Microsoft's document gambit moves ahead

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ODF perpetuate current Office thinking

What gets me about the ODF is that it basically mimics the current clunky nature of MS Office, with its separate word processor, spreadsheet and presentation file formats.

As a technical writer and desktop developer, I have long wished to be able to have tables in Word behave like mini spreadsheets, but allow formulae to reference other named parts of the Word document, then have a hierarchical presentation view that allows multi-level display of contents. OLE is a fudge (and flaky!), and I noticed that ODF unfortunately includes this.

Where is the quantum leap? Playing MS catchup will not get the ball away from MS (which has a history of not leaving any balls lying around too long).

I think ODF WAS dreamed up as a part of being a current Office competitor, rather than raising the bar to another level. I think it is trying to wrest away some of MSs customers rather than present a new and significantly improved direction.

The current iPod and its fairly ineffective competition has also shown that incremental improvement by competitors on the market leader does NOT make significant diffences to the laeder's market share. Likewise, ODF offers little compared to MS formats getting ratified as a standard by ECMA. A standards body is still deciding what the standard is, with the end result still a standard which others can use. A market leader can make incremental improvements, but competitors have to shift the buyers' consciousness. All ODF has really done is make MS provide an open format. Having done that, ODF will probably recede, though still hang around as a beacon to which anti-MS veterans can look back when they are old and say how it made a difference, even though they lost the battle!


In this I am not saying that MS is superior to any other, it is just the way of the market place, and standards are now BIG business, with fortunes and market share hanging off them. Any one who believes that open standards are David verses Goliath are, in my opinion, deluded. IBM is much larger than MS, but it is still trying to find its place in the software market after dropping the ball many years ago (with OS/2). Same with Sun: dropped ball. Getting standards ratified requires sustained (and expensive) effort. For many standards, only the largest players have any chance of making the distance, and so they extract their price and overlay their myoptic preferences. Therefore, often 'open standards' are not really open, but just a relection of the ideological and ecomonic preferences of those few that contributed to them. They do not guarantee the best, just an expedient consensus, as any decision by commitee is. Even then, there are so many factors outside the standards committes' influence that will show how really viable they are.


Regarding 'standards' with proprietory strings attached, I do not like them. They exhibit bad faith, because they are not open, but often control by, or require licensing or paying fees to, a particular company, such as with MPEG-4 (and MP3s = MPER-2, Layer III) and Java (up till recently). If a company offers something to be standardised and it is ratified, with no proprietory encumberences or licences (free or otherwise), then it is an 'open standard', just like any other (which have always reflected the biases of those individuals and companies sitting on their commitees).

By what some are writing here, they are implying that the ECMA Open XML formats are still proprietory. Does use of the Open XML formats require a licence from MS or ECMA? That is the key criteria! Next is the process by which changes are made.

On this last point, some may have noticed the tendency in recent years for standards bodies to be more aggressively commercial, such as having time-bombed PDFs of standards (such as after one year, you get green blank pages), making you have to keep paying to have something to look at if, some time later, you need to look at the standards by which you built a product. I think this is blackmail, but probably relects the downturn in government funding for such bodies. This last lack of adequate, 'no strings attached' funding has probably contributed more to the debasement of standards in recent years, by allowing companies to hyjack standards commitees for other than getting the best possible result.

Posted by: Patanjali   Posted on: 12/07/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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