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Count on Walt Hucks to nail it every time.  Once again he comes through with another gem, commenting on the Mary Jo Foley interview with the slippery Tom Robertson, General Manager of laugh out loud "Interoperabiltiy and Standards" for Microsoft.  I kid you not. 

Microsoft describes their highly proprietary and self serving implementation of interoperbiltiy as, "Interoperability by design".  Which means, only those applications, systems and services designed by Microsoft will have the needed interoperability consumers must have to make sense of the many volumes of information and information processes that drive critical day to day workflows.

Now with Ecma 376, we have a clear example of Microsoft "Standards by Design".  Very sad, but it's our lot in life.

Thanks Walt, once again a great commentary,
~ge~

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!

Eventually i suspect the truth will come out concerning ODF and the events in Massachusetts.  Migration is difficult and our friends in Redmond are not about to lend a hand.  The problem is the starting point, the MSOffice desktop productivity environment.  A starting point owned and controlled entirely by Microsoft.  The challenge is to get from the overwhelming dominance of proprietary Microsoft binary documents and into an open XML universal file format that any application, running on any platform can interactively read, render and write to.

Microsoft has decided to keep secret the blueprint to these billions of binary documents, reserving exclusively for themselves the right to convert then to XML.  Of course, the only version of XML Microsoft will convert them to is the wholly owned and controlled OOXML file format. 

Microsoft refuses to cooperate in any way with the conversion of these legacy binary documents to the only truly open XML universal file format, OASIS OpenDocument.  Which leaves the world with a near insolvable problem; how to get from where we are today, with the boot of a ruthless monopolist on the neck of our information and information processes, to where we really desire to be -  with our digital civilization in the hands of open standards, and out of the control of proprietary applications and platform vendors.

This document describes what the OpenDocument Foundation learned in Massachusetts about the challenge of migrating to ODF. 

Excellent article about Vista and MSOffice "System" 2007 as development platforms.  The author provides one of the better explanations of how MSOffice 2007 and SharePoint "Hub" are connected and joined at the hip.  Hey, i invented tha tterm "Hub"!  Or so i thought.  I guess some things are just obvious.

My use of the term "Hub" to describe an XML turnstile where backend information meges with portal interfaces, email, messaging, and document storage/collaboration goes back to the 2003 "Sales and Inventory" management system prototype we built for Comcast.  Desktops connect to the hub through XML documents, XForms and Jabber XMPP data binding, and browsers.  Great stuff - the way SOA should be done!

Famed Microsoft WikiPedia editor Rick Jellife takes on the HTML-CSS proposal put forth by Opera Browser CTO Håkon Wium Lie's in his recent CNET column.

Rick claims that the Opera proposal is "solid in its ultimate premise .... that inspite of .. all the talk about ODF and OOXML, it is important not to lose track of HTML's potential and actual suitability for much document interchange.

Good discussion except that MS Rick can't help himself when it comes to the tired moral equivocation argument that the world can and should accept and use two ISO/IEC desktop productivity environment file format standards, ODF and OOXML.  Once again he puts forward the claim that ODF is OPenOffice specific and OOXML is MSOffice specific - each having it's place and value as an international standard.

Are we standardizing applications here?  I thought it was about creating a universal XML file format that all application can use::  One file format  for OpenOffice, MSOffice, KOffice, Writer, WordPerfect Office, Novell Office, GNOME Office, and even the Flash-Apollo based " Virtual Ubiquity " from Rick Treitman.

ODF does need to provide the marketplace with at least three profiles; desktop productivity environments, server side portal publication-content-archive management systems, and devices.  This would greatly improve interoperability as ODF documents transition across desktops, servers, devices and Internet information domains.  It would also help the implementation of ODF by SOA, SaaS and Web 2.0 systems.

But having two file formats that irreconcilably incompatible servicing the exact same market categories?  Doesn't make sense.  And can only end in massive end user confusion where the application with dominant marketshare end up crushing any and all competitive alternative

Sam really nailsit with this satirical commentary on the spliny whiny letter Microsoft wrote begging the world to reconsider the proprietary application and platform bound Microsoft Office Open XML file format as an international standard for office productivity suites.

Yes!  It's Da Vinci time.  I wonder if W^ has downloaded ACME 376 and taken the Da Vinci conversion engine out for a test run?  Belgium and Adobe took a look, and have expressed an interest in getting their hands on the ODF 1.2 version of Da Vinci.  California and Massachusetts have yet to comment about ACME 376, but of course they are also waiting for Da Vinci.

I'll thank W^ for his kind comments, and make sure he knows about the ACME 376 proof of concept.  If DaVinci can hit perfect conversion fidelity with those billions of binary documents using XML encoded RTF, there is no reason why Da Vinci can't do the same with ODF.  We do however need ODF 1.2 to insure that perfect interoperability with other ODF ready applications.

Yes!  It's Da Vinci time.  I wonder if W^ has downloaded ACME 376 and taken the Da Vinci conversion engine out for a test run?  Belgium and Adobe took a look, and have expressed an interest in getting their hands on the ODF 1.2 version of Da Vinci.  California and Massachusetts have yet to comment about ACME 376, but of course they are also waiting for Da Vinci.

I'll thank W^ for his kind comments, and make sure he knows about the ACME 376 proof of concept.  If DaVinci can hit perfect conversion fidelity with those billions of binary documents using XML encoded RTF, there is no reason why Da Vinci can't do the same with ODF.  We do however need ODF 1.2 to insure that perfect interoperability with other ODF ready applications.

Hi guys,

There is an interesting discussion triggered by Tim Bray's "ongoing · Life Is Complicated" blog piece.  Our good friend Mike Champion has some interesting comments defending ISO/IEC approval of MS Ecma 376 based on many arguments.  But this one seems to be the bottom line;

<mike> "there is not an official standard for one that (in the opinion of the people who actually dug deeply into the question, and I have not) represents all the features supported in the MS Office binary formats and can be efficiently loaded and processed without major redesign of MS Office.

..... So, if you want a clean XML format that represents mainstream office document use cases, use ODF. If you want a usable XML foormat that handles existing Word documents with full fidelity and optimal performance in MS Office, use OOXML. If you think this fidelity/performance argument is all FUD, try it with your documents in Open Office / ODF and MS Office 2007 / OOXML and tell the world what you learn." </mike>

Mike's not alone in this.  This seems to be the company line for Microsoft's justification that ISO/IEC should have two conflicting file formats each pomising to do the same thing, becaus eonly one of those formats can handle the bilions of binary documents conversion to XML with an acceptable fidelity. 

This is not true, and we can prove it.  And if we're right  that you can convert the billions of binaries to ODF without loss of fidelity, then there was no "technology" argument for Microsoft not implementing ODF natively and becoming active in the OASIS ODF TC process to improve application interoperability.

<diigo_