Not doomed. Just approaching the sell-by-date.

The core problem is increasing interactivity between and among real-time rendering applications and application wrappers. Very soon the realization of semantically portable data domains and out-of-the-box interoperable interactive real-time 3D applications will drive the competitive postures evident in the OOXML vs ODF bitter butter battle to the mat. This is to be followed by ascendant server-farm battles, eg, MS Virtual Earth Vs Google Virtual Earth as the de facto standard for world modeling. Third parties such as IBM will propose to dispose but is at present only noodling for ideas with nothing to sell because they have yet to formulate targets, strategies or goals for products or services. The server farms controlling the content hosting are the arena.

Let's be clear, OOXML isn't the fruit of a sudden flowering of customer-centric idealism from Microsoft. While laudable and credible, it was a desperate response to the standardization of ODF and the clear political movement towards open standards that went with it. If this attitude spreads to their media division it will also be for business reasons, not ideological ones. That's fine, and an excellent case study in market forces at work.

On Desktop Vs Server based document creation and management, we're heading towards the server-based option becoming credible, but right now it's nowhere near beign a credible alternative for a wide variety of work. Google Docs & Spreadsheets suffers from poor responsiveness, severly limited functionality and cramped distribution or content repurposing options. I far prefer to use Wikis for web document creation or Pages/Word for print document creation, copying from one format to the other as required. The web document tools I've used are awkward beasts that incorporate all the limitations of both web and rich client tools and only a few of the benefits of either.

Lets face it, when writing a GUI application nobody would choose AJAX over any of the desktop alternatives unless web acess is an absolute requirement. How many web designers actualy create their web sites interactively online using web hosted tools? Even if they don't use a WYSIWYG rich client app to build the sites, they use client based text editors to tweak the source. Wikis are the only widely used exception. If most people currently use client based tools to create the web, why do you think they will suddenly start using online tools to create what are currently offline documents?

Sure, we will eventualy reach the kindmof world you're talking about, but we are a long, long way from that. When we do get there it will probably be using protocols, formats and technologies that haven't even been invented yeat. Meanwhile, we need decent open desktop document file formats.

Have at.

I use Visual Studio and Iron Designer, PFE, and so on for the web application designs. For 3D, a totally different set of tools that one hopes will go away when MS targets the 3D building community with integrated application builders, something they do better than any alternatives. Once done, the data apps are used for data entry and maintenance and the desktop documents are exports. That is what document databases have been doing for a long time and the web is the latest incarnation of that species.

The future is clearly in the interactive web applications for various content domains. Unless you really intend to build print-on-demand 1000 dpi technical manuals, the industry is fast moving away from the desktop applications to the slow but integrated web toolkits. This is where Google and Microsoft are going, and very few others really matter except as infrastructure providers (Sun) and the kibitzers (IBM). Microsoft may be moving slowly. They are anything but desperate.

I had a CEO at Intergraph who looked straight at me and said "XML is Microsoft FUD. Those apps will be too slow and my customers will be unhappy." To which I had to reply, "In a large network, the speed of a single node or even a cluster of them is irrelevant in face of the interconnected operations possible. The web will march over us like an ant army."

And so they did.

No, the OOXML or ODF apps aren't going away. They simply won't be worth the bitter butter battles because they are increasingly less of the buttered bread, and you are right, Simon: this is about business.

In the real world a huge amount of the content that ends up on the web is written in Word and those writing resist to the death changing that. They don't care about what geeks like or what Sun or Google are doing for their own corporate interests (like they really care about the end user any more than Microsoft - you're naive if you think they do). That's why what happens with OOXML is important.

It is important in several ways:

1. Some content on the web is generated in Word. Because that content usually ends up in bad HTML or PDF, it doesn't make much difference to the standards.

2. The maturing of web contributors matters. We have some time in a career, we learn from those around us, we set some good or bad examples and these get fed back into the cultures which in turn do the same to each other at some higher level.

Let's look at two. The anti-MS forces (not the same as the pro-ODF forces but signficantly overlapping) expend an enormous amount of time diss'ing MS rightly or wrongly. This becomes a habit. It's easier than thinking. There isn't that big a counter to that so it becomes a dominant habit. At the same time, faced with legal threats, company lawyers for pro-open source products portray these as 'assaults on the open source community' whether they are or not. These can easily become conflated with standards and to a not-very-attentive public, they become 'the same community'. How does that community look from the outside: self-centered, foul mouthed, arrogant, braggarts and immature. The list goes on but this is how these bitter butter battles play out.

The actual changes in technology that we should be paying attention to are happening quietly elsewhere. ODF or OOXML regardless of their importance to future standards (not much, but that's just my opinion) become a cause du jour recruited into a different war, a war fought by economic competitors using the cause du jour to recruit those who just want something to fight over: say the young and the curmudgeons.

Did ANYTHING change for the better? I've seen the triumphal blogs from the open sourcers, IBM, etc. Those are to be expected the same way soccer fans riot in pubs. But did ANYTHING change for the better?

Or is the outcome just weariness of the battle and wariness of the combatants because NOTHING changed?

I don't care which of those standards prevails. I really don't. The products that support them are in the lower levels of the stack. What I care about is that the web contributors evolve to better tactics, better skills, and yes, higher values. What I reading convinces me that open source is being hijacked into causes instead of maturing as a business model. The whole thrust of MS-Evil vs OS-Good is just flakey, tired, and does not cause change worth getting out of bed for.

To be a change agent for the future, you can fight the battles of the BigCos, or you can go work on the code where change is emerging from the technical churn. That I think is Day's point here and mine here and elsewhere. The most important ideas to be discussed are being discussed but they really have very little to do with ODF or OOXML.

The bastard child of those might be worth waiting for.

Oops. Forgot to sign that last comment.

"To be a change agent for the future, you can fight the battles of the BigCos, or you can go work on the code where change is emerging from the technical churn. ... The most important ideas to be discussed are being discussed but they really have very little to do with ODF or OOXML."

Thanks Len, you've summarised my post in two sentences. I wouldn't have made the immediate jump to 3D virtual worlds, but that's exactly the kind of nonlinear thinking that we need more of :)

Thanks, but it isn't that big a jump in my opinion. 3D systems have been challenging our markup-centric assumptions for a decade and a half. There is an even older vector vs markup schism historically. The number of big companies that have recently announced virtual world initiatives is growing fast and picking up a lot of press. With that much noise, there is something going on.

But the point is we have an acceleration toward non-page-oriented hypermedia wrapper applications as the focus of innovation. Standards for high churn domains are hard to come by. There is a 3D vector standard for real time applications (X3D) that goes almost unnoticed as the server-farms worlds announce products and *standards initiatives*. It has become a cynical game of playing on personalities and pumped-up emnities to achieve ever more proprietary ownership of the web infrastructure. In the 3D/VR app communities there is almost no understanding of what they are doing to their content builders and owners. They are like villages of the dammed possessed and purposeless except to self-preserve. Real standards? Not in their second careers or their worlds of woocraft. The BigCos are lining the 3D Web up as the push to finally capture the web flag. Not the topic here, but understand that these bitter butter battles do more to damage the consensus culture by trying to wipe out the other species than if they simply tolerated them and stayed focused on improving their own technology. It is hard to do.

I agree that none of the big players have pure motives. I don't expect them to. Over time I've come to see it almost like Henry Kissinger as a balance among kings and principalities where we try to squeeze out the best deal for the greatest number possible.

The web is to slow.
Office document are growing rapidly with the ability to add selfmade foto, sound and foto elements. I just checked our presentations directory and the average presentations file is about 2MB and this growing rapidly. Also with long time spreadsheet limitations of 65000 rows gone, spreadsheet sizes will start booming and also mutlimedia items in all kind of Office documnet will made the office document a lot bigger than before. The internet is not keeping up. Especially upload speeds of individual users are still terrible. The webbased office tools are stil terrible with adding real multimedia or large amounts of data to them.
The XML formats will give data and multimedia integration with Office documents a big boom and this is the part that on line application services are terrible in

I do not see so badly the standard either that they want to implant with because he is so bad? , he is that I do not understand much of this but people speak very badly of which Microsoft tries.I have entered OOXML and it has seemed to me well…

Thanks

http://blog.linuxtoday.com/blog/archives/071004-185336.html

Apparently, some people aren't fooled.