Floor Lamps are Not Software
IBM's Rob Weir wrote a nice piece about the standardization of electrical fixtures and the benefits those standards bring to consumers.
In fact, far from constraining choice, standards enable greater choice. Because the basic plugs, receptors and connectors are governed by standards, these core components have become commodities and are produced off-shore at low cost to you, the consumer. This causes lighting designers and manufacturers to compete on the basis of style, elegance, utility and features. So standards result in lower cost, greater competition and greater choice for the consumer.
Rob is certainly right that core electrical components have become commodities, which is why the outlets in a fifty year old house generally work fine with modern, stylized floor lamps. That's a good thing, especially since electricity hasn't changed much in recent memory. Safety and materials have certainly improved, but electricity itself remains pretty much the same.
Of course, there is more than one electrical socket standard in common use. While floor lamps work fine in common sockets, high power appliances such as dryers and cooking ranges require a more robust socket. Hence, NEMA 14-30 and 14-50 receptacles.
Clearly, a one size standard does not fit all.
Rob then equates electrical standards with document formats.
It is the same thing with document formats. Consumers don't want to worry about document formats. They don't want to even think about document formats. They just want them to work, invisibly, without problems. Of course consumers want choice, but it is the choice of applications, choice of features, choice of vendors, choice of support options, choice of open source versus proprietary source, choice of heavy weight versus web-based, a choice of buying a single application versus buying a suite, etc. A single universal file format is what makes these other choices possible, just like a choice of the Medium Edison Screw bulb leads to an affordable choice in lamp designs.
The problem is that software standards, which are generally concerned with software interoperability, are different than electrical standards, which govern physical objects. In the physical world, end users might need to use cumbersome physical converters to bridge US and European power socket standards (which, while inconvenient, enables interoperability). With software, applications can support multiple standards and can even translate between those standards in ways that are invisible to end users.
The iPod supports the AAC, MP3, Audible, Apple Lossless, AIFF, and WAV audio standards. In the document space, OpenOffice supports multiple formats including RTF, XHTML, and the OASIS Open Document Format. Sun's Jonathan Schwartz is even promoting the ability for documents created in Google's office to be "trivially" exported to OpenOffice and notes the coming availability of a plugin that enables Word to use the ODF document format.
Rob's equating a single electrical standard with his call for a single universal file format also misses an important point. Electricity is a largely mature and stable technology and there is not much room for innovation in the socket and receptacle space. Document formats, on the other hand, are constantly evolving to keep pace with changing technology. Competition is vital to ensure that those formats continue to meet those ever changing needs. Imagine if a single document format was adopted 15 years ago. How would that format deal with things that we take for granted today like including links to web pages, adding digital photos, or even embedding video in our documents? Unlike electricity, document formats are evolving at a rapid pace and competition will help drive that innovation.
IBM wants to prevent that competition. It is actively trying to prevent ISO/IEC JTC1 from even considering the ECMA Open XML standard. Rather than let the marketplace decide which standardized format is best for a particular purpose, IBM wants to remove that choice. To go back to Rob Weir's electrical fixture example, in IBM's world, as long as there is a standard socket for a floor lamp, there is simply no place for a competing standard that is better suited to high powered appliances like dryers.
February 15th, 2007 - 06:13
[QUOTE]IBM wants to prevent that competition.[/QUOTE]
Pardon? Were you born after the DoJs Anti-trust case against Microsoft? Have you not heard of the Halloween documents? Or was that several hundred years before your time?
[QUOTE]Hence, NEMA 14-30 and 14-50 receptacles[/QUOTE]
So do you suggest ODF for real interoperability and OOXML for Microsoft interoperability only? Or what is the point of that comparison? Do you wish to imply that Documents come in two flavors – high-power and low-power?
[QUOTE]The problem is that software standards, which are generally concerned with software interoperability, are different than electrical standards, which govern physical objects.[/QUOTE]
Or at least thats how Microsoft would LIKE them to be – right? So that Microsoft can continue to own users data and prevent interoperability.
If you really wanted to prove that Microsoft is interested in interoperability why dont you answer just the following simple questions?
1. Why did Microsoft not participate in ODF?
2. Why has Microsoft used vague terms throughout the OOXML specification (to the effect that a specific functionality should mimic that which is present in certain archaic versions of Microsoft Office) while not providing concrete specification for behavior?
3. Why has Microsoft chosen to specify bugs in past versions as part of the OOXML standard – see Excel treatment of leap-years which is clearly wrong?
4. Why has Microsoft not re-used widely available and used standards from the W3C and other standards bodies – SVG, MathML, ISO Date Format etc. etc. etc.?
Or, why don’t you go back to being a lawyer and leave such geeky technical points to technical people – like Rob – who understand what they’re talking about?
February 15th, 2007 - 16:18
G,
I believe most, if not all of your questions have already been addressed. A good place to start would be Brian Jones’s blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/default.aspx.
I think a point you should consider is why lawyers, marketers, business people, and lobbyists have become involved in what would normally be a technical discussion. While I would very much like to leave the “technical points to technical people,” the ODF versus Open XML debate is no longer merely a technical debate.
IBM and its supporters are actively seeking government mandation of ODF throughout the world and hence trying to eliminate choice in document formats. While the technical details of document formats are best left to engineers to debate, when those proponents lobby governments to adopt one and only one technical specification, lobbyists and lawyers become part of the discussion.
February 15th, 2007 - 19:12
I don’t believe IBM is trying to prevent adoption of OOXML – I believe they’re promoting what organizations and governments around the world are already supporting, which is ODF. Same with Google and Sun. I think Microsoft just needs to adapt to a world in which their products are now viewed as inferior to free alternatives – as a result, plainly, of abusing consumer trust. Governments don’t usually sue companies that help consumers.
February 16th, 2007 - 05:14
David
IBM, and many others who believe that user data does in fact belong to the user (as opposed to the application that manipulates it) are supporting ODF simply because it is vendor neutral. Microsoft had ample opportunity to do so.
Your (Microsoft’s) format is a mis-leadingly named (intentionally perhaps?) XMLisation of the Microsoft Office document formats. It is not a standard specification – it is a XML conversion of the existing Microsoft document formats. In being that, it is not vendor-neutral. Nor is it implementable by any third party that might wish to implement it.
And, though you may THINK that Brian Jones has addressed technical issues with Microsoft Office XML ( I refuse to call it Office Open XML and indulge in misleading people ), the specification ( I simillarly refuse to call that which is not a standard, a standard – especially with such precedence as ECMA-script, a “standard” which Microsoft used to make web-sites exclusively compatible with IE and a nightmare to view with any other browser ) is rampant with indications of how a feature should be implemented (with pointers to Microsoft Office features) while at the same time being vague about patents covering those features in those version of the implementing software and vague about the implementation itself.
Brian Jones also has no good reason for not using the ISO Date Format or, in fact, ANY of the existing standards that COULD be used to ENSURE INTEROPERABILITY (isn’t that what you SAY your format provides? Or are you just pretending?).
What good reason could anyone ever give for making February 1900 a Leap Year?
When you state that Floor Lamps are not Software you bypass the real issue – standardization to promote interoperability.
But then, as was made obvious by Burke and Yates lobbying against the Massacussets State decision to mandate the ODF format, Microsoft seemingly wants to ensure that their format – a single vendor format – remains permanently controlled by them. Neither truly open, nor truly interoperable. Therefore relegating users to be vendor dependent.
That is the sole aim of this sham of a standard – show me but ONE alternative implementation that is NOT Microsoft. On the other hand, ODF already has several credible interoperable implementations – the IBM Lotus Suite, WordPerfect and OpenOffice.
The problem with “lawyers, marketers, business people and lobbyists” – ANY non-technical person for that matter – entering a discussion on a topic they obviously understand less than sattisfactorily is simply this – they are not qualified to understand the problems and therefore not qualified to generalise (as you have done) and judge the situation.
You have clearly not even aware of the tactics (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) that your very own Marketing department practices.
I’d strongly advise you to indulge in more internal communication before passing judgement on external technical statements. And, while you’re at it, try not to categorise technically researched and technically provable flaws as “lobbying”. Also kindly note that every individuals opinion is their own and not necessarily that of the Organization that employs them.
June 17th, 2007 - 13:01
For me, one good test to see whether Microoft as a company is being honest when it says it cares about interoperability is to see how well they’ve allowed ODF translators to integrate into Office 2007. Right now the translator that they themselves sponsored is only able to integrate their product in an absolutely ugly, klunky fashion. The day MS allows the team they sponsored– as well as any other teams– to integrate their translators in a manner that isn’t a total pain in the rear for end users is a day I will be much less suspicious about MS’s intentions.
Also, the music formats are a great example of what we don’t want to happen, and of the benefits of ODF. It would be much better for consumers and for the industry at large if we all had standardization on patent-free, legally-unrestricted formats, like OGG. I recall Microsoft itself felt the sting of patent stupidity when it had to shell out millions for MP3 patents. It’s even more difficult for smaller companies to innovate and create new services because they have to worry about file format licensing issues, and they don’t have a huge wallet like Microsoft. As a consumer, I don’t want to have to deal with the hassle of worrying about different formats; the whole issue is one that was largely imposed upon us by Apple, Microsoft, et al, in an attempt by them to create walled gardens of music services and hardware. The whole inability to play some formats on some players and other formats on other players has been a real pain for end users. So your comparison is actually apt, but I think it argues against your point.
The less legally restricted, the better. Microsoft has been way too vague about MSOOXML and patents, and companies and governments should be worried that MS will be litigious (or threaten litigation in order to extract money from companies) somewhere down the road regarding MSOOXML-related tools. This is probably less likely to happen with ODF-related tools.
July 10th, 2007 - 15:51
Daniel,
Thanks for your comments. I think you’ve raised an interesting point about music codecs. Different codecs were developed for different purposes at different times with different technologies. For example, uncompressed WAV is the format of choice for music aficionados, but it results in extremely large file sizes that wouldn’t be appropriate for portable devices. Codecs like MP3 trade some quality for smaller file sizes. AAC and WMA have used advances in technology to increase quality without increasing file size. My point is that if we stopped at WAV, devices like the iPod, streaming radio, or low bandwidth voice applications like cells phones wouldn’t be nearly as successful or prevalent as they are today. There simply wouldn’t be enough disk size or bandwidth to make those applications practicable. Technology needs to progress and competing standards and technologies help make that happen. Locking into a single standard can lead to an dead zone in innovation.
I’d also note that devices like the iPod, Zune, and Sansa support multiple codecs, which solves the codec interoperability issue for most people.
As for Microsoft’s patents in OOXML, Microsoft has been very clear that its patents in the spec are covered by the Open Specification Promise, which I’ve written about before. The OSP allows the use of Microsoft’s necessary patents in implementations of the spec on a royalty free basis.