Standardizing the Microsoft Office Open XML formats

Today we are making a really important announcement about our XML formats. We are going to bring the Microsoft Office Open XML formats to a standards body with the intention of eventually making the formats an ISO standard. This should really help everyone feel certain that these formats will always be available and fully accessible. We are going to work with Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, the British Library, Essilor, Intel Corporation, NextPage Inc., Statoil ASA and Toshiba to form a technical committee at ECMA International that will fully document all of our schemas so that anyone can understand how to develop on top of them. This is obviously a huge step forward and it really helps to increase the value of these document formats because of the improved transparency and interoperability. This will help to create a large ecosystem built around these formats that will support them in a large number of different scenarios for customers.

In addition to this move towards standardization, we are also going to make some changes to our licensing approach. I've definitely heard the concern from folks over the past few months around the licenses. We want to make this issue much simpler as well as address the core concern, which was that some folks thought we might somehow sue people for using the formats. Obviously we don't want anyone to have that concern, so in order to clear up any other uncertainties related to how and where you can use our formats, we are moving away from our royalty free license, and instead we are going to provide a very simple and general statement that we make an irrevocable commitment not to sue. I'm not a lawyer, but from what I can see, this "covenant not to sue" looks like it should clear the way for GPL development which was a concern for some folks.

As I've been saying for the past 6 months, our goal with these formats was to open them up so that anyone could build solutions on top of them. We see this as a huge opportunity for Office to play a more vital role in business applications. It's something that we benefit from and so do our customers and partners. I posted about this a couple months ago, and if you're interested you should go back and read that post (https://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/09/29/475340.aspx). Here are two points I really want to stress:

1. It has always been our goal to make customer data in documents more valuable to them. By working with customers and partners at ECMA, we can continue these efforts to build out the Office ecosystem and help our customers reuse their XML data across systems and applications. This effort also opens up a lot of opportunities for us as well as commercial opportunities for other companies.
2. Some customers, particularly in the public sector, have been telling us that they would like us to take this step. They are focused on the long-term management and archiving of digital records and want to use our document formats. They have told us that they would like to see us pursue this step as a measure of goodwill toward them and their interests and we are now following through on their request.

At the XML conference last week, there were a number of folks I talked to who had already done a lot of work with the 2003 XML formats. With the work we'll do in ECMA, we are guaranteed to have a first class specification that fully describes every detail of our formats. In addition, we'll provide plenty of tutorials, best practices, and all kinds of tools to help folks work with the formats. We released the Beta 1 for Office '12' last week and we're already starting to receive a ton of great feedback.

I'll talk a lot more about both the license change as well as the standardization effort over the coming months. It's something I'll obviously stay heavily involved with and I'm really excited about it. I hope you are too.

-Brian

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  Can you say anything about opening up the non-XML legacy Office formats, or point us at someone who can?

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  Bravo. Nice move.

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  "I'm not a lawyer, but from what I can see, this "covenant not to sue" looks like it should clear the way for GPL development which was a concern for some folks."
  
  It seems to do nothing of the sort to me. OS developers like to do things the legal, right way. Promising that you won't sue does not make them free to distribute code that "may" be a potential issue.

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  The advertising clause (must display this URL) in the license conflicts with the GPL, just like the old 4 clause BSD license.
  
  Wether that's a problem with the GPL or Microsofts license is up to the reader of course.

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  "...instead we are going to provide a very simple and general statement that we make an irrevocable commitment not to sue. I'm not a lawyer, but from what I can see, this "covenant not to sue" looks like it should clear the way for GPL development which was a concern for some folks"
  
  Is it something in the water which makes its impossible for a Redmond employee understand the difference between an open standard and an ISO standard?
  
  Microsoft employess remind me of that old Foster's commercial where patrons ask the Ozzie barkeep for coffee and he says "Beer?".
  
  I'd also like to thank the Redmond crew for being responsible for a great supper tonight. I had bet a coworker that Microsoft was going to try an end run just like they did.
  Excellent wings.

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  I've been waiting for something like this. I was resigned to not looking too closely at these materials while they were licensed as "review for planning and feedback to Microsoft only," studying up on other publicly-availalbe initiatives first.
  
  This is certainly the way to go, and I look forward to openings for public discussion and comment, along with my favorite, the Open Packaging Conventions. Are those going to ECMA too?

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  For darm McBride: ECMA is a different avenue to ISO, and it is in many ways a friendlier avenue than OASIS. You might notice that C# and the CLI are ECMA standards and they have moved on to ISO.
  
  Big plus for ECMA: Their specifications are free and downloadable as PDFs. ISO, unfortunately, sells its standards, which is probably why they don't get read much.

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  Why does Microsoft ALWAYS have to re-invent the wheel? What's wrong with simpy using ODF (http://www.oasis-open.org/)? The format is already widely supported by companies like IBM and Sun and many other office suites already support it.

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  Brian,
  
  Two questions/points
  
  1. Will this set of formats at some point be administered by an independent organization outside of Microsoft ?
  
  2. EMCA=European Computer Manufacturers Association. Will international standardization be pursued at some point (ISO, IEEE etc.. )?

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  A lot of great comments so far, thanks.
  
  I'm going to post the actual wording of the "covenant not to sue" later today or tomorrow morning so you folks can read it. This is a replacement for the licenses we had been using. It means there is no longer a license necessary, you can just go ahead and use the formats and documentation.
  
  Bob, here's a link where I talk about why we aren't supporting OpenDocument as our default format: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/06/13/428655.aspx
  We aren't reinventing the wheel. We've been working on our XML formats for just as long as the OpenOffice folks. OpenOffice 2.0 already has support to read and write the Microsoft Word XML format from Office 2003. We have over 300,000 developers out there leveraging the XML functionality in Office 2003. It's much more widely supported than you may realize.
  
  Scot, Yes and Yes! The formats are going to ecma which is an independent standards organization. We plan to pursue ISO standardization after we finish the work in ecma.
  
  -Brian

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  You state "we are moving away from our royalty free license."
  
  You further state "we make an irrevocable commitment not to sue."
  
  And lastly "our goal with these formats was to open them up so that anyone could build solutions on top of them."
  
  My questions therefore are:
  
  1. Does the corporation intend to charge royalties?
  
  2. Does the corporation intend to retain and possibly use other legal harrassments such as cease and desist letters or orders?
  
  3. If this new format(s) are truly going to be "open" as an open standard, is the corporation going to release the source code under the GNU General Public License (GPL)?
  
  krp

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  
  
  Should be an interesting read - I'll wait until you post them before making any additional comments except one:
  
  Make sure it's in plain english - legalize often doesn't mean what a layman would think.
  
  

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  Hi krp,
  
  This is all provided royalty free
  
  The "covenant not to sue" essentially says that as long as you don't sue claiming that you have IP on the formats you are protected
  
  Not sure what you mean about releasing the source under GPL. We aren't making Office open source. We are making the file formats open. So if by source you mean the schemas and documentation, then yes we are releasing them, but we aren't using any license. We are providing the "covenant not to sue" which means you don't need a license.
  
  Urban, I'll try to get it up ASAP. It will have legalese though as it's a legal document, sorry. It's only a couple paragraphs though so it should be pretty clear :-)
  
  -Brian

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  So why the patents? Taken on face value Microsoft have spent a lot of money for nothing.
  
  If one assumes Microsoft don't spend money for nothing, one has to go with the ODF standard, let other get caught.

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  "So why the patents? Taken on face value Microsoft have spent a lot of money for nothing."
  
  The patents are still very useful for defensive purposes. There have already been several cases of companies suing MS and others in the industry, trying to make money just from patents and not creating/selling any technology (Eolas comes to mind as a recent example).

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  A license indicates that one is allowed to do something; if one does it, one is not guilty of breaking any law. A promise not to sue does not indicate that one is allowed to do something.
  
  I am not a lawyer, but I strongly suspect that a promise not to sue has substantially less legal weight behind it; if the CEO of the company changes, it probably doesn't mean anything any longer. As a programmer, I certainly wouldn't develop code based upon it.
  
  As far as the patents being useful for defensive purposes - Eolas doesn't make any products of which I'm aware. Telling them they can't use your patents doesn't do much to them.
  
  Brian, I wish you wouldn't do this to yourself. I realize that you feel you're doing the best thing, but if you think about all that Microsoft has done - the companies they've crushed, the people they've sued for illegitimate reasons - working for them in any capacity must be considered immoral.

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  "As far as the patents being useful for defensive purposes - Eolas doesn't make any products of which I'm aware. Telling them they can't use your patents doesn't do much to them."
  
  You're missing my point. My point is that companies like Eolas acquire patents and sit on them until large companies like MS or even the entire industry use technologies covered under the (usually broad) patents. They sue MS for violating the patent as a means of making money.
  
  Even if the technology in question was in use before the patent was applied for (as several entities independent of MS have asserted in the Eolas case), it can still be costly to prove it and win a suit (Eolas got a $500 million judgment and MS is appealing). If MS has patents on whatever they develop, it prevents one of these other companies from coming along later, acquiring a patent and suing them over it. Similar scenarios have already occured several times now.

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  For a real world example of what patent ambiguity does to a community look at the Mono project. Despite claims for a few years that Mono would not be shutdown by Microsoft, development (and is s still ) significantly affected.
  
  http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_General#Do_you_fear_that_Microsoft_will_change_the_spec_and_render_Mono_useless.3F
  
  TJ

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  n4cer,
  
  It might be practical for a corporation to protect itself, but in the end two wrongs don't make a right or encourage a large entity that has choice to except something that is partially wrong as a standard (if they have choices).

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  How is development of Mono affected? As long as they stick to the CLI standard, they won't have a problem. They can, and have created applications that can run on both runtimes. Where they may (they haven't yet) run into problems is implementing proprietary MS technology not covered under the standard such as Windows Forms, ASP.NET, etc.
  
  Just because MS provided a standardized platform doesn't mean you can freely implement everything MS develops to run on the platform. Just as even though C++ is a standard, you can't expect to freely clone DirectX just because it's built using C++. IP rights granted under the standard do not extend to these proprietary libraries (and shouldn't).
  
  On the flipside, Mono includes libraries that are specific to nx functionality and have little/no use on Windows. These aren't part or the ECMA or ISO CLI standards either, yet, again, don't prevent cross-platform development by sticking to the standard and using cross-platform non-standard libraries for write once portability or choosing to port to the equivalant libraries on either platform to best take advantage of native platform features.

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  "It might be practical for a corporation to protect itself, but in the end two wrongs don't make a right or encourage a large entity that has choice to except something that is partially wrong as a standard (if they have choices)."
  
  That's just it. They have no choice other than to do what they're doing or be vulnerable. Shareholders nor customers would like them being vulnerable. They're pushing for change to the patent system but until that happens, they use the system for protection from malicious entities.
  
  I personally don't consider it two wrongs. The only wrong is committed by those just seeking patents for profit through lawsuits and not actually investing in developing the technology they're patenting.

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  
  The MS presspass (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/nov05/11-21Ecma.mspx) says "The Office Open XML file formats will provide 100 percent of the functionality of the binary formats, as well as total backward compatibility through all past versions of Office."
  
  Hmm, I don't think that's correct.
  
  1) All past versions? I don't think you would release an implementation of this anytime soon then, because it means you will need to begin supporting Word 95, Word 97, Excel 95, Excel 97, Powerpoint 95 and Powerpoint 97, in addition to even older versions.
  
  2) Backwards compatible? The only way for an older version to open a new version of the file format whose storage is different, is two folds : 2.1) the converter plugin is able to convert the storage with full-fidelity, and 2.2) any new feature is migrated into its old equivalent.
  
  We all know that, taking Excel 2006 for instance, it is simply put not the truth already. David Gainer has put extensive posts out there showing new features such as pushing the grid limits far beyond.
  
  So all in all Brian, you've set yourself for yet another month of FUD/antiFUD posts. I'd rather have you post about the goodness of Xml composition effects, performance, and things like that.
  
  

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  n4cer,
  
  "they use the system for protection from malicious entities"
  
  Lets say company A has only good intentions and never does anything bad.... (right ... ) Company B only has 'IP assets' and is looking to monotize . Company B gets some money from company A which the wholesome shareholders take and eventually because of lack of an actual product company B no longer exists. 5 years later company A's products are no longer very popular, the only thing company A has left to make money from is IP in some standards it set. Now company A believes the only avenue for income is to monotize its 'IP' even though it promised not too, under certain specified situation. Now company A is suing business C and group of people D.
  
  Which brings me back around to what i believe is the central issue, why should company C or body of people D care what company A and B need especially from a standard. (if they have a choice)

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  "I've definitely heard the concern from folks over the past few months around the licenses. We want to make this issue much simpler as well as address the core concern, which was that some folks thought we might somehow sue people for using the formats."
  
  What is this about "using" the formats?
  
  The concern that was expressed was that people were concerned about implementing the formats in a competing product.
  
  Does Microsoft hereby warrant that they will disclose every single bit of information about the formats so that competitiors (even open source competitors) can make a competing Office product - without Microsoft suing them?
  
  Does Microsoft warrant that they are allowing - no, more than that - promoting the ability for competing Office products to be able to fully interoperate with Microsoft's format?
  
  Why do you say "using" the format when the actual issue is to be able to "implement" the format?

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly ...
  
  Have you had a look at
  http://opendocumentfellowship.org/Articles/TechnicalComparison
  on the OpenDocument Fellowship site?
  
  It's quite intriguing. I can pick up most of the OpenDocument XML they quote as soon as look at it - the MS Office 2003 XML looks quite opaque, as does the MS Office 12 XML.
  
  That being so, why would someone wish to confuse themselves with an opaque version of what is supposed to be a standard, when there is a much clearer version already available? Clarity of expression = clarity of thought.
  
  And MS Office 2003's XML isn't the XML of MS Office 12 - MS Office 12's XML, like SX? and ODF, doesn't throw all the bits and pieces in together like MS Office 2003's XML does, so you can't rightly claim MS Office 2003's XML is ancestral to MS Office 12's XML.
  
  I'm afraid ODF precedes MS Office 12's XML, because OpenOffice.org 1.0 (c.2001) saved in sxw, sxi, etc, by default.
  
  Sorry: I think Microsoft is going to lose this one.

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2005
  Why isn't Microsoft playing fair? Heck, now you are trying to convert OfficeXML into a standard format, pressuring the ISO organization for that. Being a member of the OASIS, why can't you talk with Sun Microsystems to make an agreement over the OpenDocument format? I mean, the two companies are big friends now, aren't them? Why don't you collaborate to make a XML format instead of fighting all the time? The sad fact is that neither Microsoft nor Sun Microsystems will make the move, so this discussion will keep on going forever, til' one format will prevail over another. I don't know what's going on these days, but all discussions about EVERYTHING gets polarized all the time.

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2005
  Have you considered speaking to the OSI and other prominent Open Source related organizations to make sure in advance that your proposed pseudo-license doesn't cause problems for Open Source implementations?
  
  How about posting the text on the debian-legal mailing list? If they can't find problems, nobody can.

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2005
  If your license allows redistribution, then it will be compatible with a lot of open source licenses.
  If you are going to claim compatibility with the GPL, you must drop the advertising clause.
  
  
  

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2005
  >> How is development of Mono affected? As long as they stick to the CLI standard, they won't have a problem....
  
  Many good points. I should have been more specific in that I believe the Windows Forms & ASP.NET parts of the Mono project has been affected. Surely developers have looked at the legal situation and decided, "I'm not going to contribute to a dead-end project."
  
  TJ

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2005
  Despite thoughts of hidden agendas, I think that this bodes well for competition in general. If true standardization ensues, I would assume that any software developer would be able to provide 100% Microsoft compatibility in their products with Microsoft formats without having to reverse engineer anything. This gives the consumer greater choice and pushes all providers, Microsoft included, towards higher quality products.

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2005
  "Which brings me back around to what i believe is the central issue, why should company C or body of people D care what company A and B need especially from a standard. (if they have a choice)"
  
  If company C or D deviates from the standard or tries to create technology not covered under the standard that infringes on the IP of Company A, then company A has a right to protect such IP as it has not granted rights to said IP in that case.
  
  Adobe makes similar claims on PDF, and I believe Sun on ODF. IP rights are only granted for the purposes of implementing the standard. If you try to subvert the standard or implement technology that has nothing to do with the standard but is still covered in whole or part by IP that just happens to also be granted under the standard, then Company A has a right to protect their IP in that case.
  
  From an Adobe IPR (the same language exists in their licenses):
  http://www.ietf.org/ietf/IPR/adobe-ipr-draft-zilles-pdf.txt
  ------------------------begin Adobe text----
  Accordingly, the following patents are licensed on a royalty-free,
  non-exclusive basis for the term of each patent and for the sole
  purpose of developing software that produces, consumes, and
  interprets PDF files that are compliant with the Specification:
  
  U.S. Patent Numbers:
  
  * 5,634,064
  * 5,737,599
  * 5,781,785
  * 5,819,301
  * 6,028,583
  * 6,289,364
  * 6,421,460
  
  In addition, the following patent is licensed on a royalty-free,
  non-exclusive basis for its term and for the sole purpose of
  developing software that produces PDF files that are compliant with
  the Specification (specifically excluding, however, software that
  consumes and/or interprets PDF files):
  
  U.S. Patent Numbers:
  
  * 5,860,074
  ------------------------end Adobe text---
  
  If you implement a technology covered under these patents but that is not the PDF standard, Adobe can take legal action against you to protect their IP and the integrity of the standard. Why does everyone want to hold MS to a different standard? Most people already use other technologies covered under MS IP (in either standard or non-standard technologies) everyday w/o even knowing or thinking about it.

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2005
  "Many good points. I should have been more specific in that I believe the Windows Forms & ASP.NET parts of the Mono project has been affected. Surely developers have looked at the legal situation and decided, "I'm not going to contribute to a dead-end project." "
  
  They don't have a realistic view of what Mono offers if they thing it's dead-end based on not supporting proprietary MS technologies. The problem with people taking that view is that they don't recognize the value of the standard platform and the ability to build new and innovative technologies on that platform rather than just copying proprietary MS bits.
  
  Most recently, I've seen people talking about cloning WCF (Indigo) on Mono. This should not be the way forward for Mono nor does this perpetual cloning make any sense, especially in the WCF case. WCF uses open standard protocols for web services. There's no reason to clone it. Just create your own object model for those standards.
  
  Mono offers the same common runtime platform for multiple platforms that .NET does for Windows. Using just the standards as a common base and building either cross-platform technologies (if that's your goal) and/or nx optimized technologies atop the standards is the path Mono devs should be pursuing.
  
  Again, it's like C/C++ or any other such standard. Just because there's a common base doesn't mean everyone has to do the same thing. Find a way to differentiate, and where it makes sense, create technologies that work on multiple platforms (again, without cloning proprietary technologies). Mono's standard base along with technologies like GTK# offer a road to cross-platform development. For those that prefer to take advantage of native platform services (such as optimizing for MacOSX's UI or Windows' printing services) then you only need to change a fraction of code out of the common base. At any time, you can go for least common denominator like Java or optimize for each platform like native code, and get the performance benifit of it actually being native code at runtime and being flexible enough to interact with platform-specific APIs if you choose.

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2005
  From Andy Updegrove's blog:
  
  "Microsoft will make specific licensing commitments to remove "virtually all barriers" that would prevent developers from working with the file formats."
  
  Can you comment on what "virtually all barriers" means here. Or will that become clear when the terms are published?
  
  
  
  
  

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2005
  Since most of the questions have been focused on the CNS, I figured I'm create a new post to focus specifically on that: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/11/22/495876.aspx
  
  There I talk about the new approach we are taking, where there is no longer a license. We are saying that everyone can go ahead and use our formats.
  
  I don't understand this whole "vaporware" talk. We've been working on these XML formats for over 6 years now. The first version of the Excel format was in Office XP. The first version of WordprocessingML was in Office 2003. Now we have improvemed them to the point that they are ready to be the new default formats for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Look into it a bit folks. Read some of my entries from this summer. I clearly explain how the formats work, I even pointed to free online labs that let you work with Office 2003. It's not "vaporware", it's not "reinventing the wheel", it's an obvious progression of work we've been doing since back in Office 2000 when we used XML in our HTML formats.
  
  -Brian

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2005
  n4cer, some responses:
  
  "If company C or D deviates from the standard or tries to create technology not covered under the standard that infringes on the IP of Company A, then company A has a right to protect such IP as it has not granted rights to said IP in that case."
  
  You'd think Microsoft would have learnt how restrictive that is after it bit them with the Java "standard". I'm not defending Microsoft's actions in that case as they clearly were intended to subvert Java rather than for any legitimate reason, but there are legitimate reasons why you might want to create, say, something that implements only part of the Doc standard, or that enhances it.
  
  Furthermore, from a purely practical perspective, saying that you only have a license to the spec if you conform to it completely essentially forbids releasing your code until it's done and bug-free, which makes the Open Source "bazaar" development process impossible. The idea that your use of the spec suddenly becomes illegal if a spec-conformance bug is discovered is bizarre and a license that tries to make that claim doesn't seem very "open".
  
  
  "Most recently, I've seen people talking about cloning WCF (Indigo) on Mono. This should not be the way forward for Mono nor does this perpetual cloning make any sense, especially in the WCF case. WCF uses open standard protocols for web services. There's no reason to clone it. Just create your own object model for those standards."
  
  And how exactly does that help someone trying to run a program that was developed against the WCF object model?
  
  
  Basically, your responses seem to me to miss the point of what "open" really means, which is discouraging when coming in response to what may be a really big positive step from Microsoft, if they do it right. (Others have posted some legitimate concerns with how it is actually being done, but I'm waiting for further details before judging). But "open as long as your code doesn't do anything we don't like or come too close to competing with our value proposition" isn't open.

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2005
  Brian,
  
  Does the Excel XML schemea include anything related to read/write access for each cell?
  
  Also, what is the relationship between the new open schemea and Excel's events? Could I build something into an Excel xml file saying that a particular web serivce would like be informed when that cell is updated?
  
  Many thanks,
  
  Rod Boothby

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2005
  You don't have to make OpenDocument default if you don't want to, but you've never explained why you aren't supporting it at all.

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2005
  You don't have to make OpenDocument default if you don't want to, but you've never explained why you aren't supporting it at all.

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2005
  "What MS did with Java was nothing more than including their own namespace that allowed developers to access Windows native services."
  
  Sorry, it wasn't a namespace at all, java has always had adequate namespace features.
  
  It was a non-standard language extension designed to encourage bowdlerised exclusively platform dependent java development to the detrement of other platforms.
  
  The usual embrace-extend-extinguish tactics from Microsoft, once again illegally leveraging their platform monopoly.
  
  If you're so willing to rewrite history on that one, why should we trust that you won't do the same again?

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2005
  kudos to microsoft for opening up its formats!

• Anonymous
  November 23, 2005
  Much of the MS-specific functionality was provided via the com.ms.* namespaces. There was also VM support but none of this functionality affected one's ability to produce WORA apps if you wanted to. You just didn't use that functionality.
  
  There were people at the time, however, that didn't care about WORA (they made internal apps that ran in an all Windows environment for example) and wanted the benefits of native platform services and language features while using Java as their preferred language. Where the need existed for portability, they'd code straight Java.
  
  The trust issue should be directed towards MS. I'm not an employee.

• Anonymous
  February 15, 2006
  Today we are announcing the details behind the upcoming 2007 Microsoft Office system products. We had...

• Anonymous
  February 16, 2006
  Two weeks ago we had the second face to face meeting for Ecma TC-45. For those of you unfamiliar with...

• Anonymous
  February 16, 2006
  Microsoft is giving itself a hearty pat on the back for announcing its intention to open up its Office formats. It will, says product manager Brian Jones, "fully document all of our schemas so that anyone can understand how to develop on top of them."

• Anonymous
  February 18, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  February 24, 2006
  No doubt you've seen that in version 0.8 of the XML Paper Specification, we pulled support for annotations...

• Anonymous
  March 21, 2006
  <i>11/21/05</i>.  Microsoft's decision to standardize on the Open XML Formats for the next release of Office was based on a variety of criteria from Office developers and users.  Brian Jones explains some of the thinking behind the decision

• Anonymous
  May 13, 2006
  I can't be bothered with anything these days, but such is life. I don't care. So it goes. More or less nothing seems worth thinking about. I've just been hanging out waiting for something to happen, but that's how it is.

• Anonymous
  May 13, 2006
  Not much on my mind lately. My life's been completely boring these days. I've just been hanging out not getting anything done. So it goes.

• Anonymous
  May 17, 2006
  I haven't been up to anything these days. So it goes. I can't be bothered with anything these days.

• Anonymous
  May 18, 2006
  If you haven’t made your way to Brian Jones’ blog, do so immediately. He’s announced some very exciting...

• Anonymous
  May 18, 2006
  Not much on my mind right now, but it's not important. I've just been letting everything happen without me. I just don't have anything to say right now.

• Anonymous
  May 27, 2006
  I just don't have much to say recently. Such is life. I've basically been doing nothing. Basically nothing seems worth bothering with. Oh well.

• Anonymous
  June 02, 2006
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