Breaking free of the politics

A few updates on the OpenXML formats

Brian Jones: Open XML Formats — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 19:57:11 GMT

Sorry I've been offline for the past couple weeks. I've been meaning to post some content for awhile

re: Breaking free of the politics

Ghibertii — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 17:05:38 GMT

Microsoft breaking free of politics? that is humorous. Check out the story from Florida yesterday:

http://enterprise.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/04/16/2019244&from=rss

Brian an engineer like yourself may be able to step away from the politics but the company you work for now keeps its monopolies alive by "working" within the system.

re: Breaking free of the politics

Jens Peter — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 14:37:12 GMT

How could anybody know Vonnegut, his history, his books and write that nonsense?

btw, what really irritates me in the news from malaysia is the sentence "Once the dust has settled, he said, Sirim would appoint new members to the evaluating committee and begin the process again."

There are millions of dollar spend for a format discussion in a land where government's objective is to become a fully developed country by 2020.

re: Breaking free of the politics

Francis — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 22:33:21 GMT

Ooh, working on Office 14! -I can't wait to hear the details, whenever they are finally released (or leaked.)

A thought: have you given any consideration to moving Publisher to Open XML? At the least, that would improve compatibility between Word and Publisher (which is sorely needed.) If you could figure out how to use one file format for both programs, you could reuse a lot of code, effectively turning Word and Publisher into different frontends (UIs) for the same rendering/editing engine. Such a hook-up would be a a document editing powerhouse--and totally blow InCopy and InDesign away.

re: Breaking free of the politics

Sam Hiser — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 08:05:48 GMT

Brian-

Since you asked...

Microsoft has a commercially bellicose culture. You've more common sense than to deny it, given what's in the public record from Halloween, DoJ, EU and now e-mails dribbling out of the Comes v Microsoft case.

You and the MOOXML Irregulars (Mahugh & Kitterman, in particular) have expressed surprise, befuddlement & bewilderment about being blind-sided on the ISO fast-track opposition. I found that mildly amusing.

The innocent Germans in Dresden must have felt the same way; wondering what on earth could have made the RAF so incredibly mad.

I did not use the N-word because it doesn't directly apply in this comparison -- which is of a certain surprise borne of willful ignorance. It's nuanced, I'll give you that.

And, yes, we and the forces of Democracy, fairness & common sense are going to keep the pressure on your company to deliver document formats that work with applications properly in the way prescribed by the Internet.

Just because you're losing the war doesn't make is less one. Although I can empathize with your desire to disassociate with the history of your company and its approach to competition -- at a time like this.

Look, you're a technician -- I appreciate that; but the world, the customers, are articulating requirements and your company's strategists are persistently changing the topic of discussion. The things you are working are not in demand. You may be powerless to change that now, but the market will be forcing you to change what you will be working on soon...which will be integrating the many Microsoft applications with ODF -- v 2 or 3, depending on how long you persist in that state of bewilderment, whether it's sincere or put on.

Formats are political. Documents are political. Records are political. Speech is political. Budgets are political. Healthy markets for software products are political. The free flow of information across different systems (not just Microsoft's) is political. Real interoperability, therefore, is political. Pretending they're not means I can't help you until you help yourselves by getting real.

When you say stop the politics it's like saying let us continue to stall by re-directing the conversation away from the inconvenient truth that Microsoft needs time to re-"format" its product catalog. From Vista to VSTO, the catalog just got out the gate and it's already obsolete because it works around a set of formats no body wants. The catalog was conceived in an era before people could speak openly or intelligently about GUID, WMF, XPS and other things which used to be private -- unquestioned in privacy. It's not acceptable to work that way anymore.

Quite frankly, I shouldn't be wasting our time with all this, but you and I will probably be working together in the not too distant future.

re: Breaking free of the politics

I'm Brian Jones — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 19:24:21 GMT

Stewie,

The whole point of our progression towards XML formats over the past 4 realeases of Office was that we wanted to make it easier for developers to build solutions on top of our files. The more people that can develop on top of our files, the more valuable our files become. The more valuable the files are, the more valuable Office itself as a platform becomes.

-Brian

re: Breaking free of the politics

Stewie — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 09:57:41 GMT

By the way, have you ever heard of WordPress? It's totally free. Thousands of cool themes to choose... you should totally check it out.

_

Stewie — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 09:53:01 GMT

Isn't the real purpose of an open standard to help the consumers? By that, I assume you must make it easy for developers to use the standard to help consumers.

It has been my observation that MS isn't actually interested in the consumer so much as controlling the consumer; this is clearly a valid concern with the new standards issue. Is it really about making a better standard, or is it all about dominating and winning the battle?

Funny also, how I found this blog by clicking on an add on google that said "linux" and underneath was a link to Microsoft and then there was nothing about Linux there.

I agree with what the anonymous person said; this is purely political, from the very start of the article.

re: Breaking free of the politics

I'm Brian Jones — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 22:55:40 GMT

Sam, what have I distored? Please help me clear it up.

re: Breaking free of the politics

Sam Hiser — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 22:40:23 GMT

You guys make me laugh.

Brian, your impulse to distort my comments reveal as much about you as my initial statement.