02.27.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:56 by lnxwalt
There is a long-held tradition in this country as well as Europe, that we should promote competitive markets and that we should oppose the abuse of monopolies.
Over the past several years, Microsoft has proven themselves adept at using their monopoly power to squeeze other companies out of their particular parts of the market. The resulting loss of choice caused consumers to pay higher prices and lose access to any improvements that would have been made available.
A few years ago, a number of companies in the industry started work on a vendor-neutral format. That format became OpenDocument Format (ODF), standardized by OASIS and by the ISO as an industry and international standard for office documents. Although Microsoft was a member of OASIS, where the format was defined, they chose not to participate–after all, they have a monopoly in office software which they would risk losing if anyone else could read and write the same file formats with full fidelity. Instead, Microsoft created something called Office Open XML (OOXML), or as I call it, Not-so-open XML.
OOXML was submitted to Ecma to standardize–with the requirement that whatever Ecma decide on had to be fully-compatible with their pre-defined format used in their Office 2007 product (which hadn’t been released when Ecma started their work). Ecma then submitted this second file format to ISO to be standardized as an international standard for office documents. OOXML, beside some ongoing questions about the legal ability for other software to use the standard, is also designed with all sorts of compatibility features, meant to carry the mistakes of prior generations of office software into the foreseeable future. OOXML has a number of unspecified secret areas which are mostly the same things about Microsoft’s file formats that were historically used to keep competing companies in the dark about how to properly read and write their formats.
This move to standardize OOXML was turned back in September of 2007, when the ISO fast-track ballot to approve it failed. Now, the ISO is giving Microsoft/Ecma a second chance to try to pass OOXML. Because Microsoft’s business strategy depends upon the income from its twin monopolies (Windows and Office), they are really running a full-court press to try to push this off on the world.
Standards attorney Andy Updegrove has a pretty expressive essay that describes some of the issues that are now apparent, in particular the need for standards that are industry-wide, vendor-neutral, and unrestricted (by “intellectual property”, licensing restrictions, or fees) for any use by governmental agencies of any kind.
Many of the most important groups promoting software freedom (not price freedom, as in “free beer”) have urged that OOXML not be standardized until it is altered to be the kind of standard that Andy is describing.
Now Google, the Web’s leading search engine and advertising platform, has joined in, urging that ISO not standardize OOXML in its present form.
Do you have files from several years ago that you are required to maintain? Is your present software able to properly read/interpret/process those files? If you lost access to the original application or version of the application, is the file format an open standard format which you could pay someone to write an import filter for your present software? If the answer to any of those questions is “no”, you are a hostage to closed and proprietary file formats.
While OOXML pretends to be open, it is really a proprietary format in drag. Join Mr. Updegrove, Groklaw, the Free Software Foundation, the FSF Europe, ByteFree, Google, and myself in urging ISO and your country’s “national body” ISO representative group to reject OOXML.
Microsoft can be a great company when it is pressed to compete. IE7 is miles ahead of IE6, thanks to competition from Firefox. If OOXML is rejected and governments begin to use ODF for all their editable documents, Microsoft will implement ODF and both we and they will be better off for it.
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02.22.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:51 by lnxwalt
Much of the tech world is entranced at the politicking going on as Microsoft seeks to persuade the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to endorse Office Open XML (OOXML, a file format based upon the format used in Microsoft Office 2007) as an international standard. Bloggers ranging from Brian Jones and Doug Mahugh at Microsoft, to IBM’s Bob Sutor and Rob Weir, to renowned standards attorney Andy Updegrove, to independents such as Pamela Jones of Groklaw, myself (Walt Hucks of Opportunity Knocks), Shane Coyle & Roy Schestowitz of Boycott Novell, CyberTech Rambler of CyberTech Rambler, and Orcmid (Dennis E. Hamilton) or Orcmid’s Lair have weighed in with opinions of why the motion should or should not pass.
Regardless of which way the ISO final vote goes, here are some things you should expect to see:
- Microsoft is slowly losing share in the office suite space; losing to FLOSS such as OpenOffice, KOffice, and AbiWord; losing to online office products such as Google Docs, Zoho, ThinkFree, and Ajax13; losing to users of older versions of its software; and especially losing to the move to Web-based everything. If anything, this will only accelerate.
- There is already an international standard for office documents—OpenDocument Format—approved as ISO/IEC 26300:2006. ODF is vendor-neutral, being designed from the beginning to encompass the functionality of multiple vendors’ products. In Europe and other overseas countries, governments, non-profit groups, and educational groups are increasingly standardizing on ODF. Because of immense political pressure, governernmental adoption in the US has lagged, which will cost us in the future when we have to mount a sudden rapid-conversion program.
- Despite new announcements from Redmond about how they are going to make it easier for end-users to use whatever products from whatever vendors and still interchange data files, the simple truth is that their MS Office monopoly is one of only two really successful businesses propping up such flops as the Zune, Origami, and MSN. The American stock market rewards short-sighted and short-term actions, even as those actions combine to have sharply negative longer-term effects on companies. This would seem to indicate that Microsoft (MSFT) will simply try to create new monopolies through takeovers, while desperately fighting to preserve existing monopolies. In short, they cannot afford to make it easy or possible for a competitor to arise that would take away their control of the market.
- The quest for more openness will continue. Organizations such as BytesFree and EFF will continue to push for legal and social recognition of individual data rights. Certain government agencies, along with many large corporations that see dollar signs in data harvesting, will continue to oppose this quest. In other arenas, groups like Creative Commons, the WikiMedia Foundation, and the Free Software Foundation will continue pushing for freedom in software, the arts, and cultural items. In the end, openness is worth the costs, but we have to recognize that it does in fact cost us something and that it is worth that cost in order to have openness and its benefits.
- Users of Linux, FreeBSD, and other alternative operating systems will continue to grow in number. Few, if any, of these users will have access to any OOXML file, while most will continue to have access to ODF and usually the old MSFT binary formats. OOXML is locked into a constantly-shrinking box. A rather large box, to be sure, but still shrinking.
In your home and your business, you should prepare for the coming changes. If you are a Windows-only company, you need to deploy computers powered by Linux or Mac within your business. Chances are, you will find certain closed, proprietary formats and protocols that the newcomers will not translate as well. Those formats and protocols are the ones that give your software vendor an intravenous tap into your wallet. In each case, you should start planning for a move to open standard, vendor-neutral formats and protocols. If you use Microsoft Office, you can start by rolling out Sun’s ODF plugin to all employees and then starting to use OpenDocument Format files as your “official” documents (and the existing binary formats such as .doc and .xls as your “interchange formats” for exchanging documents with those outside your organization during a transition period). During this time, notify your regular clients and suppliers that you are transitioning to ODF formats (make CDs with the plugin and give them out so they too can install it). After a year or so, those clients and suppliers should be ready for your transition.
You should start trying out some of the web-based suites, especially those that support ODF as well as the old MSFT binary formats. I recommend both Google Docs and Zoho. What you do not want to do is let your business get trapped into a single-source solution when that source may be losing share in the market.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: ODF, OOXML
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02.01.08
Posted in Industry News at 15:13 by lnxwalt
This morning, Microsoft publicly confirmed months of speculation by making an offer for Yahoo!. It is no secret that both Microsoft and Yahoo! are lagging in their efforts to compete with the Google in the search and online advertising spaces.
You can find more details about the proposed transaction elsewhere (finance.yahoo.com, bloomberg). One thing that most commenters will not consider is that Yahoo!’s infrastructure is built upon FreeBSD and other FLOSS, using open standards. When Microsoft bought Hotmail, which also used FreeBSD, it took quite a while for them to successfully transition to using Microsoft’s Windows Server platform. Hotmail’s users dealt with outages and flaky behavior. If Microsoft does succeed in buying Yahoo!, expect some quick changes in the appearance of Yahoo sites, followed by a longer period of transition.
I have no idea whether the merger will go through. Nor do I know whether Yahoo! still owns stock in Google (Yahoo! was an early investor in Google), which would tend to cause regulators to block the purchase.
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