India Votes Against OOXML

harsha_c sends in a local Indian perspective on the vote against Microsoft's OOXML ahead of the March 29 deadline. Of 19 companies participating, only 5 voted in favor of OOXML. "It was the ultimate battle for control over global IT standard for documents — between Microsoft-promoted OOXML and Sun and IBM-backed Open Document Format. It was played out between Indian IT giants, namely Infosys, Wipro, TCS supported by Nasscom on one side and the global IT biggies like IBM, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat backed by te IITs, IIMs and IISc on the other, on their respective positions on Microsoft's OOXML standard. Microsoft understandably expressed its disspointment. 'While we are disappointed with the decision of the BIS committee, we are encouraged by the support from NASSCOM.'

Hooray! An honest nation!

While voting for OOXML does not automatically make one dishonest, I think it is fair to say that voting against is a sign of honesty.

Re:Hooray! An honest nation!

I don't think it means a thing for honesty, it might mean there is less corporate corruption going on but really how is it "honest"? OOXML really makes no difference to the average IT company except for benefits of not having to go through an overpriced, closed vendor (MS) to get the "standards".

Huh???

First you say "I don't think it means a thing for honesty", then you say "it might mean there is less corporate corruption going on". That is a contradiction, dude. If you said it in fewer words, it would be called an "oxymoron".

Then, you say "OOXML really makes no difference", and continue on to say "except for... not having... an overpriced, closed vendor...".

Ditto. You start each sentence one way, then contradict yourself later in the same sentence. Sorry, but you can't have it both ways.

Re:"not properly document" criticism is invalid

It doesn't matter whether OOXML is properly documented --- as Stephane Rodriguez [blogspot.com] explains, even if it were properly documented, it doesn't accomplish what a standard should, which is to enable interoperability (with Office 2007).

autoSpaceLikeWord95 and useWord97LineBreakRules

autoSpaceLikeWord95

This is defined on pages 136-137 of the "dipositions of comments" document SC34N0980, and the decision has been made at the BRM to incorporate this definition into the draft standard.

useWord97LineBreakRules.

This is defined on pages 147-148 of the "dipositions of comments" document SC34N0980, and the decision has been made at the BRM to incorporate this definition into the draft standard.

Re:autoSpaceLikeWord95 and useWord97LineBreakRules

Proprietary crap like that does not belong in a global standard.

Sure, it's crap. It's specific information about some bugs in "Word95" and "Word97", by means of which now non-Microsoft vendors can implement some kind of compatibility mode that duplicates those bugs.

As soon as the revised spec is published by Ecma, the information will be in the public domain. It's crap all right, but it's not "proprietary crap" any longer. And it's certainly no longer an example of missing information in the OOXML spec.

I agree that it is debatable at least whether this kind of information really belongs into a standard. But what would you suggest that should be done with this information?

Re:autoSpaceLikeWord95 and useWord97LineBreakRules

They're going about it completely the wrong way, why not just make the existing markup describing spacing and line breaking flexible enough to cater to the bugs in these old apps, and then have the conversion process handle it accordingly. No need to enshrine these old bugs in a new format at all.

Re:autoSpaceLikeWord95 and useWord97LineBreakRules

But what would you suggest that should be done with this information?

They should convert that information into the equivalent representation in their new format. Replacement of specific spaces with hard breaks or forced non-breaks or whatever will cause the resulting document to print exactly the same and would not require this stuff.

This puts all the ugly part of implementing this information into the program that is reading the .doc format, rather into this "standard". Microsoft could even keep it secret if they wanted...

Re:Hooray! An honest nation!

I'm Anti-Microsoft, Pro-Linux, Pro-F/OSS, Pro-Open Standards, all that.

But just because someone is against Microsoft on this issue doesn't mean they are 'honest' or honorable with their intent or motivation.

India is a growing IT powerhouse. When Microsoft provides the basis for participation in IT products and services, it goes without saying that they have influence in your success or failure. It may well be that India's motivation is simply to help Microsoft become irrelevant so that their potential is no longer dependent on Microsoft's will. After all, Microsoft is an American company and as such is subject to influence of the U.S. government. You can see that there's plenty of reason to mistrust Microsoft.

Re:Hooray! An honest nation!

Microsoft is an American company and as such is subject to influence of the U.S. government.

That's funny; I always thought it was the other way round.

Yes, but...

Your argument does not support your subject line. And in fact, the argument is incorrect. "Most" of the arguments being made against OOXML are based on these two facts: (1) There are hundreds of technical problems with OOXML (literally hundreds... read the articles) that were found by those who studied it, and which Microsoft has refused to address, and (2) the fact that it does not conform to the often-stated needs of a truly "open" standard.

This is not something I made up. All you have to do is read the articles linked to from here, and perhaps Ars Technica. Other places too, but that should be enough to convince anyone.

Re:One link. There are many out there. Just look.

This [blogspot.com] is a great example of concrete unsolved problems with OOXML both in documentation and design. In an earlier comment in the thread you asked someone to name one unaddressed issue, there are 15 or so there. If you really are involved in the standards body for your country/region, I really hope you know about glaring issues like these and disapprove on grounds more substantial than just the fast track request.

I do not think it is out of scope to take into account the past trustworthiness of Microsoft as an international entity, either. You may disagree with that, but the linked post can't really be argued against.

Dishonesty of voting for OOXM

In my opinion, any national body which at the current state votes for OOXML to become an ISO standard is definitely dishonest.

Either they are dishonest because they don't understand what they're doing while claiming to understand, or they're dishonest because they're knowingly voting against their country's best interest.

Nota bene, the representatives of Microsoft Corporation and partner companies are not necessarily dishonest in their lobbying for "APPROVE" votes, since what they ask for is genuinely in their interest. But the national bodies are supposed to represent the correspondiong national interest!

"One standard" vs "multiple standards"

There is a lot of rhetorics around "one standard" vs "multiple standards". A major reason for this is the ISO/IEC rules which way that there should not be "contradicting" standards, while in reality this rule is not generally followed.

In fact facilitating technical progress requires that the "no contradicting standards" rule cannot be strictly enforced.

In this situation however there is a serious problem. Because of Microsoft's dominant market position, if OOXML gets ISO/IEC approval, that will probably kill ODF. The problem with this is that this kills investments in ODF. If Microsoft is allowed to get away with this, the net result will be a chilling effect on all investments in non-Microsoft standards.

Re:"One standard" vs "multiple standards"

OOXML cant kill ODF, because ODF is open, and OOXML isnt.People who want to guarantee access to their documents in perpetuity (eg legitimate governments) cannot use OOXML because it cannot meet their needs. It is full of rabbit holes.

It may take a while for the smoke and mirrors to clear, but in the end, the truth will out.

Re:

A few donations, free lunches and trips to exotic places will likely convince decision makers otherwise. You know it's true. That's just the way things work for now.

Re:"One standard" vs "multiple standards"

Microsofts game is not to promote OOXML, it is to delay and confuse the world wide adoption of any standard. The status quo is worth billions to them yearly as well as being a tool to promote other products. They fight to preserve that. I also find it hard to imagine anyone supporting OOXML for any reason beyond payment from Microsoft. It might be a promise of business investment or Gates foundation aid for a country rather than hookers and blow for an individual but it is still all about getting payment from Microsoft.

Microsoft's own fault

OOXML sucks technically, but that's not even the real problem. The real problem is Microsoft's waffling on making the standard open. If they had unequivocally placed the standard and all necessary patents in the public domain and committed to keeping it stable, more people might vote for it.

Microsoft just doesn't *understand* open standards

The real problem is Microsoft's waffling on making the standard open. If they had unequivocally placed the standard and all necessary patents in the public domain and committed to keeping it stable, more people might vote for it.

Recently I accidentally went to a short promotional Microsoft presentation (non-US) about OOXML for work. From the description about integrating with Office from a programmers' perspective, I'd thought it was going to be about writing Office addins, but it turned out to be a promotional-fest for OOXML in front of about 30 or so local software architechts for various companies and government organisations.

They started with a couple of locals without explaining what was coming -- one guy had built a Silverlight application that could parse basic OOXML Word documents and display them according to the OOXML specification. The other guy had written a web app that generated its own Office 2007 documents (Word and Excel) without having to rely on any third party or binary manipulation.

Then the local Microsoft CIO jumped up, having recently returned from Geneva, and started complaining about how there were really a small segment of people who had gripes with Microsoft and were refusing to work with Microsoft and trying to stop the standard going through for its own sake. They made a big thing about how the two people who'd just presented hadn't needed to read a complete 6000 page specification to do what they'd done, and he used the phrase "defacto standard" in virtually every sentence. They were preaching to the converted on this occasion, considering the room was full of people who were already big Microsoft customers, and really only wanted reassurance rather than to be convinced. I was tempted to ask if Microsoft ever had any plans to support the OASIS standard, but I didn't in the end.

I came away from that presentation with the impression that Microsoft as a company, and especially at the executive level, doesn't actually have a clear understanding of what an Open Standard is. The entire focus of Microsoft is that their Office suite is by far the most popular (for whatever reason), and therefore Microsoft should be the one to decide the standard. If someone else did that while Microsoft was looking the other way, then it must have been an accidental quirk that now needs to be corrected.

Perhaps there's some idea somewhere up in the ranks of leveraging their broken format in the future to reinforce their market dominance should there ever be a problem, but I think for most of them, they're just a bit pissed off or shocked that someone else has already defined a standard and is now trying to tell Microsoft that it can't do what it wants to do. After all, it's not "supposed" to work that way in their minds... Surely the "defacto standard" that's used everywhere should be the one that matters, right?

In their own minds, most of the Microsoft managers are quite certain that Microsoft would never abuse its position, or their already fundamentally of the belief that it's only fair that money should always change hands for these kinds of things, and that if Open Source apps can't find sources of funding then it's their own problem. (Money makes Microsoft go round, after all. It shouldn't be surprising for Microsoft employees to have those kinds of ethics.)

The frustrating addendum to this is that many businesses are in exactly the same mindset as Microsoft because money makes their business go around, too. If Microsoft starts using badly documented parts of their spec and charging for others to implement it, those people will quite happily either keep using Microsoft products, or pay for a product that costs extra as part of the necessity of paying the Microsoft tax. These people haven't even consciously dealt with concepts like standards definitions before, they don't appreciate how critically important it is to get it right, and they don't want to now. That's where Microsoft is getting its support from.

Is it?

From the perspective of document format users, OOXML is better than what MS customers had before.

How do you figure that? Anyone implementing OOXML readers or writers still has to reverse-engineer Microsoft's applications. It doesn't make a lot of difference whether the undocumented proprietary code looks like "xmlns..." instead of "{\rtf..." or binary gibberish.

Doesn't Solve the Fundamentals

While I applaud the moves in recent times to give us standards within the field of office documents that we can all work with, it doesn't solve the fundamental problems. Chasing after Microsoft, trying to get ISO committees to reject OOXML and trying to get governments to mandate proper standards (a worthy goal, as IT has so very few) is, unfortunately, a saga destined to never end. The reason for this is that Microsoft has the dominant office suite in the world today held in place by the platform they control (Windows), they can mandate any formats they like and they can keep going back to the ISO to get a puppet standard through.

If IBM and others are as serious as people like Rob Weir seem to be then I strongly suggest they stop being chicken shits after the way in which they capitulated OS/2 in the face of Windows, start funding a really viable alternative to Windows and start really getting just what is required. This would be a desktop operating system that would circumvent the OEM channels Microsoft controls by being given away freely so that everybody, including OEMs, can install it free of Microsoft's control, and it will be a desktop good enough in terms of developers' tools and installation so software can get to users. With enough effort then you'd definitely carve out a market large enough to make it viable, and you'd then have an office suite with enough of an installed base. Governments and other organisations would then pick it up as a result.

Winging about OOXML isn't going to get anybody anywhere, sadly. It's only maintaining the status quo.

Re:Doesn't Solve the Fundamentals

funding a really viable alternative to Windows

A viable alternative to Windows has to run popular Windows software. The problems are a) MS owns (or can buy) the most popular Windows software and can modify it to be incompatible with an alternative OS, or b) MS can push the next release of Windows before the alternative can gather momentum. This makes creating a viable Windows alternative a very risky, expensive, and exceptionally time sensitive gamble.

Which is why ODF scares the hell out of MS. ODF would make it much easier to develop an alternative to Office. As it stands, Office's price is pretty inelastic since there is no real competitor. We've been paying five dollar a gallon prices for Office for a long time now. ODF would make it possible for people to switch to a wallet friendly and just as effective Office alternative. And unlike Ma Bell, once the office productivity market is broken up, there won't be a way to put it back together again.

Once people no longer have to rely on the Microsoft Office software suite, their need to run Windows diminishes greatly. If Office falls, Windows OS falls, and MS goes from Kraken to being just another fish in the pond.

End result: you don't need to create an alternative Windows compatible OS. You just need to develop an Office alternative. Which is why MS is using every ethically challenged legal and business strategy to shut down ODF.

Even if MS stops ODF, if they keep pushing out underwhelming and much delayed Vista-like versions of Windows, or if MS cannot keep people on the software upgrade/subscription path, then they might really be vulnerable to an actual alternative Windows compatible OS (which at the moment is XP. Go figure.) Given that an operating system isn't useful in and of itself (applications make a computer useful,) it is a double hit to see MS having a great difficulty in coming up with and implementing must-have features or improvements to Windows. They're also scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of Office improvements. It's becoming apparent that MS has has lost the agility needed to create and implement innovations in a cost and time-effective manner.

So until MS figures out how to compete by producing a quality product, it's going find itself in the same position that IBM did in the early 90s (where IBM almost went bankrupt.) It will be interesting to see if MS can pull an IBM and re-invent itself from a clumsy dinosaur into a fleet footed mammal.

Re:Doesn't Solve the Fundamentals

If IBM and others are as serious as people like Rob Weir seem to be then I strongly suggest they stop being chicken shits after the way in which they capitulated OS/2 in the face of Windows, start funding a really viable alternative to Windows and start really getting just what is required. This would be a desktop operating system that would circumvent the OEM channels Microsoft controls by being given away freely so that everybody, including OEMs, can install it free of Microsoft's control, and it will be a desktop good enough in terms of developers' tools and installation so software can get to users. With enough effort then you'd definitely carve out a market large enough to make it viable, and you'd then have an office suite with enough of an installed base. Governments and other organisations would then pick it up as a result.

There's already an OS like that. It's called GNU/Linux.

Parent is a virus link

Please don't click it.

Re:Parent is a virus link

you should have warned about the goatsee to:D I felt relatively secure being on linux and using ff+noscript. Boy did that teach me a lesson!