I wonder what kind of dance Balmer did when he heard about this?
Massachusetts Verdict: MS Office Formats Out
The state of Massachusetts Friday made it official: It will use only nonproprietary document formats in state-affiliated offices effective Jan. 1, 2007. Although state CIO Peter Quinn has said repeatedly that this issue does not represent “the state versus Microsoft Corp. —or any one company,” adoption of the long-debated plan may result in all versions of Microsoft’s Office productivity suite being phased out of use throughout the state’s executive branch agencies.Quinn said that “government is creating history at a rapidly increasing rate, and all documents we save must be accessible to everybody, without having to use ‘closed’ software to open them now and in the future.”
“Microsoft has remade the desktop world,” Quinn said. “But if you’ve watched history, there’s a slag heap of proprietary companies who have fallen by the wayside because they were stuck in their ways.”
There plenty of governments, and even corporations, who complain about Microsoft’s proprietary formats. Why doesn’t Microsoft simply make a corporate version of Office with non-proprietary formats? They could charge MORE for it and everyone would be happy.
It doesn’t seem like it’d be too difficult. Word already has RTF.
Because they are Pointy Haired Bosses and cannot see beyond their greedy noses.
RTF isn’t a good solution in this case: government forms and the like have to retain formatting as well as language.
Begin the transition by saving / converting all existing Word documents in html format. This would make all government documents on line ready and non proprietary. Stored files would enabled for reading with any PC. There is an abundance of html format editors, even Word will do the job.
A trend ???
I think we will see more of this very shortly.
Further to the point, if Word was just another html document editor it would then be measured and priced according to it’s html compatibility – and functional comparison with it’s competition.
In short, the state of Massachusetts already has it’s open document format editor already installed on their PCs. At the next generation of Office, they can consider whose html based product meets their needs and budget best.- or if they have to upgrade at all.
Long overdue. There are already all kinds of data formats that history has nearly forgotten: 16 2/3 rpm records, 8 track tapes, 5 1/4 floppys, laser disks. This potential for information loss could make the burning of the Library at Alexandria seem trivial.
Just for experiment I took a 1 page memo document and saved it 3 ways: DOC, RTF and HTML.
.DOC was 28.672KB;
.RTF was 8.192KB,
.HTML was 8.192KB.
It would seem that MS Word requires more than 3 times the disk space of these alternate formats. The cumulative size of many such records therefore increases not only the storage cost to allocate more sectors per record, but the risk of data integrity problems with any one of those sectors.
Don–you’re talking about obsolete storage media. In the case of a 5 1/4″ drive I still have one of those drives, so I can read that medium as long as I can figure a way to connect it to a PC. On the other hand, consider the ancient 9 track computer data tape, for which there were indeed standard formats. No computer manufacturer ever actively supported those formats, using their own proprietary formats instead.
The real issue is data formats, in this case the Word document format, which has been changing over time and is poised to morph again into an XML format that is is supposedly standard and “open.” However, the Word data dictionary (which defines the meaning of the tags in the document) is yet another proprietary format. I think that change is the reason why the State of Massachusetts is requiring document storage in an open format.
Increasing fees are met with decreasing traffic.
This is true for both motor fuel and data.
Try setting up a fee based blog and see how much traffic
it gets vs. a open blog. You could make Dvorak Uncensored a
subscription based service. Your traffic would almost certainly decrease. You could be like Microsoft and tell your readers that it
is actually less expensive. Charge users like $6.95 a month for unlimited access and see how many people sign up. You could
brand it DOL, Dvorak On Line and claim it’s the wave of the future.
Maybe you could make it dot net and offer a Dvorak Passport and free email. Get users confused and then sell them online support from your offshore help desk. We will have that fixed today. Today is yesterday here. What country are you in sir? Ah forget about it.
Reading the article, I was surprised to hear that they included “PDF” as a non-proprietary format. I guess I just assumed that Adobe owned the format.
I love PDF but resent have to pay so much for Acrobat.
I don’t like PDF. I try avoiding PDF files when I can.
I’m sure some people need PDF, so if it works for them that’s great.
I don’t think we will need a browser in the near future. I guess this could be bad news for business for all the folks giving away free browsers and building free browsers. At least they aren’t going to face a big drain in revenues, since the browsers are free. You won’t even have a browser war, so people can fight over giving away browsers. Maybe with less browsers, there will be more shoppers buying actual stuff with computers. Maybe the operating system will replace the browser and the operating system people will go broke and we wil have a new operating system war with people fighting over giving away free operating systems. No peace, no progress, no pizza.
There would be a living hell.
I have to go and paint something and eat lunch. Have a good day.
Dermitt — lots of folks [well, at least folks in construction] love .pdf’s when you’re emailing quotes, notes, change orders and comments all over the map. As long as you don’t need to edit the .pdf, you don’t have to buy Adobe’s overpriced package. Plenty of editors will let you save or export to a .pdf. I’m using both Pages and NeoOffice on a Mac — and it’s built into both.
I agree that .html makes a lot of sense; but, ain’t a bunch of people accepting email with .html attachments, nowadays.
I’m a graphic artist by training and I have a bit of a control freak in me when it comes to delivering a document. I haven’t seen anything better than a PDF so far. These days I even use it to deliver jobs to the printer,which was unheard of just a few years ago.
It’s kind of remarkable now that I think about it. The PDF has been around for … what? … ten years now? And, still, nobody can beat it for accuracy across platforms.
A Sun Microsystems executive says the OpenDocument format has the potential to change the world. See CNet for more on this.
If a document is open, why have standards? You have the people who write standards and the people who write documents. I see it like oil painting where everybody has a different technique, uses different brush strokes and different colors. The result of this is that no two paintings are exactly alike and the more unique paintings result in more value and more interest. You could have a set of standards and use a corporate approach, but everybody is going to do their own thing. OpenDocument could ‘turn everything inside out’, which is hard to believe. No single approach ever solves every problem. It often just creates more problems. This all sounds like trying to create a single world language standard. No more English, French, German, Arabic or any other languages. Yea right! Maybe we’ll have a single postage stamp that is designed according to the rules of some international standards body.
I like Dvorak Markup Language, DML. DML should be the new standard, replacing XML and all our documents could feature the Dvorak seal of approval DSA and be fit for use with PDF or Pretty Dvorak Friendly so everything can be inside out with standard Intel Inside Marketing Language or IIML for the acromaniacs.
Google is teaming with Sun Microsystems, so now the rumor mill is turning faster. Some might say spinning or flying. Last week it was Google Moon with NASA and this week it is Google Sun. Sun stock is in the low $4. range, if you need proof that their ideas aren’t the greatest. Google is now trading at over $300. It proves one thing. Personal technology is a feast or famine business environment. Maybe Google is going to inject some ideas into Sun and save them from their own plan, whatever it is. Just the announcement sent Sun shares up on Monday and nothing was disclosed. Everybody is meeting at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, http://computerhistory.org/ Maybe it will be like the deal Sun made with Microsoft. I hope it all works out, but nobody seems to know save for the masters of the technology universe. Perhaps Google will buy Sun and launch a new Google product line. Nobody seems to know. How about a G-Box gaming console with wi-fi. Let the games begin.
Breaking news: Microsoft and Motorola form a new alliance.
Maybe it will empower you to watch MSNBC on your cell phone or be a walking data robot with all the information in the world in a chip they shoot into your head. I guess Microsoft is worried about it.
They went into the news business and Google was planning the next big story. Future breaking news via MSMNBCBS dotnet: Microsoft Shares Tumble to $4.00: SUN goes down on Redmond Empire.