the panel reached consensus that one standard is important
to ensure interoperability and to allow users to collaborate effectively on the same document,”
said the minutes
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Antitrust & Competition : The European Union, the United States, and Microsoft: A Compa... - 0 views
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Interoperability through antitrust - is there a legal foundation in place capable of pulling this off? This article is a lengthy study and comparative analysis of the legal foundation in the USA and Europe. Microsoft is of course the target. Excerpt: Microsoft has incorporated products, such as browsers and media players, into its operating system, behavior that again amounts to technological tying. It has also improved its server software by heightening the degree to which servers employing that software can interact. By raising the level of interaction among servers equipped with its software, Microsoft has so integrated work group servers as to enable groups of small servers to approach the capacities of mainframe computers. The European competition-law authorities see both matters as problematic. The integration of the media player has been condemned as tying; and the heightened server interaction has been faulted for failing to provide the interoperability that rival server software requires in order to participate on an equal footing with Microsoft server software in Windows work groups. Microsoft’s integration (at least in the view of the European antitrust authorities) also raises issues of essential facilities, and of the role of antitrust in achieving interoperability. . We have now reached a moment in time in which both the American and European laws are sufficiently developed to warrant reflection and comparison. That is the task approached in this article. Three part study: Part I -The European approach. Part II-USA decisions regarding Microsoft tying. Part III-comparison of USA and European approaches to product integration (tying).
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Microsoft attacks UK government decision to adopt ODF for document formats - 0 views
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A subsequent meeting of the same panel also considered a detailed comparison of ODF and OOXML, citing concerns raised by one member. “We need to make sure there is sound reasoning to back up the decision as this may incur significant costs to some government departments. The comparison may be slightly skewed by concentrating solely on implementation of strict OOXML, which is an emerging standard similar to ODF 1.3, whilst considering implementations of all ODF versions. It ignores transitional OOXML which does have very wide support, arguably wider than ODF,” said the meeting minutes.
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“LH described the issues identified in the [comparison] document and added that there has since been some confusion about support for OOXML strict in LibreOffice. It appears that LibreOffice supports the standardised transitional OOXML, as well as a different Microsoft version of transitional OOXML,” the minutes stated.
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Despite its obvious disappointment at the government’s decision, Microsoft was also keen to point out that its software does fully support ODF.
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“The good news for Office users is that Office 365 and Office 2013 both have excellent support for the ODF file format, so their current and future investments in Office are safe. In fact, Office 365 remains the only business productivity suite on the UK government’s G-Cloud that is accredited to the government’s own security classification of 'Official' and which also supports ODF,” said the Microsoft spokesman.
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"Microsoft has attacked the UK government's decision to adopt ODF as its standard document format, saying it is "unclear" how UK citizens will benefit. The Cabinet Office announced its new policy yesterday, whereby Open Document Format (ODF) is immediately established as the standard for sharing documents across the public sector, with PDF and HTML also acceptable when viewing documents. SERGIGN - FOTOLIA The decision was a rejection of Microsoft's preference for Open XML (OOXML), the standard used by its Word software, which remains the dominant wordprocessor in government. "Microsoft notes the government's decision to restrict its support of the file formats it uses for sharing and collaboration to just ODF and HTML," said a spokesman for the software giant in a statement to Computer Weekly. "Microsoft believes it is unproven and unclear how UK citizens will benefit from the government's decision. We actively support a broad range of open standards, which is why, like Adobe has with the PDF file format, we now collaborate with many contributors to maintain the Open XML file format through independent and international standards bodies," it added"
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Game Time for OpenDocument: - 0 views
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There are the technical arguments for ODf vs. EooXML. Then there are endless discussions concerning the discovery and disclosure of volumes of contradictions between ODF and EooXmL And how about all those legal-patent-licensing-DRM restrictions on EooXML which shatter in comparison to the truly open and un encumbered ODF. Even the comparison between ECMA the great rubber stamp standards for sale org vs OASIS, the everyman's consensus community standards mill where ODF flourishes. All interesting. but this blog is about the reality of migrating information and information processes to ODF. It's not easy!
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There are the technical arguments for ODf vs. EooXML. Then there are endless discussions concerning the discovery and disclosure of volumes of contradictions between ODF and EooXmL And how about all those legal-patent-licensing-DRM restrictions on EooXM
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There are the technical arguments for ODf vs. EooXML. Then there are endless discussions concerning the discovery and disclosure of volumes of contradictions between ODF and EooXmL And how about all those legal-patent-licensing-DRM restrictions on EooXM
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There are the technical arguments for ODf vs. EooXML. Then there are endless discussions concerning the discovery and disclosure of volumes of contradictions between ODF and EooXmL And how about all those legal-patent-licensing-DRM restrictions on EooXM
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The real state of ODF Interoperability? There is none : Comments from the Northwest P... - 0 views
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Marbux nails it again in the comments section of this obscure review. In particular, he sites Shah, Rajiv C. and Kesan, Jay P., Lost in Translation: Interoperability Issues for Open Standards - ODF and OOXML as Examples (September 2008), Link to paper on SSRN (compatibility fidelity comparisons of ODF implementations testing only a very small set of word processing features). "...Switching documents, I go through similar travails with the published ODF 1.1 specification, using both the PDF and ODT versions. Bottom line: I can't get either document into WordPerfect X3 or X4 using any rich text format. So I convert the document to plain text using Symphony and get my work done. That is the real state of ODF interoperability. There is no such thing. But that does not stop the vested interests from claiming that there is. E.g.:"
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shared by Gary Edwards on 27 Aug 14
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Microsoft, Apple, and Google: How three tech giants have evolved in the 21st Century | ... - 0 views
www.zdnet.com/in-the-21st-century-7000032953
Office-365 wordSDK Microsoft-Cloud Google-cloud Apple-cloud
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In 2002, the Desktop Platforms division accounted for 33 percent of Microsoft's total revenue. That percentage has been steadily dropping, and in fiscal 2013, the corresponding division (which now includes Microsoft's Surface hardware) was responsible for only 25 percent of the company's steadily rising total revenue. Server products, Office and other desktop applications, and cloud services increased steadily during that time. Looking at operating income (what's left of revenue after you subtract expenses) tells a more interesting story. From 2002 through 2004, Windows was the dominant contributor to Microsoft's profits, accounting for as much as 89 percent of total operating income. But that began changing in 2005 as those investments in enterprise software and cloud services began to pay off.
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"Over the past week, I've been blowing the virtual dust off more than a decade's worth of annual reports from Microsoft, Apple, and Google. My goal was to follow the money and figure out how each company's business has changed over the past decade. Consider this a follow-up to my February post, "Apple, Google, Microsoft: Where does the money come from?" My tally starts with financial results for 2002, the year after Microsoft signed a historic consent decree that settled the U.S. v. Microsoft antitrust lawsuit. It was also the first full year after the introduction of the iPod, which was the first step on Apple's transformation from a PC company to one that revolutionized mobile computing and communication. The earliest annual report I could find for Google was from 2003, the year before its big IPO. In Microsoft's case, the question I was most interested in was "How dependent is the company on Windows?" The Windows monopoly began crumbling as soon as the settlement was signed (although it's debatable how much influence that lawsuit had on the market). Over the past 10 years, Microsoft has shifted its reporting structures a few times, making it hard to draw perfect comparisons over time. But the chart below, which shows revenue from the desktop versions of Windows and related products, is close enough."
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IBM In Denial Over Lotus Notes - Forbes.com - 0 views
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The marketing folks in IBM's Lotus division are starting to sound like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who insists he's winning a fight even as he loses both arms and legs: "'Tis but a scratch," the Black Knight declares after one arm is lopped off. "Just a flesh wound," he says after losing the other. "I'm invincible!" The same goes for IBM's (nyse: IBM - news - people ) Lotus, which keeps declaring victory even as Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) carves it up.
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Want to know the real reason why IBM and Microsoft are going at it hammer and tong over document formats? Here it is. Lotus Notes is getting clobbered by the Exchange/SharePoint juggernaut.
The article is old, but the point is well taken. Today the Exchange/SharePoint juggernaut i sover 65% marketshare. IBM is struggling to protect the Lotus Stack against an impossible foe.
The thing is, Microsoft E/S will ALWAYS have better integration with the MSOffice - Outlook desktop monopoly base (550 M and counting). Most of this "integration" is due to the high fidelity exchange of documents in Microsoft's proprietary XML mode known as MS-OOXML. Forget the charade that MS-OOXML is an open standard called Ecma 376. MSOffice and infamous XML Compatibility Pack Plug-in do not implement Ecma 376. The Pack implements MS-OOXML.
One key differnece between MS-OOXML and Ecma 376 us that MS-OOXML is infused with the Smart Tags components. These are for metadata, data binding, data extraction, workflow, intelligent routing and on demand re purposing of docuemnt components. In effect, MS-OOXML :: Smart Tags combines with proprietary .NET Libraries, XAML and soon enough Silverlight to replace the entire span of W3C Open Internet Technologies.
Can you say "HTML"?
Okay, so why does this matter to IBM and the future of Lotus Notes?
The end game of the document format wars is that of a stack model that converges desktop, server, devices and web information systems. The MS Stack uses MS-OOXML as the primary transport of accelerated content/data/multi media streams running across the MS Stack of desktop, server, device and web application systems. It's the one point of extreme interoperability.
It's also a barrier that no non MS applicatio or service can penetrate or interoperate with except on terms Microsoft dictates.
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ODF versus OOXML: Don't forget about HTML! - O'Reilly XML Blog - 0 views
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My report on OOXML and ODF | Larsblog - 3 views
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Work on this in the Norwegian government has been going on for years. I worked on this for four months, producing a 45-page report. This blog posting oversimplifies most of the way through in the interests of brevity.
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Work on this in the Norwegian government has been going on for years. I worked on this for four months, producing a 45-page report. This blog posting oversimplifies most of the way through in the interests of brevity. The full report is here, and if you can read Norwegian you can post your feedback in the form on that page. Ever since ODF and OOXML burst onto the scene in ISO SC34 I've tried to avoid getting pulled into the mess. I was quite successful at this for several years, until one day one our managers at Bouvet suggested we bid for a contract to write a report for the Norwegian government (strictly speaking, the Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (Difi)). The report was about whether to recommend/require ODF and/or OOXML in the Norwegian public sector. I couldn't come up with any valid excuses for not doing it, and so we sent in a bid, and in the end won the contract.
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Conclusion By now I guess the conclusion should be obvious. I couldn't recommend either format. Both specs are of very low quality, and for neither format do you have much of a choice of tools. For the public sector this would essentially mean having to agree not on a format, but on a single tool to be used sector-wide. The purpose of creating standards should be to achieve interoperability, but in this case that just hasn't happened yet. Having said that, ODF 1.2 looks like it will satisfy nearly all the shortcomings with ODF 1.1 that my report identifies. Similarly, it looks like the next OOXML version (ISO/IEC 29500:2008 amendment 1) will solve most of the OOXML issues. If the implementors follow up and improve their converters things will look much brighter. Unfortunately, this is going to take a couple of years. So my conclusion in the report is that both standards should be listed as "under observation" for all usage areas.