Microsoft Promises To Fully Support OOXML ... Later

Raul654 writes "OOXML is the Word document format that Microsoft rammed through the ISO last year. Last week, we discussed a blog post by Alex Brown, who was instrumental in getting OOXML approved by the ISO. Brown criticized Microsoft for reneging on its promise to support OOXML in the upcoming release of Office 2010, and for its lackadaisical approach to fixing the many bugs which still remain in the specification. Now, Doug Mahugh has responded to Brown's post, promising that Microsoft will support OOXML 'no later than the initial release of Office 15.'"

I 3 Alex Brown

[Chris Burke]

*Alex brown shakes his fist at MS* "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"

This is why I love Microsoft

[NaCh0]

All of my software bugs get fixed in the "next" version.

Another Battle Lost Because MS Has No Mojo

[salesgeek]

Wow. I can't believe that MS wasted three years and $millions on this. MS really needs to take a look at what is going on and do something about it:

* MS Tablet PCs fail
* Windows Mobile fails
* MS ISO Standard file format fails
* Windows Live fails
* Zune fails

The bodies are getting stacked deep, there MS. Time to get back to what made you great and become hacker friendly again... and not in the sense that your OS and software have lots of security holes.

Re:They promised to support OS2 too

[DarkKnightRadick]

Which part? :p

Re:Office...15?

[idontgno]

Maybe.

I'm sure that's the rational answer.

That's also what THEY WANT YOU TO THINK!

He really means Office '15, which comes out some time in 2017.

But if you assume he means the next major release, and that assumption pacifies you, all the better.

Re:Office...15?

[Attila Dimedici]

So, when they release the next version without OOXML support they will retroactvely renumber so that the next version is still only Office 14 and hope that by the time they get to the 14th release of Office everyone will have forgotten this promise (or that the push for open standards will have run out of steam).

The real story.

[pavon]

Office 13 existed as a skunkworks project within MS. It fully supported the ODF 1.1 standard, and was crossplatform to Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and BeOS (which MS also had plans to revive). It had clean, standards compliant HTML output. Even more surprisingly, it was decided that the project would be released as open source. Everything was going great until orders from the top led them to try and include Clippy. During the initial commit of the Office 2007 Clippy source there was a large bitsplosion leaving the GIT repository in waste. Forensic analysis concluded that the disaster was the result of the collision of evil bits and non-evil bits, which annihilated one another on contact, releasing huge reserves of pure information, scrambling anything in proximity. Furthermore, due to quantum entanglement, all backup copies of the promising office suite also disappeared, along with any instances of Clippy in Office 2007.

After this incident, MS abandoned any attempts at supporting open source and open standards projects. Ms Gates still bitches about the loss of Clippy in Office 2010.

Re:Office...15?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently it's the release after the next one, tentatively planned for 2013.

God, one night, summoned in heaven the presidents of USA, China and Bill Gates, and declared that the world would end in 2012 (thus confirming the so called mayan profecies). They were returned them to their homes to give news to the people.

The president of USA said: "There are good and bad news. The good news is that God exists. The bad news is that the world will end in 2012".

The president of China said: "There are bad and terrible news. The bad news is that God exists. The terrible news is that the world will end in 2012".

Bill Gates said: "There are good and terrific news. The good news is that God thinks I'm important. The terrific news is that we don't have to worry about OOXML!"

Re:I Don't Care

[Bryan3000000]

Okay, you got your facts wrong. They pushed OOXML through a standards body to make it a new open standard, ostensibly to address the clamoring for interoperability. So really, it's not that they fail to support their own format, it's that they fail to support the format that they tried to set up as a new standard of interoperability.

In other words, the point is that this kind of proves that Microsoft rammed the OOXML standard through not to help achieve interoperability, but to prevent governments and companies from switching to other standards which truly do provide openness and a greater level of interoperability. It's evidence of further anticompetitive conduct by a company with a functional monopoly.

Re:Another Battle Lost Because MS Has No Mojo

[plague3106]

Speak for yourself, but myself and other do enjoy using MS projects. For me, actually trying to use Linux made me enjoy MS software (it helped that MS did actually improve their stuff too).

Re:Office...15?

[ffreeloader]

Yeah, it's correct. It's not a typo. It's MS's internal code for a future release called "When pigs fly".

Re:This is why I love Microsoft

[l0perb0y]

And in open source projects all the bugs are already fixed in Subversion!