Bonum Certa Men Certa

Taking Stock of Microsoft's Vapourware Announcement

GNOME GeditSome recommended readings and quick notes...

For those who are lost in translation or find themselves fooled by Microsoft's PR pitch, which has already overwhelmed the media, here are some bits of information worth considering. We posted our views some hours ago and none have radically changed since then, having glanced at a lot more articles and perspectives.

The response from Marino Marcich you can find in The Register.

Don't get too excited by this outbreak of peace. SP2 isn’t due until the first half of 2009, meaning you've got a good year before you can save an Office 2007 document using ODF. Ahead of that lies SP1, due at the beginning of June.

There is also no word on if, or when, SPs will be delivered that bring ODF and PDF to the vast install base of customers and developers working with older versions of Office.

Accordingly, the ODF Alliance, the group of vendors and national bodies leading ODF, has warned against premature celebrations saying we should wait and see what Microsoft actually delivers in SP2. ODF Alliance managing director Marino Marcich said the proof of Microsoft’s commitment to openness would be whether ODF support is on a par with Open XML.

He pointed to Microsoft's promise two years ago to support ODF, when it backed an existing BSD project for an Open XML Translator. The project, to deliver an Office add-on to save documents in ODF, is also due in the first half of 2009. That software has not been finished, and it’s not clear whether today’s announcement for support will use the translator.

“Until Microsoft enables Office users to create and save in ODF by default as easily and fully as in Microsoft's own formats, governments will continue to adopt a 'buyer beware' attitude,” Marcich said in a statement.

Significantly, Microsoft is not quite ready to give up on its ODF rival, Open XML, that it's been busy railroading through standards bodies across the globe.


Another explanation of Microsoft's strategic motives:

Indeed, while OOXML has garnered enough votes to pass, several major countries including China, India, and Brazil among others, voted against it. It is safe to assume that, in accordance with the opinion the expressed through this vote, those countries will not adopt OOXML as a national standard either. India has already decided so for one. I know the same is true for South Africa. The same will probably be true for others.

Now, think about this for a minute. This is a huge market that Microsoft cannot address with Office as it stands. Can they really disregard a market that size? I don’t think so. If not, what can they do about it?

Well, they can keep trying to fight countries decisions not to adopt OOXML but if they haven’t managed to achieve that already, despite all the efforts they put in, including some rather unethical if not illegal ones, their chances of success on that front are pretty slim.


The story he refers to when he talks about illegal efforts is probably scarcely understood. Not only has Microsoft used non-profits for influence. It paid them also, just days before the vote.

Vapourware comes not only to our own minds.

Ivar Jachwitz, the deputy managing director of Standards Norway, the country's national standards setting body which adopted ODF as a recommended format for government archives, said the final proof of Microsoft's commitment to ODF and interoperability will be seen next year, when the updated version of Office 2007 reaches consumers."We have heard a lot of promises from Microsoft but as of yet, we are hoping for results," Jachwitz said.


This person from Standards Norway must have seen not only the vote-rigging but some other interesting revelations too. Moreover, he could possibly just approach the Noway-based Opera for testimonies about Microsoft's false promises and sometimes the obstruction of justice.

ODF formatLet's consider some possibilities very quickly. Microsoft could 'support' ODF because:

  1. It was forced to do so, e.g. by regulators
  2. It needs to rescue or earn back contracts that it's losing
  3. It has decided to be nice, convincing shareholders that it's the better way to go (image over brutality)
  4. It cannot comply with OOXML, implicitly acknowledging that it's a broken specification


Looking at possibility (1) again, could the whole thing have come only after pressure from the European Commission? The following article was published only yesterday and its headline says it all.

Force Microsoft to Support ODF, Group Asks EC



The British government's agency in charge of plotting IT usage among schools has asked the European Commission to force Microsoft to offer native out-of-the-box support for the Open Document Format (ODF) file standard in Microsoft Office, and not just Microsoft's own OpenXML format. Without an easy way to support ODF in Office, children's education will suffer, according to the complaint from the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, or Becta.


Open questions from Bob Sutor give away his reasons for skepticism:

In the interest of providing a bit more to think about beyond what was evidently said on this, here are a few open questions:

* What are the plans for supporting ODF 1.2, now reaching completion in OASIS? * Will it be extraordinarily easy for users to set ODF as the default save format so that this becomes regular practice for most people? * Will there eventually be backwards native support in versions of Office before 2007, or will people need to upgrade? * Hey, Apple, what about you? Let’s see you do this in iWork!



In addition, also from the same blog, the newly-available New York State study that we mentioned earlier is further inspected here. It highlights the redundancy of a second standard.

Regardless of Microsoft's motives, as was already argued earlier, this is a big win for ODF but not necessarily for Free software. It's too early to tell because there are many factors to weigh. Erwin says that "OpenOffice.org will have a strong presence at LinuxTag 2008 in Berlin [Germany]," which is not surprising given the rapid adoption of ODF in that country and even strong ISV support for OpenOffice.org, especially in Germany. For those among the readers who develop software, this new blog which is called ODF Tools might be worth a glance too.

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

Techrights Does Not Compete With LLM Slop, It Exposes the Bastards, Plagiarists and Scammers Who Do That
People like Scam Altman, still facing a lawsuit from his own sister for sexual abuse against her
Slopwatch: Planet Ubuntu Became LLM Slop and Some People Fail to See the Immorality of Plagiarism
it lessens the incentive for people to publish real articles
 
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, May 30, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, May 30, 2025
The "AI" (Slop) Bubble Already Popped, But It's Not an Overnight Collapse
where Microsoft put its money
No More Steven Astorino at IBM, Chatter About Weekly/Nonstop Layoffs at IBM
What happened? Good luck guessing.
Looking at Corruption in Europe, Going Beyond the EPO
Expect a new series to kick off very soon
Slopwatch: Security SPAM and LLM Slop for SEO and FUD Purposes, Perpetually Tarnishing the Perception of Linux and (Open)SSH Security
A lot of this Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD) comes from Microsoft and its LLMs
Links 30/05/2025: Google's LLM Slop Pushers Are Killing Journalism and Shira Perlmutter Fails to Stop Bribed Regime From Legalising Plagiarism (in "AI" Clothing)
Links for the day
Links 30/05/2025: Offline Arts and "Threshold of Patience"
Links for the day
Signing Off Serious Lies With a Statement of Truth is No Joking Matter
It's not hard to see what's happening here
Links 30/05/2025: LLM Slop Already Ingests and Vomits Its Own Garbage, Facebook Exec Admits Copyrights a Concern Too
Links for the day
Mass Layoffs at Microsoft Result in More Whistleblowers From Microsoft
Microsoft's predatory pricing is further
EPO Poll: 68% Dissatisfied With Quality of Slop (Wrongly Framed as "AI") for Patent Classification
Slop does not work, it's just falsely advertised with extra hype (funded by slop pushers that sponsor the major media)
Big Crowds Gather to Learn About Software Freedom From the Man Who Started GNU/Linux in 1983
"It was a great success"
Microsoft Layoffs Again in Bay Area
Microsoft relies on people's false belief that being "in LinkedIn" will get you a job; well, seems like even working inside LinkedIn really sucks and you lose the job
Gemini Links 30/05/2025: Fighting Against the Bad News, and Slop is Dehumanisation Disguised as "Intelligence"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, May 29, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, May 29, 2025
Links 29/05/2025: Chinese Cracking Against EU Institutions (Prague), More Assaults on Media and Its Funding Sources
Links for the day
EPO Workers Caution That the Officials Are Still Illegally Trying to Replace Staff With Slop (to Lower Quality and Validity of European Patents)
Nobody in Europe voted for any of this
Links 29/05/2025: US Health Deficit and Malware Disguised as Slop Generator
Links for the day
Links 29/05/2025: Turtle Roadkill, Modern 'Tech' as a Sting
Links for the day
Thanks for All the Fish, Linux Format
people who once wrote for it (or for other magazines) comment on the importance of this news
People's Understanding of the History of GNU/Linux is Changing
RMS is not a radical, he's just clever enough to see and foresee what's going on
Microsofters Were Scheming to Take Over This Entire Web Site (in Their Own Words!)
Money gets spent censoring/deplatforming people who speak about real issues; no money gets spent actually tackling those underlying issues
Bicycles for the Minds and the Story Harrison Bergeron
"The goal of having people in charge of the tools they use and that the tools should amplify ability" has long been abandoned
Links 29/05/2025: YouTube Problem and Giant Privacy Hole in Microsoft OneDrive
Links for the day
[Video] Cory Doctorow Explains DMCA: DRM in the Browser (or Webapp) Will "Make It a Felony to Protect Your Privacy While You Use It."
Pycon US Keynote Speaker Cory Doctorow
United States Courts With Sworn Testimonies Are on Our Side, We'll Present the Same Here
Chronicling what happened is a moral imperative
Serial Sloppers Ruin and Lessen the Incentive to Cover "Linux"
The Serial Sloppers (SSs) ought to be named and shamed, but almost nobody does this
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, May 28, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, May 28, 2025