noah’s mark

Apparently, if it weren’t for big evil IBM oppressing Microsoft, OOXML would have been a standard in “business as usual”.  Oh, you heard me right.  Go read the article.  Once you’ve finished laughing, come back.

Hahaha.  Sorry, I haven’t finished laughing yet.  Hah.  Hahaha.  Ok, I think that’s it.

Hahaha.

No seriously, I’m done now.

Mmmmk.  So, after the whole gigantic ordeal where, once again, Microsoft played the part of the “biggest asshole imaginable”, in front of the entire world, these twats (Jean Paoli and Nicos Tsilas) have the gall to claim that IBM and the FSF were being all evil and mean to the poor (as in poorly endowed in the brain area) OOXML designers, who were really doing their best to find the most-est phenomenal-est standard possible.  The one that just happens to be completely owned by Microsoft, is already showing signs of changing, takes about 5,000 pages to (not-yet accurately and fully) specify, and is overall useless in light of the fact that there is already a standard for exactly what it describes.

My favorite quote is this one:

“They have made this a religious and highly political debate,” Tsilas said. “They are doing this because it is advancing their business model. Over 50 percent of IBM’s revenues come from consulting services.”

Exactly. And Microsoft doesn’t get any revenue from, say, Microsoft Office, which just so happens to have already implemented this “standard”.

To be clear: you, as a company that is unilaterally the biggest asswipe in every manner imaginable, don’t get to critique another company for supporting their revenues.  Especially when “supporting their revenues”, in this case, is disallowing vendor lock-in from their competitors.  You can’t defend your actions on Monday because they aid your stockholders and attack your competitor on Tuesday for doing the same thing.

Besides, the only reason that IBM wins if OOXML dies is because everybody wins if OOXML goes away.  Relatively speaking, Microsoft loses, only because it doesn’t disallow others from competing on equal ground.

Remember, nothing is stopping Office from supporting ODF, except that the act of supporting ODF gets rid of the proprietary lock-in to Microsoft Office document formats.  If your Office documents are saved in ODF document types, you are free to try other office software, maybe even realize that Office isn’t the best tool for what you need, or the price point isn’t right, or whatever.

Once again, the only benefit of OOXML to anyone (namely: Microsoft) is that it gives Microsoft a gigantic advantage in implementing this “standard”, which broke every gentleman’s rule of the standards process.  Despite the article’s (and Microsoft’s) insinuation, there is nothing about ODF that forces non-open-source players out of the game.  Everyone and their sister can write an office application that supports ODF, especially since, unlike OOXML, it isn’t prohibitively difficult to fully implement.  And when everyone uses the same document standard, guess what that means?

Everyone has to compete on merit.

And that’s certainly something that Microsoft wants to avoid, seeing as, like in the case of the F# license, “creating innovation” is code for “avoiding competing on merit at all costs” and “stealing the hard work of others”.

Is it too much to ask that these people show a shred of intelligence and tact in these situations?  Is it too much to hope that, especially on the OOXML front, a few of the “Microsoft employee” quotes come from someone who is neither learning disabled nor an asshole?

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 3:16 am and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.