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Gary Edwards

Independent study advises IT planners to go OOXML: The Bill Gates MSOffice "formats and... - 0 views

talkback.zdnet.com/5206-12558-0.html

anti-trust browser-wars comes gates iowa msoffice netscape ooxml w3c

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 May 08 - Cached
  • 3.2.2.2. A pox on both your houses! gary.edwards - 01/22/08 Hi Robert, What you've posted are examples of MSOffice ”compatibility settings” used to establish backwards compatibility with older documents, and, for the conversion of alien file formats (such as various versions of WordPerfect .wpd). These compatibility settings are unspecified in that we know the syntax but have no idea of the semantics. And without the semantic description there is no way other developers can understand implementation. This of course guarantees an unacceptable breakdown of interoperability. But i would be hesitant to make my stand of rejecting OOXML based on this issue. It turns out that there are upwards of 150 unspecified compatibility settings used by OpenOffice/StarOffice. These settings are not specified in ODF, but will nevertheless show up in OpenOffice ODF documents – similarly defying interoperability efforts! Since the compatibility settings are not specified or even mentioned in the ODF 1.0 – ISO 26300 specification, we have to go to the OOo source code to discover where this stuff comes from. Check out lines 169-211. Here you will find interesting settings such as, “UseFormerLineSpacing, UseFormerObjectPositioning, and UseFormerTextWrapping”. So what's going on here?
  • From: Bill Gates Sent: Saturday, December 5 1998 To: Bob Muglia, Jon DeVann, Steven Sinofsky Subject : Office rendering "One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities. Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destroy Windows. I would be glad to explain at a greater length. Likewise this love of DAV in Office/Exchange is a huge problem. I would also like to make sure people understand this as well." Tuesday, August 28, 2007
  • Gary Edwards on 30 May 08
     
    The IOWA Comes vs. Microsoft antitrust suit evidence is now publicly available. This ZDNet Talkback posts an extraordinary eMail from Bill Gates concerning the need to control MSOffice formats and protocols as Microsoft pushes onto the Web. The key point is that Chairman Bill understands that the real threat to Microsoft is that of Open Web formats and protocols outside of Microsoft's control. It's 1998, and the effort to "embrace and eXtend" W3C HTML, XHTML, SVG and CSS isn't working well. The good Chairman notifies the troops that MSOffice must come up with another plan. Interestingly, it's not until 2001, when OpenOffice releases an XML encoding of the OpenOffice/StarOffice imbr that Microsoft finally sees a solution! (imbr = in-memory-binary-representation) The MSOffice crew immediately sets to work creating a similar XML encoding of the MSOffice binary (imbr) dump. The first result is released in the MSOffice 2003 beta as "WordprocessingML and SpreadsheetML". XML was designed as a structured language for creating specific structured languages. OpenOffice saw the potential of using XML to create an OpenOffice specific XML language. MSOffice seized the innovation and the rest is history. Problem solved! So what was the "problem" the good Chairman identified in this secret eMail? It's that the Web is the future, and Microsoft needed to find a way of leveraging their existing desktop document "editor" monopoly share into owning and controlling the Web formats produced by Microsoft applications. MSOffice OOXML is the result. ISO approval of MSOffice OOXML is beyond important to Microsoft. It establishes MSOffice "editors" as standards compliant. It also establishes the application, platform and vendor specific MSOffice OOXML as an international "open" standard. Many will ask why this isn't a case of Microsoft actually opening up the MSOffice formats in compliance with government antitrust demands. It is "compliance", but not in the sense of what
Gary Edwards

Comes v. Microsoft - 0 views

iowa.gotthefacts.org

antitrust comes formats iowa microsoft msoffice protocols

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 May 08 - Cached
  • Comes v. Microsoft
  • Gary Edwards on 30 May 08
     
    list of email evidence presented in the antitrust action Microsoft rushed to settle.
Gary Edwards

Google Search To Surpass Size of Microsoft Windows in 2009 - Silicon Alley Insider - 0 views

www.alleyinsider.com/...e_of_microsoft_windows_in_2009

google microsoft msoffice web-platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 14 May 08 - Cached
  • Google's search business will pass Microsoft's Windows business by early next year (at the latest). Good thing Microsoft has another huge, wildly profitable monopoly: Office. Add that to the calculation, and Microsoft can breathe easy for a few more years: GOOGLE SEARCH vs MICROSOFT WINDOWS + OFFICEQuarterly Revenue Q3 2006-Q1 2008 Of course, Google's visible in that Microsoft rearview mirror, too--especially now that it offers a product that is directly competitive with Office. And then there's the most depressing comparison (from Microsoft's perspective). After 13 years of heavy investment, frequent doubling down, and--until recently--a browser monopoly, here's how Microsoft's online business is doing relative to Google's search business. Remember: Google was founded four years after Microsoft launched its online business, and Microsoft's search business is just a tiny piece of Microsoft Online.
  • The "Windows monopoly+Office monopoly=Microsoft" story was absolutely true 10 years ago, but less so now. 1. It looks as if the "Office" revenue figures are coming from MSFT's reported revenues in the Business segment. That's not all Office. Based on what they've said at the last few Financial Analyst Meetings, Exchange is approaching $2B/year, SharePoint is about $1B/year, and Dynamics (formerly Microsoft Business Solutions) is more than $1B per year. I also know that Project has been a $1B/year business for a long time (believe it or not), and products such as Comms Server and Visio contribute around $500m/year. Margins on all these products are lower than on Office, but most (not Comms Server) are profitable. 2. In addition to all the non-Office products that compose its Business segment as mentioned above, the Server and Tools business (Windows Server, SQL Server) is profitable (30% margins) and growing revenues average of 15% for the last six years. Not monopoly, but a good business. Look at all these stats together, and seems like they should get out of search and advertising and sell off (or scale back to maintenance mode) most of the consumer online sites, focusing instead on hosted business apps--they're already doing it with Exchange and SharePoint, why not Office? If somebody's going to canniblize their "real" business, it might as well be them.
  • Gary Edwards on 14 May 08
     
    The Henry Blodgett article comparing Google and Microsoft. Excellent source!
  • Paul Merrell on 18 May 08
     
    Blodgett calls Windows a "natural monopoly," a term derived from the science of economics. But the view of Windows as a natural monopoly blinks past more than a few facts: [i] the monopoly at all times was firmly rooted in government-granted monopoly created by copyrights, patents, and trade secrets; [ii] even the 3.x versions depended mightily on antitrust violations involving DR DOS; and [iii] the dependence on antitrust violations to build, maintain, and extend the monopoly continue to this day. I see scant basis for labeling Windows as a "natural monopoly." Economic theory may blink past the antitrust issues on free market principles, but it may not blink past the government grants of monopolies in similar fashion..
Paul Merrell

The universally accessible and interoperable specification v. 0.01 | Universal Interope... - 0 views

www.universal-interop-council.org/...5

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 May 08 - Cached
  • Paul Merrell on 11 May 08
     
    Version 0.01 of the Universally Accessible and Interoperable Specification has been released. The draft sets for criteria derived from competition law for evaluating the suitability of data formats and communications protocols in the ICT sector.
  • Paul Merrell on 11 May 08
     
    While proponents of ICT modernization might hope that other candidates would embrace and extend the relevant Obama pledges, thus far none have done so. But what is still missing from the Obama campaign's to-do list is specific criteria for evaluation of file formats and communications protocols to achieve the goals announced. This document is intended to suggest such criteria and to provide a set of principles useful for other governments concerned with revamping their information infrastructure to foster greater interoperability, accessibility, and competition in the software market in a manner consistent with antitrust law in the U.S. and the European Union as well as with international law applicable to all Member nations of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade and the Agreement on Government Procurement. Consistency with the laws of other nations is an ultimate goal.
Paul Merrell

My take on why Microsoft finally decided to support ODF « Arnaud's Open blog - 0 views

lehors.wordpress.com/...finally-decided-to-support-odf

antitrust arnaud ibm microsoft odf

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 May 08 - Cached
  • Let’s just now hope that Microsoft won’t try to play games anymore. Besides their rather poor track record at delivering on the ongoing chain of announcements about becoming open and caring about interoperability (as opposed to intraoperability), there are other reasons one might want to take today’s announcement with caution. One trick they could try and pull for instance would be to put just enough support for ODF to claim that they support it but not enough for people to really use it systematically. They could then tell customers who complain something isn’t working that it’s because ODF isn’t powerful enough, and if they want the full power of Office they need to use OOXML.
  • Paul Merrell on 23 May 08
     
    IBM's Arnaud La Hors on why Microsoft should be blamed for what is inevitable given that ODF is not designed for interoperability and is not application-neutral. One might rationally fault Microsoft for not having joined the ODF TC earlier, but the ODF TC studiously avoided enabling interoperability even among ODF implementations and ODF has almost no mandatory conformity requirements, with application-specific extensions classified as conformant. The real ODF standard is the OOo code base controlled by Sun Microsystems. IBM played along with that game and cloned the OOo code base instead of fighting on the TC to make the myth of ODF interoperability come true. I don't see a lot of moral high ground for IBM here.
Gary Edwards

Microsoft Silverlight - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/Silverlight

flash flex ria silverlight xaml

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Apr 08 - Cached
  • The international, non-profit European Committee for Interoperable Systems ("a coalition of Microsoft's largest competitors"[50]) fears that with Silverlight Microsoft aims to introduce content on the web that can only be accessed from the Windows platform. They argue that use of XAML in Silverlight is positioned to replace the cross-platform HTML standard. Effectively, if Silverlight usage becomes widespread enough, users will risk having to purchase Microsoft products to access web content[51]. California and several other U.S. states also have asked a District Judge to extend most of Microsoft's antitrust case settlement for another five years,[52] citing "a number of concerns, including the fear that Microsoft could use the next version of Windows to 'tilt the playing field' toward Silverlight, its new Adobe Flash competitor," says a Seattle Post-Intelligencer article. Microsoft has also been criticized for not using the Scalable Vector Graphics standard for Silverlight, which, according to Ryan Paul of Ars Technica, is consistent with Microsoft's ignoring of open standards in other products, as well.[53] However, according to David Betz, an independent .NET technologies specialist, Microsoft would have needed to alter the SVG specification to add .NET integration and UI constructs on top of SVG to make it suitable for scenarios Silverlight uses markup for (UI and vector markup, by default). Consequently, the "choice by Microsoft to use XAML over SVG, served to retain the SVG standard by not adding proprietary technology [to extend SVG]".[54]
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Apr 08
     
    Silverlight Wikipedia description
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