I don’t believe there’s been enough discussion of the weaknesses gradually being uncovered in Microsoft’s 6,000-page dump of Office behavior, which they are trying to call a standard. Andrew Updegrove’s summary has gotten some circulation on the Internet:
The Contradictory Nature of OOXML
and now Groklaw is organizing opposition to the ECMA standardization process, which is being fast-tracked (a better term would be railroaded):
Searching for Openness in Microsoft’s OOXML and Finding Contradictions
To help Office to become a standard, one adaptation governments could make would be to retroactively declare 1900 a leap year. This would require updates to history books and other documents (for instance, V-E day would change to May 7, and the World Trade Center attacks would have taken place on September 10) but I’d like to see a cost comparison with the alternative that businesses dread: migrating to open document formats.
When the Y2K panic hit, some analysts calculated that the costs of upgrading the world’s software was less than the storage cost (probably including interest) of using four digits for dates when applications were designed in the 1950s. In other words, Y2K was worth the cost of change. However, few non-programmers had to change their behavior to fix Y2K. Migrating to free desktop software would affect almost everybody.
On the other hand, David Pogue’s recent review of Microsoft Office 2007 says that users will have to learn a very different interface and habits. So perhaps this is the moment companies should seize on to move their staff to free desktop software, and not be trapped by history.
Update, 21 January 2007: The EU security forum CyTRAP has just released two very critical articles on the ODF/OOXML issue: Why Microsoft’s Open XML is not an open standard
How could Windows Vista make the adoption of the Open Document Format more difficult? Their distrust of Microsoft is obvious, and their European stationing makes it easier to show it, but they bring with them long experience in promoting robust systems.
Where are the Suns and IBMs of the world to put some marketing muscle behind this? These are serious openings for them to advertise OpenOffice!
CIO's Secretary: "What happened to my menus? They're all messed up! Jerry, this new Office is hard to use, can you help me out?"
IT Guy (Jerry): "Well, Microsoft decided to change everything with this new Office. We can send you to training, but it will cost you."
CIO's Secretary: "I'll tell Jim"
CIO (Jim): "Spend money for both a new version AND training! WTF! Jerry, can't we make Office work without spending more money?"
Jerry: "We can try OpenOffice, that works pretty much the same as we're used to..."
Josh, Sun and IBM won't be promoting OpenOffice.org. But they do have their own products (Sun: StarOffice, IBM: IBM Workplace) that support ODF. I have no experience with IBM Workplace, so I don't know how easy it is to run. But since OpenOffice.org is the basis of Sun StarOffice, I could see them doing an ad like yours.
IBM Workplace isn't really where the action is any more from IBM. This week you can however expect some news from the Lotusphere conference in Orlando about IBM Lotus Notes 8 (which was code named Hannover) and it's built in 'productivity editors' which are based on OpenOffice.org and support the OpenDocument file format.
You don't understand the history of the 1900 leap year issue. Its clearly stated in the OpenOffice.org's documentation of the XLS file format that the bug was due to LOTUS softwares bug in 123. Microsoft adopted the bug knowingly to make their spreadsheets compatible for DOS based machines. However, Excel came out for Mac first with the zero date at 1904. So to maintain computability there is another option that tells the reader of the excel document whether the zero date refers to jan 1 1900 or jan 1 1904. But the point is that was lotus' mistake, that everyone has since decided to support... including open office!
I dunno if governments would be too shy to retroactively declare 1900 a leap year, since they already revise copyright law ex post facto to accommodate corporate copyright barony. In fact, one could argue that creating an extra day in history would somehow benefit the dead artists and authors who could have been creating content for modern cultural oligarchies to buy up and exploit over the years....
Andy Oram's distrust of foreigns is obvious, and his American stationing makes it easier to show it,
Well, it appears that the CyTRAP links at the end of your article (added January 21st) are already dead links. I wonder if those articles got pulled for some reason?
The CyTRAP links are back. I don't know what went wrong, but I found the articles. Thanks for the notification.
Thanks for the history of the leap year problem, which turns out to be just a funny lead-in to the more interesting question of whether Microsoft is providing a reason to migrate away from Office, just by changing the interface so much (even though all observers agree the changes are improvements).
Today's Wall Street Journal published details of the improvements, as well as estimates of how much training and practice will be required for users to adapt. The burden is not a big one, but must still make alternative office suites more feasible. However, the competing suites must take Microsoft's changes as a goad to be adventurous in their own upgrades and to promote whatever advantages they can offer.
Two key paragraphs from the WSJ article:
However, the costs of transition won't make a difference so long as network effects hold. OpenOffice.org, for instance, is still not compatible enough with Office. At O'Reilly, we've noticed problems with subtle things such as passing documents between the office suites with revision tracking turned on.