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Gary Edwards

California may join rush of states toward ODF - 0 views

www.computerworld.com/...article.do

iso microsoft msoffice oasis odf ooxml opendocument openxml xml

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • Like the other two measures, the bill in the California Assembly doesn't list any specific document formats that could be used. But as in Minnesota and Texas, the introduction of such a bill appears to be another potential win for backers of the Open Document Format (ODF) for Office Applications.
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    Good article about the opening salvo in what promises to be a long, hard fought war with Microsoft.  Unlike what has happened in the EU and Massachusetts, this time our friends in Redmond are politically facing off on the home turf of their powerful enemies in Silicon Valley, which stretches from the south of market area (SOMA) all the way down the San Francisco peninsula to San Jose, arching around the entire Bay area.

    If you thought it was raining dollars from Redmond in Massachusetts as the great monopolist moved to successfully shut down the entire Information Technology budget, including HomeLand Security projects, the battle of California promises to be the el nino of perfect storms.  I'm confident though that California CIO Clark Kelso and five star brigadiere general Bill Welty will stand tall against the storm.  I can hardly wait for the forces to move into place and the action begin.  What a show this is going to be.

    Meanwhile, what's at stake here is all the marbles of our digital future.  Forcing Microsoft to accept and fully implement the OpenDcoument XML file format is something the great monopolist has shown they will fight to the bitter end.  Brace yourselves!

Graham Perrin

Doug Mahugh : Standards-Based Interoperability - 0 views

blogs.msdn.com/...ds-based-interoperability.aspx

interop standard ODF OOXML Excel spreadsheet OpenFormula

shared by Graham Perrin on 28 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Standards-Based Interoperability
  • 05 June 09
  • Interoperability without Standards
  • ...46 more annotations...
  • First, let’s consider how software interoperability works when it is not standards-based. Consider the various ways that four applications can share data, as shown in the diagram to the right.  There are six connections between these four applications, and each connection can be traversed in either direction, so there are 12 total types of interoperability involved.
  • As the number of applications increases, this complexity grows rapidly.  Double the number of applications to 8 total, and there will be 56 types of interoperability between them:
  • through standards maintenance, transparency of implementation details, and collaborative interoperability testing.
    • Graham Perrin
      Graham Perrin on 28 Jul 09
       
      Issues relating to CalDAV are well addressed in these ways.
  • Here’s where those workarounds will need to be implemented: Note the complexity of this diagram.
  • In the real world, interoperability is almost never achieved in this way.  Standards-based interoperability is much better approach for everyone involved,
  • whether that standard is an open one such as ODF (IS26300)
  • or a de-facto standard set by one popular implementation.
  • or Open XML (IS29500)
  • The core premise of open standards-based interoperability is this:
  • each application implements the published standard as written, and this provides a baseline for delivering interoperability.
  • the existence of a standard addresses many of the issues involved, and the other issues can be addressed
  • In the standards-based scenario, the standard itself is the central mechanism for enabling interoperability between implementations: This diagram is much simpler
  • there is no question that users of other products are massively surprised by
  • How this all applies to Office 2007 SP2 I covered last summer the set of guiding principles that we used to guide the work we did to support ODF in Office 2007 SP2.
  • applied in a specific order
  • I’d like to revisit the top two guiding principles
  • Guiding Principle #1: Adhere to the ODF 1.1 Standard
  • Guiding Principle #2: Be Predictable
  • Being predictable is also known as the principle of least astonishment.
  • What about Bugs and Deviations? Of course, the existence of a published standard doesn’t prevent interoperability bugs from occurring.
  • deviations from the requirements
  • different interpretations
  • Our approach to the transparency issue has been to document the details of our implementation through published implementer notes.
  • Interoperability Testing The final piece of the puzzle is hands-on testing
  • What else would you like to know about how Office approaches document format interoperability?
  • a standard (evolved and improved as reality demands) is the proper foundation for resolving interoperabilty
  • All complex software has bugs, and some bugs can present significant challenges to interoperability.  Let’s consider the case that 3 of the 4 applications have bugs that affect interoperability, as shown in the diagram to the right.
  • (1) their spreadsheets having their formulas lost when interchanged with Excel 2007
  • (2) not being able to handle the formulase received in Excel 2007's ODF output.
  • I am creating my own fantasy about the state of affairs
    • Graham Perrin
      Graham Perrin on 28 Jul 09
       
      :-)
  • it is far too early to declare it to be unsuccessful
  • I cannot fault the Microsoft approach as incorrect
  • I was at the year-ago DII meeting where the guiding principles were announced and their application to spreadsheet formulas described.  I applauded the principles and understood the reasoning for formulas.
  • How this would impact various groups of users and non-users (who still want to interoperate) of Office 2007 did not surface in my consciousness.
  • there is NO published standard for ODF spreadsheet formulas yet.
  • Nor is there any de-facto standard that everyone agrees on.
  • the “spaghetti diagram" method, with all of the complexity and risk of bugs that entails
  • No implementer we know of has attempted that
  • In the case of spreadsheet formulas, help is on the way -- OpenFormula is under development for use with ODF 1.2.
  • I’d like to keep this thread on-topic
  • I appreciate the post, very good
  • Visually I would rather frame it in terms of convergence, a spiral.
  • and user satisfaction.
  • I doubt someone would ever find a magic bullet to interoperability
  • New Comments to this post are disabled
    • Graham Perrin
      Graham Perrin on 28 Jul 09
       
      Hurrah!
  • © 2009 Microsoft Corporation
  • Graham Perrin on 28 Jul 09
     
    Diagrams here are eye-catching.
Graham Perrin

Where is there an end of it? | Notes on Document Conformance and Portability #3 - 0 views

www.adjb.net/...ormance-and-Portability-3.aspx

shared by Graham Perrin on 13 May 09 - Cached
  • a calm look at some of the issues
    • Graham Perrin
      Graham Perrin on 13 May 09
       
      Still, not all of the subsequent comments are calm…
  • Microsoft’s implementation decision
  • an implementation of ODF which does not interoperate with other available implementations
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • on the face of it
  • in the interests of the users
  • abandoning the “convention”
  • these ODF implementations have limited interoperability
  • more or less
  • unsafe for any mission-critical data
  • ODF implementations can actually cut it,
  • legacy support as an option
  • this interoperability fiasco has been allowed to happen within the context of a standard
  • some real problems with basic spreadsheet interoperability among ODF products using undocumented extensions
  • behave better
  • good news
  • work is underway to fix this problem: ODF 1.2
  • people may disagree in good faith
  • does not, in fact, conform
  • Rob’s statement that “SP2's implementation
  • is mistaken on this point
  • no grounds for complacency about the sufficiency of the ODF specification
  • keen to see defects, such as conformance loopholes, fixed in the next published ODF standard
  • I urge all other true supporters to read the drafts and give feedback to make ODF better for the benefit of everyone
  • Microsoft is the only one of seven main ODF implementations that fail to achieve interoperability in ODF formulas
Jesper Lund Stocholm

Doug Mahugh - 0 views

blogs.msdn.com/...default.aspx

blog ooxml

shared by Jesper Lund Stocholm on 10 May 09 - Cached
  • This is the state of formula interoperability among ODF spreadsheets today.
    • Alex Brown
      Alex Brown on 10 May 09
       
      He's right, but I'm not sure this blog posting will attract as much fuss as Rob's red boxes ...
  • An implementation is permitted to provide an implicit conversion from string-constant to number. However, the rules by which such conversions take place are implementation-defined. [Example: An implementation might choose to accept "123"+10 by converting the string "123" to the number 123. Such conversions might be locale-specific in that a string-constant such as "10,56" might be converted to 10.56 in some locales, but not in others, depending on the radix point character. end example]
    • Jesper Lund Stocholm
      Jesper Lund Stocholm on 10 May 09
       
      So in other words, OOXML doesn't say anything about string conversion either.
Alex Brown

Groklaw - When Would You Use OOXML and When ODF? -- What is OOXML For? - 0 views

www.groklaw.net/article.php

shared by Alex Brown on 28 Apr 09 - Cached
  • If you say Groklaw is an echo chamber, for example, it has insulting connotations
    • Alex Brown
      Alex Brown on 28 Apr 09
       
      It's also true; but never mind
  • Groklaw deserves respect
    • Alex Brown
      Alex Brown on 28 Apr 09
       
      The level of self-delusion here is truly scary
  • on a committee set up to help a national body
    • Alex Brown
      Alex Brown on 29 Apr 09
       
      Oh? I'd be interested to know which NB was nuts enough to appoint Groklaw as an advisor!
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • among others
  • Microsoft (and Alex Brown) are working within JTC1/SC34
    • Alex Brown
      Alex Brown on 11 Jun 09
       
      Aha, a new line of attack. It is, though, the Countries who want to have the Standard reflect the documents they actually have ...
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Apr 09
     
    The more interesting issue to me is whose voice Groklaw echoes. On the document format war, it's seemed since I stopped contributing articles to Groklaw a few years ago that it is the IBM public relations department's voice being echoed. I'll save for another day the topic of whether the echo chamber is self-delusional or deliberately intended to delude readers.
  • Alex Brown on 29 Apr 09
     
    ... and who it's aimed at. It's not as if Groklaw carries any weight (is it?)
  • Paul Merrell on 30 Apr 09
     
    Groklaw throws a pretty good punch. E.g., it launched ODF vs. Microsoft XML formats as a public issue. The blog is very influential with trade press reporters who are sympathetic to open source software. And Groklaw has done some good reporting, albeit with evident bias. Its chronicles of the SCO vs. IBM and Novell saga is undoubtedly the most thorough out there. But on ODF and OOXML, the coverage has been presented entirely as a black hat/white hat issue, ODF being perfect and designed for interoperability but OOXML as being pure evil. See e.g., http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080417104016186 (""If you want true interoperability, you need to implement ODF. Seriously. Any limitations to interoperability are entirely on Microsoft's side of the aisle, and the whole world knows it"). Intended or not, Groklaw justly deserves much credit for forestalling public oversight of the ODF TC's utter failure to deal with interoperability issues effectively and credit for keeping the oversight focus solely on OOXML. You'll find no coverage of ODF bugs on Groklaw, only ODF hugs and kisses. I see the blog as having substantially delayed ODF's repair. Groklaw has an enormous readership and particularly among citizen activists who approach ODF as a political cause rather than as a technical specification. But the Groklaw flavor of ODF v. OOXML propaganda remains consistent with that of IBM VP Bob Sutor.
paul silmonet

Instant Fix Slow Computer Solutions - 0 views

I bought a brand new PC with good specifications just last month. But only three weeks of use, I noticed that my PC froze and slowed down a bit. For the next three days, it continued to slow down. ...

Fix Slow Computer ODF OOXML OpenDocument cdf iso Microsoft OASIS openxml officeopenxml xml

started by paul silmonet on 12 Jun 11 no follow-up yet
Graham Perrin

Interoperability vs Homogeneity « Arnaud's Open blog - 1 views

lehors.wordpress.com/...nteroperability-vs-homogeneity

2009 2009-11 2009-11-11 European Interoperability Infrastructure Services

shared by Graham Perrin on 12 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Interoperability vs Homogeneity
  • leaked updated document of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF)
  • taking back what could be considered one of the most advanced features of the previous document
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • how could “homogeneity” possibly qualify has a way of obtaining “interoperability”?
  • why would the EU endorse the notion of having everybody select one specific solution or system? Isn’t that in total contradiction with its very goal?
  • I seriously hope the EU realizes how misguided this move was and takes it back.
  • November 10, 2009
  • Arnaud Le Hors
  • Graham Perrin on 12 Nov 09
Gary Edwards

Why Microsoft Azure could have the last laugh in the cloud wars | CITEworld - 0 views

www.citeworld.com/...t-laugh-in-the-cloud-wars.html

rdsdk Office-365 Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 20 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Venture capitalist Brad Feld recently wrote an interesting post predicting the end of Amazon's dominance of the cloud computing market, and concluded, "it’s suddenly a good time to be Microsoft or Google in the cloud computing wars." I'd go one step farther. Using Feld's arguments, I'd say that Microsoft is in the driver's seat. More like this The dark side of the cloud price wars between Amazon, Google, and Microsoft The rise, fall, and rehabilitation of Internet Explorer Microsoft, Apple, and Google battle for the mobile enterprise Featured Resource Presented by Citrix Systems 10 essential elements for a secure enterprise mobility strategy Best practices for protecting sensitive business information while making people productive from Learn More First, the price war. Microsoft and Google are on approximately equal ground when it comes to cutting prices -- both have highly profitable core businesses that they can use to subsidize a price war in cloud infrastructure, even to the point of sustaining losses for a while to gain market share. Amazon does not. 
  • Second, the quality argument. Like Feld, we've also pointed out that there are niche cloud providers that do a better job than the big guys at providing infrastructure-as-a-service for specific verticals, but when you move all the way up the stack to full software-as-a-service applications, Microsoft has an edge among the big three with Office 365.
  • Google has been making inroads into smaller businesses with Google Apps for almost a decade now, Microsoft remains the standard in the biggest and most profitable business customers -- as this recent investigation from Dan Frommer at Quartz showed, only one company in the Fortune 50 uses Google Apps. (That company happens to be Google itself.) 
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • But then comes the fourth argument. Feld points out that once companies get to $200,000 per month of cloud-infrastructure spend, it's actually significantly cheaper to build their own data centers
  • The third argument, support, is mostly a wash. While Amazon's support may be terrible (I have no evidence of this, but I'm taking Feld's word for it), Microsoft and Google and their respective ecosystem partners do a decent job of supporting customers on their stacks.
  • It's unclear how the Google Cloud Platform helps that business. Are customers using Google's cloud somehow more likely to advertise with Google? I don't see it. Are Google advertising customers demanding to run other workloads on Google technology? I don't see it.
  • There's one more point favoring Microsoft. Google's core business is selling online advertising. That business makes up about 90% of Google's revenue, and it has enviably high operating margins -- around 30%, based on Google's 2011 financial report. (I picked 2011 because that was before Google bought Motorola Mobility, which changed the margin structure.)
  • Microsoft is the only one of the big three players with an on-premise offering -- Windows Server and the rest of the Microsoft infrastructure family. Maybe the exact break-even point will change as the cloud price wars continue, but Microsoft has the most pieces customers would need to move from all-cloud to a hybrid or on-premise solution. Or, for that matter, for existing on-premise customers to begin experimenting moving some workloads to the cloud.
  • Meanwhile, while Azure almost certainly offers lower margins than, say, on-premises Windows Servers, it's necessary -- customers are moving workloads to the cloud, and Microsoft needs a competitive offering there to keep them on the Microsoft stack so they continue to buy other Microsoft products. Plus, as I argued in point four, today's Azure customers could become tomorrow's on-premise Microsoft infrastructure customers.
  • In other words, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Engine both lower the profit margins of their parent companies. But Azure is clearly strategic while Cloud Engine, as far as I can tell, is not. Who's more likely to keep investing in and improving its cloud? 
  • right now, Microsoft's chances look pretty good to me. No wonder they put the cloud guy in charge of the company.
Gary Edwards

Consumer Office 365 tops a half-billion dollars in annual revenue run-rate - Computerworld - 0 views

www.computerworld.com/...ars_in_annual_revenue_run_rate

wordsdk Office365

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • In the June quarter, Microsoft added approximately 1.2 million subscribers to its consumer Office 365 rolls, a quarter-over-quarter growth rate of 27%, but a year-over-year increase of 460%.
  • Microsoft's Office 365 "rent-not-buy" subscription service is at an annual revenue run-rate of more than half a billion dollars, Microsoft signaled last week.
  • According to CFO Amy Hood, Microsoft ended the June quarter with more than 5.6 million Office 365 subscribers to its consumer-grade plans, labeled "Home" and "Personal." The former sells for $100 annually, while the latter -- which was introduced in mid-April -- lists for $70 a year.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Microsoft's quarter-over-quarter gain was 100%,
  • Pacific Crest Securities said it anticipated 1 million new consumer subscribers per quarter. If Pacific Crest's forecast is accurate, the quarter-over-quarter gain for the three months ending Sept. 30 would be about 18%, but would represent year-on-year growth of 230%.
  • Nor would Microsoft assign credit for Office 365's gains -- whether on the consumer or commercial side -- to any specific move it has made, including the release of Office for iPad in March. When a Wall Street analyst asked Hood about the source of a large gain in cloud revenue -- which includes Office 365 for businesses -- and if Office for iPad played a part, the CFO declined to name any one factor. "I wouldn't point to one product area," Hood answered.
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Aug 14
     
    "Microsoft's Office 365 "rent-not-buy" subscription service is at an annual revenue run-rate of more than half a billion dollars, Microsoft signaled last week. According to CFO Amy Hood, Microsoft ended the June quarter with more than 5.6 million Office 365 subscribers to its consumer-grade plans, labeled "Home" and "Personal." The former sells for $100 annually, while the latter -- which was introduced in mid-April -- lists for $70 a year. "
Gary Edwards

Just how much bigger AWS is compared its next competitor may surprise you | Network World - 0 views

www.networkworld.com/...mpetitor-may-surprise-you.html

wordSDK Office-365

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • For reference, Microsoft's latest quarterly earnings statement does not break out revenue for Azure specifically, and it breaks up revenue for its different cloud products into different commercial and licensing categories. One of those categories, the commercial division had cloud services revenue that doubled in the quarter, growing $367 million, mainly from Office 365 commercial sales.
  • Brandon Butler — Senior Writer Senior Writer Brandon Butler covers the cloud computing industry for Network World by focusing on the advancements of major players in the industry, tracking end user deployments and keeping tabs on the hottest new startups. He contributes to NetworkWorld.com and is the author of the Cloud Chronicles blog
  • Email him at bbutler@nww.com
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Aug 14
     
    "Amazon.com came out with its quarterly earnings last week and Technology Business Research analyst Jillian Mirandi crunched the numbers of how much of a lead AWS has on its competitors in the public cloud market. The numbers are striking. AWS broke $1.1 billion in quarterly revenues for cloud IaaS in the first quarter of 2014. The company's next closest competitor in the cloud IaaS market, IBM, came in at $350 million. That's almost a three-fold lead for AWS compared to the nearest competitor, according to TBR. Behind IBM, Microsoft and Google close out the top four public cloud IaaS providers, but those latter two companies only generated about $30 million in cloud IaaS revenue last quarter, TBR estimates."
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