be MicroSoft's fault.