Microsoft executives have accused IBM of single-handedly leading an effort to block the software giant from having its Office Open XML standard approved by the International Organization for Standardization.
After initially being rejected by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in September 2007, Microsoft has a second chance for its next-generation document format to become an international standard in February at a ballot resolution meeting in Geneva.
While criticism of Microsoft's efforts to promote the standard has come from a variety of quarters, Microsoft's senior director of XML technology, Jean Paoli, accused IBM of masterminding the attack.
"Let's be very clear," Paoli said. "It has been fostered by a single company — IBM. If it was not for IBM, it would have been business as usual for this standard."
As a member of European standards group Ecma, IBM voted against the approval of Office Open XML (OOXML) as an Ecma standard. Microsoft claims its competitor has since opted for more covert tactics to influence the ISO vote.
Nicos Tsilas, senior director of interoperability and IP policy at Microsoft, said that IBM and the likes of the Free Software Foundation have been lobbying governments to mandate the rival OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard to the exclusion of any other format.
"They have made this a religious and highly political debate," Tsilas said. "They are doing this because it is advancing their business model. Over 50 percent of IBM's revenues come from consulting services."
A growing proportion of those revenues are being derived from the support of open-source software, Tsilas said.
Read this
Cruel truth surfaces in the OOXML war
In the heat of conflict, propaganda gives way to proof. Microsoft may be feeling that heat over its so-called document standard...
Debate over the legitimacy of the standard has been framed by a battle over two opposing philosophies on how IT goods and services are best provided to users.
On the one side is the proprietary-software model championed by Microsoft, in which the customer buys a licence in the hope that they won't require services to implement the solution. The other, the open-source software model, sees software developers give away their intellectual property for free and aim to profit instead from consulting services.
"IBM have asked governments to have an open-source, exclusive purchasing policy," Tsilas said. "Our competitors have targeted this one product — mandating one document format over others to harm Microsoft's profit stream."
"It's a new way to compete," Tsilas said. "They are using government intervention as a way to compete. It's competing through regulation, because you couldn't compete technically."
Paoli said that Microsoft has never been an aggressor in the standards world and did not mobilise against Sun and IBM when they proposed ODF.
"We did not go and block it," Paoli said. "When it was voted as an ANSI [a standard of the American National Standards Institute] in the US, we voted 'yes'. There is absolutely no parallel between what Microsoft did in the standardisation process for ODF and what IBM is doing now," he said.
Brett Winterford travelled to Redmond as a guest of Microsoft.
Talkback
I dont know if reading this correct, but from what i have read (Deffinately no expert, so please dont flame me to much) OOXML has certain parts of it that are hidden\ protected so that other office type applications can not read it correctly? so theirfore it is not a true open standard? Please do let me know if I am wrong or misunderstand somthing.
Microsoft has a standard way of "doing business". Watch what others are doing, wait to see what is interesting/useful/successful, copy that and find a way to get their foot in the door, then use their size and weight to stomp the life out of any and all other competitors until they are either out of business, or at least out of that market. This time, at least so far, the plan isn't working so they are desperately looking for someone to blame.
How funny! Microsoft NEVER blocking anyone from doing business. Microsoft was the inventor of FUD, they have led the way to stop, and completely erase all competition to their "swiss cheese" OS. They don't want any competition , because they know they can't compete head to head. They tried to "influence" votes the first time and why would they have a change of heart on the second go? They are like a spoiled brat always trying to blame someone else for their own incompetence.
"If it was not for IBM, it would have been business as usual for this standard."
What an amazing statement! Fast Track. Compromised ISO. Promises to be broken. Proprietry Content. Hidden Information. Unspecified Dependencies. Poorly Documented. Stuffed Ballots, etc., etc. Need I go on? Oh Yes. Only for MS Office 2007.
"Business as usual" Microsoft lock-in. Past, present and future. No interest in the greater good such as an open and durable Standard that can be universely and safely adopted. And anyway M$ document format will be changed every few years.
i think what you are referring to is in section 1.1 of this page: http://holloway.co.nz/can-other-vendors-implement-ooxml.html
basically, there are tags that are not fully defined (“autoSpaceLikeWord95”). MS does not REQUIRE that you implement these tags because they are for legacy docs, but then ms can turn around and claim that only their product faithfully renders the large body of existing doc files.
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Get the facts at:
http://www.burtongroup.com/Guest/Ccs/WhatsUpDoc.aspx
Neutral, objective, not paid for analyst report.
BTW - "Fast Track" is anything that is not developed at ISO, but submitted from another recognized open standards organization; there are no IPR issues with Open XML; there are tons of independent implementations of OXMl, including from Apple, Google and 4 from IBM.
It helps to know what you;re talking about before you post.
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"Paoli said that Microsoft has never been an aggressor in the standards world and did not mobilise against Sun and IBM when they proposed ODF."
This attitude is ridiculous. Why would Microsoft mobilize against ODF? ODF was a genuine standard proposed to fill a genuine gap. Moreover, it was developed at OASIS, an organization Microsoft is a sponsor of. At any time, Microsoft could have contributed to the OASIS ODF committee. Instead, they sat in a corner.
Then, ODF got ISO approval, and it became clear that there would be significant adoption long-term. Microsoft then made their own nearly single-party "standard", with proprietary dependencies, and only the weakest efforts to make it non-redundant.
But here they tell us it's only fair. Sun and IBM got a standard, so why shouldn't Microsoft? Let's let everyone have their own standard for the same purpose, because that's clearly in the best interests of consumers.
That Burton Report has been fully discussed and refuted.
See the extensive Groklaw article, including the refutations, at;
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080116214144572
Regards.
This is just another way for MS to try to take away the attention of the technical flaws of the OpenXML.
MS will try to find any excuse to make OpenXML approved as soon as possible.
ECMAs fast track is criminal for this kind of standard. They gave 5 months to review a 6000 pages document. Them they gave 4 weeks to analyze their 2K corrections....
Now with all the changes that ECMA is suggestion, not a single application support OpenXML.
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IBM has been sabotaging and blocking this standard from day 1. Why? Why do they not want you to have a choice standards? Why do they want to force an inferior standard down your throat? Why do they think they are best situated to know what is best for your shop?
BTW:
1. At ISO "Fast Track" is the name used to indicate a standard was not home grown, not developed in ISO. Because standards developed in other organizations can also "grow up" and become ISO standards there is a process that enables this - the Fast Track process. ISO does not require that all standards be developed from scratch at ISO, and in fact many are not. OXML as you know was developed at Ecma and therefore would come into ISO under the Fast Track process. Your implication that Ecma and\or MS are trying to rush this through is just plain wrong. OXML is in the ISO Fast Track because it was not developed at ISO, but rather at Ecma.
2. Thousands of pages beceause it is a better, richer standard that enables many features that ODF does not (backward compatibility with billions of existing docs, accessibility, macros, etc). Also thousands of pages because IBM has tried to sabotage and has bombarded the spec with suggestions for "improvements." To their credit Ecma, and its other members like MS have listened and addressed issues, and improved spec., hence the additional pages.
ODF is better.... NOT. But don't take my word for it. Ask IBM (which now implements OXML in 4 of its products), Apple, Google, Novell, and the many OXML implementers. Also check out: http://www.burtongroup.com/Guest/Ccs/WhatsUpDoc.aspx
And you sound like IBM or FSF :-)
I just don't like being told by others what to do or what is good for me.....whether it be my government, my boss, my wife, IBM or MS. I don't like it when companies try to lock me into their products or their standards. I want them to compete for and ern my business, and I want to have choice. Having IBM, Sun, FSF, and ODF Alliance ram their standard down my throuat and around the world is offensive. We are smarter than that. At the end of the day we all win when we have choice and when these companies are competing and innovating for our business. Having just one standard, no matter which one is bad for end-users, business and local economies.
We covered the Burton report here: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39292197,00.htm
Have to say, it did contain all the classic elements of FUD. BG may be "independent", but they have a remarkable habit of siding with MS (see their report on Google Apps last year)...
In the words of Jeremy Allison, speaking for his employer:
http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-3513-0.html?
forumID=1&threadID=43687&messageID=809118&start=0
For you to claim that Google's limited implementation of OOXML means that it believes it to be superior to ODF is "misleading" at best!
In the hope that this link might end up "clickable" when published:
(http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-3513-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=43687&messageID=809118&start=0)
>> Thousands of pages beceause it is a better, richer standard
>> that enables many features that ODF does not (backward
>>compatibility with billions of existing docs, accessibility,
>>macros, etc). Also thousands of pages because IBM has
>>tried to sabotage and has bombarded the spec with
>>suggestions for "improvements." To their credit Ecma, and
>>its other members like MS have listened and addressed
>>issues, and improved spec., hence the additional pages.
I gotta admit, this bullet point made me laugh out loud. When it comes to standards, simplicity and clarity are good things. HTML is simple, it's done well. I don't think IBM is really to blame for Microsoft's 6000 page specification. I read elsewhere that the recent errata for MS-OOXML is almost six times the size of the full ODF documentation!
Another favorite talking point of the Microsoft pundits seems to be that MS-OOXML is somehow backward compatible with Microsoft doc files. This is actually nonsensical. Both ODF and MS-OOXML are formats, not applications. The only application which can faithfully and fully interpret Microsoft's proprietary binary doc files is guess what? Microsoft Office.
Other companies needing to support MS-OOXML in their applications are left without the ability to provide “backward compatibility” as they don't have the knowledge necessary to understand the look and metadata described within Microsoft's document files. In other words, it's not OOXML which is providing the backward compatibility, it's Microsoft and only Microsoft. Precisely the kind of thing standards are supposed to free us of!
Yes, OpenOffice.org does manage to render all these proprietary binary formats fairly well but this is only possible through thousands of man-hours of reverse engineering and hundreds of thousands (millions) of lines of programming source code. Reverse engineering is the polar opposite of "open and published". This is why tags such as “autoSpaceLikeWord95” DO NOT belong in a standard.
>>ODF is better.... NOT. But don't take my word for it.
>>Ask IBM (which now implements OXML in 4 of its
>>products), Apple, Google, Novell, and the many
>>OXML implementers.
Speaking of witch hunts, it's amazing how many news outlets picked up this headline and ran with it. It's extremely misleading. At any rate, Jeremy Allison, an employee of Google, but this fallacious argument to rest some time ago in another ZDNet Talkback posting:
" I don't usually speak for Google, but in this case I'm going to make an exception.
We don't believe that OOXML is suitable as an open standard. Google supports it in a very limited viewing capacity in search to allows users to find and view the information they are looking for. This hardly constitutes "support" or any agreement that OOXML is a preferred document type. We are fully behind ODF as the ISO standard document format."
Hi - I'm the Microsoft employee quoted in this ZDNet article. If you want to find out more about Microsoft's OXML policy positions please go to http://www.microsoft.com/office/openxmlpolicy or http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/
Regards,
Nicos Tsilas
Microsoft hasn’t believed in Open since Bill Gates wrote the infamous; “Open Letter to Hobbyists” in Feb 1976, now that open is the thing to be, they too want in.
Having said that, should IBM have been allowed to vote on this? They seem to have good reason to vote against Microsoft’s OOXML given their interest in a rival standard.
You have to admire Mr Tsilas’ confidence (arrogance) "They are using government intervention as a way to compete. It's competing through regulation, because you couldn't compete technically."
learn the truth about the OOXML:
<a href="http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections#The_Gregorian_Calendar">EOOXML_objections</a>
if you thought Microsoft was right in that people need a choice of standards,
see what hundreds of people of Canada had to say about OOXML adoption to the country's Standards Council:
<a href="https://forums.scc.ca/forums/scc/dispatch.cgi/public/docProfile/100009/4498941">People's responce to SCC</a>
The Burton's Group report has been debunked here:
<a href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080114-analyst-group-slams-odf-downplays-microsoft-iso-abuses.html">Analyst group slams ODF, downplays Microsoft ISO abuses</a>
""""And you sound like IBM or FSF :-)""""
Touche ;) I don't work for either of those entities, I'm self employed. However, I do in fact have a leaning towards Free and Open Source Software, and open standards, and I openly (pun intended) admit this.
""""I just don't like being told by others what to do or what is good for .....whether i t be my government, my boss, my wife, IBM or MS. I don't like it when companies try to lock me into their products or their standards. I want them to compete for and ern my business, and I want to have choice. Having IBM, Sun, FSF, and ODF Alliance ram their standard down my throuat and around the world is offensive. We are smarter than that. At the end of the day we all win when we have choice and when these companies are competing and innovating for our business. Having just one standard, no matter which one is bad for end-users, business and local economies.""""
Similarly, I dislike being told what to do - human nature I suppose. When you say you don't like it when companies try to lock you into their products/standards, then you must really revile Microsoft in that case, after all, their particular modus operandi is all about locking YOU into THEIR stack of products.
I'm puzzled by what you are saying about "having IBM, Sun, FSF, and ODF Alliance ram their standard down" your throat, as all they're doing is promoting the Open Document Format, which as you know is an actual, ratified, official world standard.
What /has/ been happening, however, is that Microsoft - desperate to keep their ability to lock consumers into their stack - have been trying to rail road their MOOXML into being /another/ ISO standard alongside ODF.
Why do I say rail road? Look at all the new countries who joined the ISO shortly before there was a vote for MOOXML. They weren't there before. And this is now causing the ISO a lot of harm, because it's finding itself unable to conduct its normal business because most of those new participants are not following their member obligations by voting on other issues and new standards within the ISO. Effectively, the ISO's normal activities have been severely hampered by this.
Additionally, the 6000-page document submitted to the ISO for approval details a standard document format (MSOOXML) which even Microsoft's OWN products don't generate! Microsoft Word doesn't save in the format detailed in that document. Excel doesn't save in a format detailed in that document, for example.
So, I say to you, be careful when you form an opinion on this. I'm all with you for choice, but at the same time, this issue has a lot more issues than merely choosing a format.
As to your final point about only having one standard, in my opinion, that is nonsense - for the reasons I outlined above. Microsoft want its MOOXML format as an ISO standard, but that particular format isn't even one which its own products use. Oh and add to that the fact that MOOXML will be maintained within ECMA - maintained meaning altered/added to - so you'll be back to the same old situation where products - open or proprietary - which compete for attention with Microsoft's products - will always be playing "catchup" with Microsoft, because Microsoft will change their products format internally, then pretend to translate that change into the ISO standard they've - er - worked so hard - to attain.
At the same time, ODF - which WILL ALSO be evolved, added to, and improved - will be FULLY published and documented - and anyone writing software to read and write in the Open Document Format, will be able to fully implement the format.
Personally, I know which format I prefer, and it's not MSOOXML.
Regards.
Because an awful lot of people from every direction are pillorying OOXML and its deficiencies, and its agenda.
Can you please explain in non-marketing terms why OOXML is a good thing considering its current state? Oh, and while you're at it you could also try explaining why Microsoft's own current "implementation" of it is veering at high speed away from what they have submitted as a "standard."