Schwartz Joins the Doc Format Discussion

I appreciate the fact that Jonathan Schwartz of SUN has jumped into the doc format discussion with a well thought out discussion. I think there are some important issues raised, control of your data, long-term archival of data, and most importantly, the translation of documents.  Yet, his posting follows some very careful positioning in order to lead to the logical conclusion (for him) that you should use his products and services. Logical - but it is important to keep an eye on the issues rather than the commercial interests.

Yes - my employer has commercial objectives to see our product used. Thus goes the nature of competition.

 1) Control of your data is critical. We certainly recognize that - thus the move by most formats to being XML-based. The base level standard is XML, and that gives enormous opportunity for access to the data no matter what application created it, or when. 100 years from now, XML will be the magic bullet, not ODF or Open XML. 

2) Long-term archival is a huge issue and challenge. There is no question that the accessability to the Declaration of Independence is not based on a requirement for a machine to be able to read the document. Knowledge of the language sure helps though. The trade-offs in the past for data storage vs. computing capability were such that it was not feasable to have the benefits of XML-based formats. How much of the flat data stored on mainframes is readable without the mainframe applications? How about the data stored in directory services or other data manipulation systems.

I have never found the archival arguments to be complete. If you were to go completely down this path then SAP would have to open all of its data, Oracle, IBM (DB2), etc. etc. The trade off that everyone is ok with is based on the benefits that the system may offer (value) in exchange for the difficulties with long-term archival (or any one of a hundred other trade-offs).

Microsoft responded to national libraries and government agencies years ago with access to the binary formats, and source code for the Save As functions etc. Also, we provided documentation and licensing that recognized the import of the long-term archival issues. Is that a perfect solution - nope, but it was a step in the right direction. ODF is no better nor worse than Open XML at enabling technical access in 100 years simply because both are XML files and can be opened up easily. In fact, the Open XML translator project shows that it is a relatively easy task to build an independent piece of code that lets you do that.

 3) The point that Mr. Schwartz makes about the bridge that is being built between Google formats and OpenOffice is exactly what we have been saying for over a year. Translation is the key. There are dozens of document format standards, some from consortia, some from national bodies, and some from international bodies. The whole "only one" argument is really a commercially-driven sentiment that does not reflect the market reality, nor the desire of customers to have more choice - not less. I think it is great they are building translation capability, I hope they continue to do so as it is the exact right thing to enable for customers.

 Interesting letter from Mr. Schwartz - glad the conversation continues.

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2007
  "ODF is no better nor worse than Open XML at enabling technical access in 100 years simply because both are XML files and can be opened up easily. In fact, the Open XML translator project shows that it is a relatively easy task to build an independent piece of code that lets you do that." This is more sophistry from you, Jason, in which you're witholding two pieces of information...as if from yourself: o in your XML implementation, not all the data is in XML; and o the translator is designed to do poor translations The governments do understand. Plugins are now a fact of life. Pep-talk may feel good but it doesn't hold the market.    

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2007
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• Anonymous
  February 14, 2007
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• Anonymous
  February 14, 2007
  Today an open letter was posted to the interop site at Microsoft . Yesterday, an open letter was posted

• Anonymous
  February 14, 2007
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• Anonymous
  February 14, 2007
  FWLIW, Anthony Christopher, there are heaps of copies of MS Win9x and MS Office 9x floating around the world.  I've seen the MS Win95 floppy version sold second-hand, unused, for NZD$5.00, and turned it down because I couldn't guarantee that the 3.5" floppies were still usable for what I wanted to do with them - install MS Win95 off them in an emulator. That's the other thing - you can get a good emulator or virtual machine for the price of a qemu or bochs download from Sourceforge. What you then do is save as rtf, because that can be reasonably guaranteed, within a certain level of confidence, that it will not only be readable by later versions of MS Office, it will preserve at least 85% to 98% of the formatting information.  But you also save as txt, just so that if the worst comes to the worst, you can at least have the text ... ;) Then mount the file that is the virtual file system and copy from it to the main file system. In other words, translation is vitally important.  It helps if the translation software is up to scratch.  Unfortunately, Microsoft in previous versions of MS Office, didn't make this a priority. Which is one of the reasons why I keep pressing for Microsoft to open the source of the likes of MS Windows, 3.x, 9.x, NT 3.x - 4.x, MS Office 9.x, MS Works 3.x -4.x ..., under the template Microsoft Community License ,,, There's enough versions of this software floating around to make its current static status positively hazardous, since its vulnerabilities are known inside and out by the black hats - Microsoft is going to compete against its massive installed base anyway, so it may as well have the benefit of getting its bugs and security holes fixed by others while competing against it.

• Anonymous
  February 15, 2007
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• Anonymous
  February 15, 2007
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• Anonymous
  February 16, 2007
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