Microsoft asks pals to help KILL UK gov's Open Document Format dream The UK Cabinet Office is close to adopting Open Document Format (ODF) as the official standard for government documents, but it hasn't happened yet – and it won't, if Microsoft has anything to say about it. The software giant has issued an open letter to its partners in the UK, urging them to submit comments on the Cabinet …
If commenter Don Jefe is British, he should be excommunicated as completely no-thinking for not wanting his Government to operate more efficiently and cost effectively. Mr. Jefe is probably ignorant of fact the latest iterations of ODF based office suites can easily read from/write to all latest Microsoft Office formats and going back to Office 2000. So there would be no need for department to be forced to upgrade in order to read Office 2014if they had office 2012. Microsoft could implement the ODF in Office as an additional supported format in less than one day and for less than100 pounds total costs.
For those with very little or no knowledge of the history of ODF, Microsoft was an early, fully participating member of the organization, helping to formulate such "modern, platform agnostic forma". However when it because apparent that ODF was headed and close to success, Microsoft jumped ship and created it's own broken EMCA format that only Corel Wodperfect endorsed.
Formats, particularly Open, Internet and International Formats that allow the greatest cross pollination and interoperability of technology at incredible financial savings and reduced complexity are beneficial to all, and anyone defending Microsoft in this situation on idiotic, dysfunctional logic and false (proven untruthful) reasoning is patently delusional.
Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to introduce W. ANDERSON, this weeks 'Person Who Doesn't Read the Comments They are Rebutting Award'. Congratulations!
I am curious though, those 'incredible financial savings' you mentioned, where are you getting those figures? Of all the things standards do provide, 'incredible financial savings', isn't one of them. Nobody who has ever gone through a large scale standards adoption or migration will ever tell you 'incredible financial savings' were realized after the entire organization had completed the transition. I've been doing this for a long, long time and have yet to see 'incredible financial savings' due to an organization changing or adopting a standard.
I believe I know where your error lays though. You are confusing cost shifting with cost savings. Useful standards most certainly do provide a decent array of cost shifting tools, but not 'savings'. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is failing to address, or even see, the pinch point created elsewhere inside the company by savings realized from (activity).
In all but the smallest organizations, changing something (anything) to a degree that you see a savings has created a new, or increased, cost elsewhere in the organization. That isn't subject to probabilities, that is an absolute business law. Nobody, absolutely nobody, is immune to that. If you've got a really well oiled operation then finding and addressing that new issue shouldn't take more than a year(ish). But if you've got a big mess of an organization (like most) and thousands of staff it usually takes years to deal with all the new issues.
Should you ever find yourself in a position where you're dealing with a decent sized budget remember this rule: The costs of savings rise in direct proportion to the savings realized. Many decades and many, many, many dollars later I still use that and it is 100% true, every single time. Failing to acknowledge that rule is the single most expensive thing you can do to an organization that isn't actively malicious.
It makes absolutely zero difference what industry you are in or what service/product you provide. If somebody says 'Doing (thing) will save ($this_much) then be wary. That person is dangerously simple minded. Usually, when people say that it is down to simply being inexperienced. It's the kind of thing junior staff bring to you when they want to demonstrate their cleverness. Internal ops and technical people do it too, but their ideas are almost guaranteed to cost 30x over what they might save, they're just too isolated. Also politicians, but nobody can help them, just ignore them.
The startups in our venture portfolio do it all the time. It's often one of the first, post investment, meetings I have with them. The reality of the actual costs of running and growing a company have set in and they want to implement some savings making elements. Unfortunately, they do the same thing you have done and fail to acknowledge the true cost of savings. Because they don't understand the connections between different parts of the company they can't predict where the pinch point will move to and make adjustments to move it somewhere else if necessary.
CEO's of companies wanting to sell you something will make those (x) + (y) = savings statements, but that's just because they know that's what you want to hear. If you tried to do that to them they'd just smack the shit out of you for speaking out of place. Junior staff are to be seen, not heard.
More than a few companies, some very large, have been destroyed because it cost them $35M to save $3M. The upshot is I can by them cheap at that point. I owned a dog food factory in Iowa once. Paid $2M for the factory and the 1,700 acres of land it owned. Good deal that was.
Standards offer many advantages, and can really enhance speed of growth, but they don't 'save you money'. In any organization, failing to be prepared for the movement of pinch points costs many times more money than any savings you had hoped to realize. True cost savings inside an organization take many, many years to mature and will often see two or three changes in top leadership during their maturation process. 'Plug and Play' or 'Silver Bullet' savings that seem to provide pure savings of large amounts do not exist. If you think they do please send me your company mailing address so I can have legal monitor for an opportunity to buy your company for a song.
When I saw this on /. yesterday I went to have a look & ended up registering & commenting; the standard of comments there is very high, I was surprised, but sadly there are too few of them.
I added my 2 cents which was basically don't let uSoft in, they are powerful & will corrupt the otherwise admirable effort to open-source standardisation. I should go back & see if the moderators have published my little effort.
This is the last day (see end), go there & register & put your pov, that is, if you care at all about the IT infrastructure of the UK for years to come.
http://standards.data.gov.uk/
And the 'thread', they call it a 'Challenge':
http://standards.data.gov.uk/challenge/sharing-or-collaborating-government-documents
(and they seem to have extended the deadline for comment submission to 26 Feb, but I'm not 100% sure of this).
The biggest problem with Microsoft's Open Office XML format is its cryptic methods for trying to support backward compatibility. They have not clearly defined many aspects of their format, and for many decades they have released new versions of their software which are incompatible with the previous version in the name of corporate profits, to the detriment of anyone trying to create a document and have it be readable in the future. If we've learned anything about the way that Microsoft treats customers with each new version of Microsoft Office, it is that we can't continue to tolerate the inconsistent file formats that change every few years, break compatibility, and only serve to increase the profits of Microsoft due to their forcing users to upgrade to the newest $500 version of Microsoft Office. We needed an open format, written by a standards body with no financial agenda, and this is what ODF has done.
You're spot on. The MS standard is crap. Unfortunately, very few standards actually represent the 'best' options. That's not an IT thing, that's just standards in general.
I harp on it all the time, but you should see the backside of standards development and adoption. It's all royally fucked, regardless of the industry. You find a standards body that has 'transparent' review & acceptance policies and I'll show you where all the actual work is being done and we'll have some whisky drinks without being bothered by anyone who isn't us.
I said in an earlier post that I'm a big fan of standards, and I am, but I'm not real keen on their development. There is not a standard in existence that wasn't almost completely developed by some industry heavyweight.
Early in my career I worked on more than a few standards that are still in use today. My job was liaison between various industry players, going between them with the terms and tradeoffs everybody makes to get a little bit of advantage in the final standard. There's always a 5,000 pound gorilla in the room and they always have a lot more leverage than the majority. Basically, they'll allow you to have (x) as long as you don't try to interfere with (y). All those things are dealt with and the standard actually drafted before voting members of the body ever even look at the draft.
All that stuff you see about various things getting pushed, or left out, of the final draft is nothing more than standards theater to make everybody feel warm and fuzzy. If some group is screaming their voice wasn't heard, that's probably true. A very, very small group does the actual development, and if you aren't invited to the discussions your voice absolutely will not be heard. Well, people might hear the racket, but will ignore it like a passing train.
Although it hasn't ever negatively impacted me, I still don't like how standards are developed. The 'little' guys always get ignored. Just so we're clear, I'm not concerned with the financial discrimination that goes on (that's kind of what all those piles of money laying around are for). I'm concerned because it is absolutely guaranteed that any strategic and tactical advantages a standard creates are not optimized if everything is built from a single perspective.
In most standards development processes you've got some really, really high caliber specialist people involved and they every single one know, that the value of something is not determined by its size. In my field we work with such small and precise things that most Humans can't wrap their heads around them and we get right to the absolute edge of breaking physical laws.
At my company we have made huge impacts on entire industries but that's only been because we are small (comparatively) and look at things from a different perspective. The giant global engineering firms and enormous advanced manufacturers simply can't function like we do because the needs of the businesses are entirely different. That's also why they pay us to do the work they can't, and license technologies we create.
But you flip everything around with standards development and the same company that paid us $19.8 last year won't acknowledge we exist for the purposes of standards development. I can state that better. The same company that paid us $19.8M last year will ask for our input, but only as far as how they can use that input to hobble someone else. That's just fucking stupid and it is in no way exclusive to my industry.
It doesn't matter if you make cupcake icing or thermonuclear weapons, the people actually pushing those fields forward don't get good representation and it is detrimental to everyone. In an earlier post I mentioned the resources we provide for standards in our industry. The lack of representation by the technical side of a wholly technical industry was costing me a lot more than the few million a year it costs to send those guys out to kick people in the shins.
I'll cut this off shortly. Thanks for listening to my rant. Maybe one of you smart folks can figure out something I can't. The problem with standards in general is that there's an MS driving all of them and no matter who it is the standards are weighted in their favor. Standards are never, ever neutral. If you think they are you're not looking hard enough. Huge swaths of every standards based industry are handicapped by a very small group of outsized representation and neither technical nor financial advantages are being remotely optimized. But this is closing in on almost four decades of dealing with standards bodies and I still don't know how to fix them.
Let's examine that point in close detail. To whose benefit is that? Who has the power to fix it? To whom it it a nuisance? From whence does this incompatibility come?
Answer these questions and you know why you don't want it: It is engineered to thwart your interests. Its purpose is not to serve your needs, but Microsoft's.
I can't be arsed to pirate a copy of MS Office, install it, and then round up a 'representative' batch of documents of the 'standard' types, to then do multiple round-trip back-and-forth conversions of these documents through multiple workflows, where each workflow uses either: only MS Office; a mix of Office and a FOSSOffice alternately; and, a single FOSSOffice instance. I'd be interested to know: Do the resulting documents eventually diverge from their original forms? Is that divergence, if present, a meaure of entropy? If there's entropy, where is it least?
Works on all browsers, tablets etc. Fast, clean design.
Built on Drupal (open source) and HTML/CSS/Javascript (open standards).
MS failed to monopolise the web with IE6 - and were forced to adopt standards used by everyone - so their newer browsers work OK. It was a fight but once MS were past IE8 they've started to play on the level playing field - and slick websites like the Cabinet Office website which work fine for all are the result.
Competition is a good thing for product quality - MS should appreciate that it helps to make them produce better products as well.
Wow! got a down vote. I assume from someone who hasn't been data mangling for some time. So the conversation goes:-
M - "Right the client is sending something in CSV"
Y - "Umm, how is that CSV formed?"
M - "I'ts' CSV!"
Y - "Yes, but CSV isn't a standard. We can't assume our current CSV code works on whatever they give us"
M - "Why not?"
Y - "Because CSV isn't a standard"
M - "So just make our code work with their provided CSV"
Y - "No problem, We'll put someone on it as soon as we have their CSV"
M - "But it's a CSV"
Y - "Yes, but CSV isn't a standard"...
etc....
Hmm. Things CSVs don't work very well for:
Strings with spaces in
Strings with commas in
Quote characters around or within strings to allow embedded spaces and commas
Embedded quote characters inside quoted strings
Embedded new lines in quoted strings.
These are all things that MS's CSV files contain, and they make reading the file more than a little difficult, as the rules that are used do not appear to be documented.
I know! We need to write a standard for it!
"Things CSVs don't work very well for:"
I just tried a few in LibreOffice Calc
test space, "test space","test,comma", test,comma, test;semi, "test";"semi"
read in as :-
test space | test space | test,comma | test | comma | test;semi | test";"semi |
where only the test,comma had been split into two columns ( as expected)
Re: I just tried a few in LibreOffice Calc
Which route did you try? Excel permits you to either open (auto detect and determine field) or use the external data import wizard. Trialling the above through Excel 2007, it gets everything into the right columns but doesn't remove the quotes.
But thinking about how I've handled csv's over the years, it has been a case of either using Word (load as unformatted text file) for the smaller, simpler and one off pre-process or brush up the Awk & Sed scripting skills.
But then as I said CSV's can be read, just getting them back into a useful form for further processing...
"Which route did you try"
Opened the file with calc, data wizard opens , unchecked the non-relevant boxes (space, semicolon) and OK.
I generally ask collaborators for data as .csv as I've developed a lot of C over the years for handling all sorts of odd cases and often the files are millions of lines long and need some/lots of pre-processing before going anywhere near a spreadsheet (or more usually JMP)
These formats (OpenXML, ODF, etc.) are word processing formats. A document may not format the same on two different computers even if they are running the same operating system and the same version of whatever "productivity suite". The result depends on printer settings (paper size, margins, fonts, etc).
PS and PDF are print formats and should render the same if the paper is big enough. However PDF is not as portable as its name would suggest because Adobe has added so many bells and whistles to Acrobat that its files are no longer readable on some platforms unless an older version is forced.
Yep, agreed, that one thing is now straight, but there's another thing: for most Govt departments the rendering is NOT IMPORTANT! It's all about the content, or it should be, for everything that doesn't have a public interface (which is almost everything). There are no points for style in the inter-office memo stakes!
Rendering shouldn't be important to most government departments. That much is certain.
However, I've yet to meet a government that had any real success in prioritizing much of anything. You start poking around and it's virtually guaranteed that in some forgotten corner of every government building there will be a document that outlines the 'standards of operation and quality control policies' for all government communications internal and external.
There's going to be some tiny sentence in there that says something to the effect that 'taxpayers deserve the highest levels of quality that can be had to maximize the value of their 'contributions'. I'm quite certain being able to say that straight faced, while signing an requisition form for $235M of Adobe software is a requirement of getting any government job where you have access to funds.
XP and Office 2003 worked OK.
Since then it's been mainly button moving and bull.
If MS really have paid bugger-all tax on 1.7bn then it's time the government worked out we won't stand them being MS's bitch for ever, and if some suit does go the brown envelope route it's going to be very awkward to cover up this time.
I moved to Open (Libre) Office years ago, has saved me so much pain and searching for features, forget the money, really, that's a tiny part of the pleasure of a sensible evolving engineering solution over the madness that is MS office versions.
I use Office 2013 at work and think it looks horrible, it works OK but why should I be visual insulted while doing my inevitable searching for what I could easily locate ten years ago.
Oh no! I have some "progress" on my shoe....
But this is a done deal. There is no chance of ODF making it through this tidal wave of lobbying. The fiasco with ISO showed exactly how easy it is for Microsoft to buy their way to a rubber stamp and that's what will happen here: the decision will be to "prefer" ODF but "accept" MS formats, which means that nothing will change and MS will continue to get free money from our government and libraries and schools for doing precisely bugger all squared.
It's a nice gig if you can get it.
I am personally sick to death of Microsoft. They think they can use their heavy handed tactics to influence the good work that the UK government is doing by supporting open formats just so they can force users to be kept on their high paying software roundabouts.
I expect that Microsoft will hit every government office in the UK with SAM audits (if the open standards pass), as punishment for daring to give people a choice. By doing this they will seek to sting the people by searching for every licensing breach they can find and hit the government hard with fines.
As IT Manager of a government department I once faced their heavy handed tactics and I have dedicated my life to making sure they don't do what they did to me to any other IT Manager or company on this earth. STAND UP FOR YOUR RIGHT TO CHOOSE and SUPPORT OPEN DOCUMENT FORMATS !
Okay, now that I have your interest.
This is a move to save pounds for the UK government. Like many governments, trying to deal with all those people wanting to get their taxes cut. Here is a way that the government can save millions if not billions of pounds by moving to Open Source software.
They could put MS on the spot by mandating that any software must save in the ISO standard and if MS wants to compete, they must be able to save DOCX as the standard mandates and MS has to prove it. What features will be lost?
As one poster stated, even DOCX has it's own issues between versions of Office. I have experienced.
Contact your MP and have them support this for tax savings. Point to the Munich success and how it can save the government millions. If one city can save 14 million dollars, then how much can a whole country save?
Open Office is perfectly capable of saving documents in Word 97 format, and that is a format more people are likely to be able to read than ODF. Not spending money on Microsoft software is one thing, but forcing people to get bigger computers is quite another.
Actually, the standard should really be the version of .doc used with Word 2.0, as Windows 3.1 had already reached adequacy, and all the upgrades since then were but gimmicks designed to extract money from people.
"Open Office is perfectly capable of saving documents in Word 97 format, and that is a format more people are likely to be able to read than ODF."
Quite - producing documents in ODF would force everybody that needed to open them to upgrade to MS Office 2010+. Pretty much no one is going to use Libre / Open Office for this.
> producing documents in ODF would force everybody that needed to open them to upgrade to MS Office 2010+. Pretty much no one is going to use Libre / Open Office for this.
I remember working hard for clients at a non-profit community organization's cybercafe, opening old MS Word documents with OpenOffice. These were documents that more modern MS Word iterations couldn't open, or mangled. Worked perfectly every time - the only time I ever had any problem was with an MS Works document, but MS Office wouldn't touch that either.
I doubt your competence to make such statements.
Funny how MS ends up minting money even in cases where it should have no way to.
See this case as reported from India in December 2013 .
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/microsoft-and-your-tax-returns/article5515493.ece
Thanks to this campaign and others, the authorities there have started moving away from their 'MS only' stance in this case
There, it is about to happen and I told you, take a look at ie market share over the past 5 years ... that will be the MS Office market share graph in 5 years, maybe even less.
With MS Office goes exchange, with exchange goes windows server ... MS is dead, will only go downhill from here.
The only reason we had MS in the datacenter was because we were forced, this will change shortly for government and all their major contractors, and contractors contractors ... like dominos (the game, not pizza).
Getting more popcorn, finished the last crate I purchased watching the Syrian liberation army ... ;-)
"The software giant has issued an open letter to its partners in the UK, urging them to submit comments on the Cabinet Office proposal to the effect that Her Majesty's government should be allowed to continue to use Microsoft file formats."
... in other words, Microsoft has asked that .doc etc. format use should still be allowed. Nothing about using it in place of ODF.
Show me the documentation where Microsoft are appealing that .doc is used instead of ODF. Until then, this is just click/anti-microsoft-troll bait.
"Show me the documentation where Microsoft are appealing that .doc is used instead of ODF. Until then, this is just click/anti-microsoft-troll bait."
It merely demonstrates that hardly anyone trusts Microsoft. Some may be indifferent, some may be in bondage, some may have escaped but "trust" - not a word often seen near "Microsoft"
"It merely demonstrates that hardly anyone trusts Microsoft"
Personally, I trust no large organisation - right now, Google rings far more alarm bells than Microsoft on the "trust" scale, but I digress... The point is that by blanket-banning .doc, you're taking away choice. Like the browser wars - yep, Microsoft were caught bang-to-rights and were forced to allow people to choose the browser they wanted.
I also detest hypocrites - and taking away the ability to choose a format offered by someone you've already forced to allow choice over something else is blatent hypocracy.
"Show me the documentation where Microsoft are appealing that .doc is used instead of ODF. Until then, this is just click/anti-microsoft-troll bait."
MS, and you, know that allowing the monopoly closed format means that no open format will gain traction in a world where the vast majority grew up surrounded by that monopoly format. So they don't need to say that .doc would be used instead of ODF, because it's bleeding obvious.
Perhaps the UK Government should purchase x thousands of copies of Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows to run it on. And the way they should pay for it, the same way the government should pay for all purchases IMHO, is by giving the company that amount of discount off their corporation tax bill (not reducing it below zero: after all, surely the government isn't their only customer?).
What do you mean Microsoft may not be so much in favour of that now? Anything to do with them not paying corporation tax?
Office is one of Microsoft;s cash cows. If a large corporate user start mandating the use of an open standard guess what might happen.....
All of a sudden the perpetual tie-in to MS Office starts to lose out to cheaper alternative.
I suspect this is much more an issue of revenue protection than anything else. Hopefully the government will see sense ignore them. Now that is a leap of faith that I struggle with!
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