Big Blue on OOXML

Some will probably say “it’s about time too”…

IBM has made public an article written by Peter Seebach called “OOXML: What’s the big deal?”.

In it Peter explains in clear and unambiguous language why Microsoft’s OOXML document format (also know as DIS29500 or ECMA-376) is not fit to be an international standard.

Stating what has already been said many times before might be construed as boring or repetitive, but in this case Peter gives a refreshingly concise review and summary of the main issues. Many of which have been lost in the verbosity and plethora of opinion and conjecture that abounds on the web regarding OOXML.

Here are couple of salient comments from the piece:

There have been a number of technical complaints made about OOXML. Every one of them comes down to the same base complaint: Rather than specifying a reasonable common interchange format, OOXML specifies the whole feature set of Microsoft Office, down to bug compatibility. This creates a burden on other implementers which is simply unreasonable (and in fact impossible) to meet, while conveniently being precisely what Microsoft is already shipping. That raises a lot of concerns.

He goes on to examine three categories of “showstopper problems” and gives examples in each. The final category, “Unique Features”, is quite damming in it’s final analysis…

Probably the most famous example is one of the optional settings provided in OOXML. The setting is called “useWord97LineBreakRules”, and it specifies to use the line-break rules that were used in Word ’97 for East Asian documents. Much like the previous examples, this is of course impossible for anyone else to do, as no specification of these rules is provided. In fact, the OOXML standard even warns implementers not to implement this:

The OOXML standard’s guidance for useWord97LineBreakRules

[Guidance: To faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of that application, which involves many possible behaviors and cannot be faithfully placed into narrative for this Office Open XML Standard. If applications wish to match this behavior, they must utilize and duplicate the output of those applications. It is recommended that applications not intentionally replicate this behavior as it was deprecated due to issues with its output, and is maintained only for compatibility with existing documents from that application. end guidance]

This guidance is excellent. Given that there is no specification available of this feature, and it is deprecated, it makes all kinds of sense for people not to implement it. But wait; if it shouldn’t be implemented, why is it in the spec? Compatibility with existing documents is not a reason to add a feature to a standard aimed at interchanging data; users are worried about whether their text can be opened at all in another program, not whether every line break is in the exact same location!

This feature is in the spec because OOXML is not a document interchange format; it’s a careful, bit-for-bit, replication of Microsoft’s historical binary formats, wrapped up in angle brackets.

That’s a cracking analysis. OOXML is NOT a document interchange format. It’s MS Office binary wrapped in XML…

Peter’s conclusion says it all.

OOXML is a credible effort to solve a real problem: The problem of how to replace completely opaque binary files encoding ten years of accreted behaviour with partially-legible XML files encoding the same behaviour, down to the last bit. That problem, unfortunately, is not the problem of providing a usable, implementable, exchange format for office documents.

OOXML should not, and must not become an ISO standard. It is, as we have been saying all along, a proprietary vendor’s implementation of their proprietary document format. There will be only one beneficiary if this becomes a global standard, and it isn’t you or me…

Welcome to Mozilla’s new baby: Messaging

Announced yesterday, The Mozilla Foundation has launched a new subsidiary called Mozilla Messaging. It will focus on the Internet Massaging and Communications space.

Here’s a FAQ with some useful information. I was particularly interested to see who is on the board. Marten Mickos (of MySQL) is a pretty “big” name…

This is a very attractive little snippet:

# In some ways we’re re-launching Thunderbird — it’s a project that has huge latent potential, and we’re there to catalyze community driven progress in the Internet communications space. The world of electronic communications is buzzing, with older technologies like email still crucial to our online experience, but complemented by other technologies like instant messaging, social networking, voice over IP, and mobile devices.

I am a user of Thunderbird and the Lightning extension (which will be rolled into TB-3) and am very happy with it’s performance and feature set. Reading the quote above, adding IM and VOIP would really make it a killer desktop app.

Oh yes. I am not one of those who believe everything is going to be “web based” applications either. Call me old fashioned if you want but I still like proper “desktop” applications and local storage. I have a gmail account, but I access it using IMAP and Thunderbird. I rarely use web based email, it just doesn’t “feel right” somehow…

Good luck to Mozilla Messaging. I follow the mailing lists with interest and will help with any input that I can give.

Dell’s Ubuntu Family Grows

Dell have added another Ubuntu powered laptop to their range. This time it’s the Inspiron 1525 which, starting at £299, looks to be a pretty good deal to me. It’s amazing what happens when you get rid of the Microshaft tax…

You can buy it in the UK, France, Spain and Germany now and the USA will get it later this month.

I wonder why Dell are releasing into Europe first this time? Are they having better sales success here. Perhaps even the UK public is buying into FOSS more than our Government would like us to…

My Dad, after seeing a liveCD of Ubuntu, wants me to come and install it on his computer for him. He said “It’s better than Windows isn’t it?”… Not bad for an 81 year old.

Microsoft’s Jihad – Be afraid. Be very afraid…

PJ has done it again…

There is some material she has uncovered from one of the many previous cases against Microshaft that show just what kind of company it really is…

It is really mind boggling the depths to which they stoop to achieve “World Domination”. This is verbatim copy from Microsoft presentations and other internal material. [Emphasis mine]

Evangelism Is War

Our mission is to establish Microsoft’s platforms as the de facto standards throughout the computer industry. Our enemies are the vendors of platforms that compete with ours: Netscape, Sun, IBM, Oracle, Lotus, etc. The field of battle is the software industry. Success is measured in shipping applications. Every line of code that is written to our standards is a small victory; every line of code that is written to any other standard, is a small defeat. Total victory, for DRG, is the universal adoption of our standards by developers, as this is an important step towards total victory for Microsoft itself: “A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software.”

[DRG = Microsoft's Developer Relations Group]

5: Jihad

A Jihad is a road trip. in which an evangelist visits a large number of ISVs one-on-one to convince them to take some specific action. The classic Jihad is one focused on getting Tier A ISVs to commit to supporting a given technology by signing the technology’s Letter of Agreement (LOA – see above).

A Jihad focuses on the Travelling Salesman aspect of evangelism. As in sales, the purpose of the exercise is to close – to get the mark the ISV to sign on the dotted line, in pen, irrevocably. Not to get back to us later, not to talk to the wife about it, not to enter a three-day cooling-off period, but to get the ISV to sign, sign, sign.

If the start of the meeting is the first time the ISV has seen the LOA, then he’s not going to sign it at the end of the meeting. Since we’re asking for a very serious commitment, we want the ISV to give their signing serious consideration. If the ISV cannot deliver, then his committing to deliver is worse than useless – the ISV’s participation may occupy one of a limited number of available slots, keeping some other ISV from participating.

• The ISV has seen the LOA at least a week before the Jihad visit
• The LOA is very clear about what exactly each side is promising to deliver, and when
• An Officer of the ISV’s corporation will be attending the meeting
• Microsoft’s Director of DRG has positioned the LOA with sufficient seriousness, in a cover letter or other communication in advance of the meeting
• You make it clear from the start that the purpose of your visit is to answer any questions that they might have, preparatory to signing the LOA while you’re there
• They understand that those who do not sign the LOA, are frozen out of all further information about the techology until it goes into public beta
• They understand (without being crude about it) that you will be making the same offer to their competitors
• You have T-shirts or other swag to give to those who sign. lt’s amazing what some people will do for a T-shirt.

This is absolutely Amazing. Not only is it evangelical in the same way Al Q’aeda is, but they also manage to sound like the guys who come into our houses here in the UK and try to sell double glazing or a new conservatory.

The elements of the evangelical infrastructure – conference presentations, courses, seminars, books, magazine articles, whitepapers, etc. – should start hitting the street at the start of the Slog. They should be so numerous as to push all other books off the shelf, courses out of catalogs, and presentations off the stage.

Working behind the scenes to orchestrate “independent” praise of our technology, and damnation of the enemy’s, is a key evangelism function during the Slog. “Independent” analyst’s report should be issued, praising your technology and damning the competitors (or ignoring them). “Independent” consultants should write columns and articles, give conference presentations and moderate stacked panels, all on our behalf (and setting them up as experts in the new technology, available for just $200/hour). “Independent” academic sources should be cultivated and quoted (and research money granted). “Independent” courseware providers should start profiting from their early involvement in our technology. Every possible source of leverage should be sought and turned to our advantage…

…A stacked panel, on the other hand, is like a stacked deck: it is packed with people who, on the face of things, should be neutral, but who are in fact strong supporters of our technology. The key to stacking a panel is being able to choose the moderator. Most conference organizers allow the moderator to select the panel, so if you can pick the moderator, you win. Since you can’t expect representatives of our competitors to speak on your behalf, you have to get the moderator to agree to having only “independent ISVs” on the panel. No one from Microsoft or any other formal backer of the competing technologies would be allowed – just ISVs who have to use this stuff in the “real world.” Sounds marvellously independent doesn’t it? In fact, it allows us to stack the panel with ISVs that back our cause. Thus, the “independent” panel ends up telling the audience that our technology beats the others hands down. Get the press to cover this panel, and you’ve got a major win on your hands.

Here’s what they think of you if you are one of Microshafts ISVs.

Now call me old fashioned if you will, but the fact that they actually wrote this stuff down is beyond me.

Thanks to Groklaw, you can download the complete documents from here: http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf in ISO-32000 (PDF) format. Yes that’s right; PDF went through ISO very smoothly last December with barely a murmur. Funny how OOXML hasn’t. Well, actually, perhaps after reading the crap that spews forth from Microsoft it isn’t…

Do you really want them to own an International Standard? If DIS29500 does get approved next month, the ISO will become just another “trophy” of their war machine. No corporation, however big or powerful should be able to corrupt the global standards process as Microsoft have tried to do.

OOXML is already obsolete.

This is a great piece of analysis of the status of DIS29500. Included here in it’s entirety, courtesy of the Free Software Foundation Europe.

DIS-29500: Deprecated before use?

[Also available as PDF (1.4M)] When ECMA submitted MS-OOXML as ECMA-376 to ISO for fast-track approval, several countries¹ criticised overlap with the existing ISO standard ISO/IEC 26300:2006, the Open Document Format (ODF).In its February 2007 response, ECMA admits that MS-OOXML addresses the same high-level goals of representing documents, spreadsheets and presentations as ISO/IEC 26300:2006, but maintains that the standards meet different user requirements. This is clarified by ECMA’s statement that the explicit design goal for ECMA-376 is to preserve idiosyncrasies from Microsoft’s proprietary legacy file formats. This statement was included in the ECMA response on January 2008 to 113 comments² made by national bodies during the 2 September 2007 ballot, as well as its 14 January 2008 proposed Disposition of Comments.Considering that alleged preservation of idiosyncrasies is the stated reason for the entire DIS-29500 ISO process, FSFE considers it worthwhile to investigate this claim in greater depth.

The preservation of idiosyncrasies is a questionable reason for an international standard. The goal of standardisation is to provide consistency and to remove idiosyncrasies, not to perpetuate them. By aiming to preserve idiosyncrasies, the best achievable outcome is good documentation of incompatibilities. When it became clear that the main purpose of DIS-29500 was the documentation of idiosyncrasies, the process should have stopped. That it did not indicates a lack of internal structures in the fast-track procedures to prevent abuse of the international standardisation system.

Analysis of DIS-29500 by the national standardisation bodies quickly revealed that information to preserve proprietary legacy formats was referenced in the specification, but the specification of these formats was missing. So although the preservation of idiosyncrasies was the declared design goal and the reason for the creation of DIS-29500, this information is missing from the 6000+ page specification.

Microsoft recently deprecated its legacy file formats and as part of its response to criticism in the DIS-29500 process announced to finally make documentation of these formats available under the Open Specification Promise just before the BRM. Although there will not be enough time for analysis of comprehensiveness, quality and fidelity of that documentation for purpose of the BRM, it seems likely that Microsoft will declare this a satisfactory response to the question of missing specification in DIS-29500. It would however be premature for national bodies to accept this assertion in blind faith – in particular as publication will take place outside the ISO scope and is subject to all legal concerns regarding the Open Specification Promise.

Simultaneously, ECMA addresses this in Response 34 of its proposed Disposition of Comments by removing all references to idiosyncrasies from the specification and placing them in a newly formed Annex for deprecated information. With the removal of this information from the DIS-29500, the design goal of MS-OOXML can no longer be met. The entire specification has therefore effectively become obsolete.

Analysis has shown before that MS-OOXML is covering the same functional space as ISO/IEC 26300:2006 and is unnecessary. It was ECMA which insisted on backward-oriented documentation of idiosyncrasies being a sufficient motive for ISO to ignore the good practice of forward-oriented standardisation. But even by ECMAs own criteria the rationale for DIS-29500 has been deprecated.

In essence: Response 34 of the proposed Disposition of Comments effectively contradicts and invalidates Response 31, which cites preservation of idiosyncrasies as the primary design goal and reason for DIS-29500. It also invalidates ECMAs February 2007 response to similar criticism.

No implementation of DIS-29500

Because there is no justification for the standardisation of DIS-29500, its approval places an unnecessary cost on competition in the IT sector, resulting in artificially higher prices for end users.

Furthermore, the ongoing standardisation process increasingly modifies what started out as a documentation effort for Microsoft’s current default file format. The implementation is already being shipped for some time, and updating the product with the various improvements made to DIS-29500 would result in incompatibility of next year’s version of Microsoft Office with the files written by today’s version. Microsoft itself maintained this as an argument against these suggested changes during the international review phase.

With more than 2,000 pages of proposed Disposition of Comments and Microsoft as the only party with commercial interest in DIS-29500, it seems likely that we will see significant differences between the DIS-29500 specification and the MS-OOXML implementation, which will nonetheless claim implementation of DIS-29500.

Verification of this claim and ensuring fidelity of written data against the DIS-29500 will be an extremely costly exercise for all users of MS-OOXML. Because there will only be one alleged full implementation available, users will need to carefully compare their binary files against the DIS-29500 specification to protect fidelity of their data.

Microsoft and ECMA are in fact already using this strategy in their current responses to criticism by listing applications that seek compatibility with Microsoft Office 2007 as implementations of DIS-29500. Even where not sub-contracted by Microsoft, these applications certainly use DIS-29500 for guidance on how to implement the current Microsoft file format, but their benchmark for success is not faithful implementation of DIS-29500, it is binary compatibility with Microsoft Office 2007.

It should be noted that a similar situation could never arise with ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (ODF) because it already has several independent implementations. Files written by one application need to be readable by all others, otherwise there is a problem with fidelity in at least one of the applications. Because there is a wide range of applications and users for ODF, such incompatibilities will be detected easily. A diverse user and application base is the best insurance against creeping legacy lock-in.

Remember ECMA-234?

There is no need in the marketplace for ECMA-376, the specification does not deliver the promised preservation of idiosyncrasies, and there is no commitment by Microsoft to implement the outcome of the DIS-29500 process faithfully for a meaningful period of time. Does anyone remember ECMA-234, the “Application Programming Interface for Windows (APIW)”?

This ECMA standard was also put forward as standardisation of the Windows operating system with much the same promises that are being made for ECMA-376 today. It was deprecated just after ECMA-234 was finally standardised when Microsoft published Windows 95, which completely ignored the existence of ECMA-234. Microsoft’s product decision made ECMA-234 obsolete and turned the entire specification into a huge waste of collective effort. Without a binding commitment by Microsoft to faithfully implement the outcome of DIS-29500, the current process is promising to go down the same route.

It seems that ISO, its national standardisation bodies and hundreds of standardisation experts around the world are essentially being used for a rather costly product marketing exercise. The question is whether ISO should allow itself to be used in this way.

If it becomes common practice to standardise for promotional effect and then ignore, ISO might find itself deprecated in the area of Information and Communication Technologies.

FSFE would consider this too high a price to pay for approval of DIS-29500.

Related reading

• Six questions to national standardisation bodies
• The Converter Hoax
• Questions for Microsoft on Open Formats

---

[1] Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Kenya, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Singapore, and the United Kingdom.

[2] BR-0002, CL-0057, CL-0058, CL-0059, CL-0060, CL-0061, CL-0062, CL-0063, CL-0064, CL-0065, CL-0066, CL-0067, CL-0068, CL-0069, CL-0070, CL-0071, CL-0073, CL-0074, CL-0075, CL-0076, CL-0077, CL-0078, CL-0079, CL-0080, CL-0081, CL-0082, CL-0083, CL-0084, CL-0085, CL-0086, CL-0087, CL-0089, CL-0090, CO-0081, CO-0082, DE-0114, DK-0004, DK-0005, GB-0136, GB-0137, GB-0138, GB-0140, GB-0141, GB-0142, GB-0143, GB-0144, GB-0145, GB-0146, GB-0147, GB-0148, GB-0149, GB-0150, GB-0151, GB-0152, GB-0153, GB-0154, GB-0155, GB-0156, GB-0157, GB-0158, GB-0159, GB-0160, GB-0161, GB-0162, GB-0163, GB-0164, GB-0165, GB-0166, GB-0167, GB-0168, GB-0169, GB-0170, GR-0094, GR-0095, IR-0008, IR-0010, IR-0011, NZ-0015, NZ-0016, NZ-0017, NZ-0018, NZ-0019, NZ-0020, NZ-0021, NZ-0022, NZ-0023, NZ-0024, NZ-0025, NZ-0026, NZ-0027, NZ-0028, NZ-0029, NZ-0031, NZ-0032, NZ-0033, NZ-0034, NZ-0035, NZ-0036, NZ-0037, NZ-0038, NZ-0039, NZ-0040, NZ-0041, NZ-0042, NZ-0043, NZ-0044, NZ-0045, NZ-0046, NZ-0047, NZ-0048, US-0096, US-0097, US-0098

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Windows is Doomed…

After reading this post several times and thinking about the implications of it. I think the author (sorry, but I couldn’t find your name anywhere) has really stumbled on something here.

The basic premise of the article is to do with Microsoft’s takeover attempt of Yahoo, and how poor Windows is as a scalable platform for building out a very big Internet presence:

There’s no way on God’s earth that Microsoft can switch all of Yahoo’s services to being based on Windows. The IT costs and the time needed to migrate Yahoo’s applications to Windows boggles my mind. It would probably cost more than whatever Microsoft ends up paying for Yahoo.

I thought about this and think that there is even more to support the author’s conclusion than he mentions.

I started to think about all these new “big businesses” out there he(she?) mentions. They are all using Linux and other Open Source software to build out these hugely massive infrastructures. We know about Google and Amazon et al. But there is more… PayPal, a subsidiary of eBay, but a business that is taking on the old-world banking industry – especially as a credit card payment processor – build their transaction processing platform on Linux and they have discussed before how they can easily scale their infrastructure by just adding a few $1k blades with Linux on them.

If any of the recent big on-line businesses had tried to build out their infrastructure on Windows, what do you think the outcome would have been?

• Cost. This would have been a non-starter for most. How much in software licenses would a Google need to have spent? Server software, database licenses, middleware, system administration tools etc etc. The mind boggles just how impractical it would be to try and do this with proprietary software. And of course, don’t forget the extra hardware needed to run the bloated code in the first place.
• Flexibility. How easy would it be to go back your proprietary supplier and ask for new features, fixes, patches? And – oh yes – ‘I’d like them tomorrow please’. This just isn’t possible or realistic with the old-world software businesses. Businesses like Google and the others rely on change. They are dynamic businesses. They need to move fast and adapt.
• Reliability. Really. Windows, in whatever guise you like – Vista, SBS, NT – are just not man enough for the job. BSODs galore and crappy single-user file systems mean you need hundreds, or thousands, of individual boxes each running expensive software just to give yourself some sense of reliability. Although of course it isn’t in reality. Windows doesn’t scale and it’s a pain to manage when you have lots of them. It’s a desktop operating system masquerading as something it isn’t.
• Security. Yep. Would you trust your data to a Windows architecture that is so wide open to abuse it has grown a whole industry of parasites that supply further process-cycle-sapping applications that endeavour and “hope” to find intruders and malicious code?

The trend to use Linux is not just with the “new kids” however.

We have seen how, recently, Specsavers the Opticians have replaced everything in their network with Linux. From the tills to the back-office servers and more recently their Active Directory user authentication system for OpenLDAP. Here’s a lovely quote from them about the impact their migration has had:

As well as freedom from vendor lock-in, Specsavers says it is getting “superior performance, reliability and security at a significantly reduced cost in comparison to proprietary solutions”. It says it is now “enjoying a reduced need for maintenance, and increased reliability”.

I was also rather surprised yesterday when I was reading a piece about Oracle.

“WC: Pretty much all of Oracle’s internal production and development systems run on Linux across the whole company. Linux by itself is across the whole company. Also uses a lot of Python. It’s really across the whole co. 10,000 Linux servers that run Oracle on-demand.”

[WC = Wim Coekaerts, VP of Linux engineering, corporate architecture.]

Did you get that? Linux is running pretty much everything in Oracle…

If M$ do buy Yahoo, they will, undoubtedly, open the biggest can-of-worms imaginable. And probably the first nail-in-the-coffin for Windows. Especially in the enterprise.

So, think about it. Next time you need to role out some new business applications, would you go with the Desktop OS that needs excessive maintenance and support to just pretend to be a server, and that might have a limited life expectancy anyway. Or deploy the enterprise scale OS that can be customised for your infrastructure and hardware, which is proven to be extremely secure and is used by many (if not all) of the biggest and most successful companies in the world? Oh yes, and it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to buy either. In fact, it can be yours for nothing. Free. Zilch. Zero.

Remember too – that you can also run the same OS, properly configured, on the Desktop too. Why do you think PC manufacturers are literally falling over each to bring out new, low-cost, Linux powered laptops (Asus, Everex, Acer, Via, Palm, Intel, LeMote, OLPC, Dell, Lenovo)? Barely a day goes by without a new announcement. It certainly isn’t because they aren’t any good…