MS Issues Word Patch To Comply With Court Order 179
bennyboy64 writes "iTnews reports that Microsoft has begun offering what appears to be a patch for its popular Word software, allowing it to comply with a recent court ruling which has banned the software giant from selling patent-infringing versions of the word processing product. The workaround should put an end to a long-running dispute between Canadian i4i and Redmond, although it has hinted that the legal battle might yet take another turn."
"Wrist slap"? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a civil lawsuit. The point is to make the plaintiff whole and cause the infringement to cease. It is not about any sort of punishment.
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Well, willful patent infringement can result in treble damages being awarded, which is about punishment even though it's a civil suit.
In this particular case, though, damages weren't trebled, but the district court judge awarded i4i an additional $40 million as sanctions against Microsoft for courtroom shenanigans (which is also about punishment).
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I would like to know where my damages are. How can Microsoft sell a product with a feature, lose an intellectual property case, then take the feature out of my copy by way of "patch". Didn't I pay for that feature? Microsoft has done this before, and I didn't get a refund. How can they keep doing this without eventually even acknowledging that they are removing features from *my* product, not *their* product?
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Strangely, my understanding of the injunction was that it wasn't supposed to interfere with Microsoft's contractual obligations to its present customers, only that it was supposed to enjoin Microsoft from continuing to sell the unpatched product to new customers. Maybe they figure that new customers buying software already on the shelves would get an unpatched version in violation of the injunction, so they're patching everyone.
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I would like to know where my damages are.
Fortunately, i4i is not asking you to pay damages.
(Strictly speaking, they could. In turn you might be able to recover those damage payments from MS)
IANAL, YMMV, etc.
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I didn't infringe upon i4i's patent. i4i was made whole by the damages awarded to them by the court against Microsoft.
i4i has no grounds to seek restitution from me, even if I continue to use an unpatched Word.
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i4i has no grounds to seek restitution from me, even if I continue to use an unpatched Word.
Actually, if you use features covered by their patents, they do have grounds to sue you. Proving damages would be a different story.
IANAL, YMMV, etc.
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I can license you to use any rancid lump of shit that may or may not do anything you want it to do. I can grant or take away any interoperability at any point in time, as you own nothing but the license to standby while it does whatever it pleases.
FZ, in "I am the slime" summed it all up pretty well:
You will obey me while I lead you
And eat the garbage that I feed you
Until the day that we don't need you
Don't go for help . . . no one will heed you
Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mo
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This is a civil lawsuit. The point is to make the plaintiff whole and cause the infringement to cease. It is not about any sort of punishment.
Civil suits sometimes involve punishment, hence punitive damages, which are awarded in order to discourage infringing behavior when the actual compensatory damages are insufficient to do so.
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True, but punitive damages are very rare in civil cases.
Copyright? (Score:3, Insightful)
Mod parent up. (Score:2)
n/t
The appeal decision is worth reading in full (Score:5, Informative)
Groklaw has it. [groklaw.net]
It's very hard not to agree with the court that Microsoft wilfully infringed. Furthermore, it seems they expected to be caught, and to lose the inevitable suit - and didn't care either. Not hard to see why: The damages awarded are equivalent to just two days' revenue for Microsoft (although they infringed for five years). As a commenter pointed out, that's why such cases are unlikely to change their posture on software patents; even when they lose in that arena (and they are serial infringers, frequently losing such cases) - they have already made a huge profit on the whole dirty business. Same old Microsoft.
The way damages were calculated is detailed by the document linked (and was upheld by appeal, as it most likely substantially underestimated the real damages).
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The way damages were calculated is detailed by the document linked (and was upheld by appeal, as it most likely substantially underestimated the real damages).
Next time court should hire RIAA lawyers and let them make the math of the damages.
Damages weren't upheld as reasonable (Score:2)
The damages were not upheld because the estimate was worth a shit (and after reading how they arrived at them I think they were WAY high) they were upheld because Microsoft failed to file a pre-verdict JMOL on damages. Or so it says under B. Reasonableness of the Damages Award.
Re:The appeal decision is worth reading in full (Score:4, Insightful)
I won't argue that i4i doesn't legally "deserve" $290 million because of what MS did or that MS shouldn't be "punished" by that amount; the courts are supposed (in an ideal world at least) to determine the proper amount based on patent and contract law.
But I'm assuming that you are using the term "real damages" in the non-legal sense of what i4i actually suffered (in the sense of what they would have that that don't have now, had MS not used their patent). I highly doubt that "real damages" in that sense have been "substantially underestimated". Small companies rarely sell $290 million of any kind of software, patent or not.
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It's very hard not to agree with the court that Microsoft wilfully infringed. Furthermore, it seems they expected to be caught, and to lose the inevitable suit - and didn't care either. Not hard to see why: The damages awarded are equivalent to just two days' revenue for Microsoft (although they infringed for five years). As a commenter pointed out, that's why such cases are unlikely to change their posture on software patents;
Why would they change? Microsoft's position on software patents is that there is nothing wrong with them in principle, but the patent office needs to do a better job of not granting patents on things that are not non-obvious or that are not novel. Their position would be that the i4i is one of the ones that would not have been granted under what they would consider proper standards of novelty and non-obviousness.
The way damages were calculated is detailed by the document linked (and was upheld by appeal, as it most likely substantially underestimated the real damages).
Considering how few people actually make use of Custom XML in Office, it's hard to see how the r
Leave MicroSoft Alone (Score:2)
Don't you think they have suffered enough. Everywhere I look, I see hatred being dumped on this poor company that is just trying to do what it does best. For gods sake, leave microsoft alone.
Besides, don't you think apple fanbois had something to do with this. Apple really sucks, and I think this is them dumping on microsoft, again.
Re:The appeal decision is worth reading in full (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine Microsoft has no problem with being "forced" to remove support for custom XML elements now that the enterprise threat posed by OpenOffice has waned. Others [blogspot.com] saw this coming and warned that Microsoft's OOXML was a marketing gimmick pretty much from the start.
ODF vs OOXML has little or nothing to do with this lawsuit. The custom XML capabilities of MS Office application that were the object of this lawsuit are not part of the OOXML file format specification; by definition it could not be a custom schema if it's defined in the spec.
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Well, yes, obviously any "custom" XML added by others could not have been specified as a part of the OOXML file format. But the ability to support and ignore (rather than silently remove) custom XML in the OOXML file format is a vital part of it being the extensible and interoperable format that it was advertised as. Pulling the rug out on that interoperability years later is completely consistent with Microsoft's modus operandi.
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If OpenOffice has waned, why is Microsoft hiring a compete group leader [74.125.155.132] to cozy up to the community and bring back knockdown arguments for their marketing team?
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Looks like the standard "Reach out and hand bombs to OSS types". I'm sure part of it will be "Get an interview on Slashdot where you lie about Microsoft's intentions to the Open Source crowd. Maybe this time they won't send you packing and will actually believe the pure unadulterated bullshit we're making you shovel as part of the deal where you sell your soul for a paycheck."
It's a marketing position, or more precisely a FUD position.
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Yeah, it looks like that to me too. But a team leader position with a group of OSS bashers is probably the wrong way to go. Probably involves some input to the scripts for the blog center in Bangalore. I hope they get somebody good for that - the astroturf has been pretty weak the last few years.
They really need several people for this gig. A cuddler or two to get up close to the community, a handler to dump their data, some "perception change agents" (PCAs) to pump the results to their pets in the pr
Help wanted: OSS competition boss (Score:2)
I've submitted it. [slashdot.org] If you like it, please vote it up.
Why patch? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why patch? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they want consistency across all copies of the same version of Office?
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Existing copies of Word were expressly grandfathered in by the ruling -- only the sale of new copies was prohibited. Is the patch intended to be applied against shrink-wrapped copies bought after Jan. 11th?
I would assume that the patch is intended to be applied to every version of Word possible. If for no other reason than to have a unified codebase.
Patch is only for redistributers (Score:2)
If you read TFA, it says "Now it appears that the patch is available on Microsoft's OEM Partner Center Website". If you go to the OEM Partner Center Website [microsoft.com], you will find it is intended for system builders who preinstall the Office Ready image on new PCs and sell Office Ready PCs to customers.
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It'll probably be optional for existing installs of Word. So you could just not install it. It might be a good idea if you have to interoperate with a lot of other people who may or may not have it, at least you know you won't be sending them incompatible files.
For new installs, though, it'll have to be burnt on the DVD, so you're out of luck.
Microsoft Word recalled due to contamination (Score:5, Funny)
CENTER FOR UNEASE CONTROL, Seattle, -- A federal court has banned Microsoft Word from sale as a poisonous substance [newstechnica.com], suspected of causing millions of brain-deaths around the world.
Microsoft Office has long been considered potentially hazardous to health, despite advertising claiming that "four out of five CEOs prefer Outlook" and most of the billions of dollars sloshing around in major banks' credit-default swaps before the Great Recession actually having been calculated in macros in Excel.
Workers whose computers are infected with Microsoft Office are advised to press "escape," step slowly away from the desk, break into a run and gather at the official hazardous substances meeting point, in the pub around the corner from the office.
Symptoms include nausea, irritability and short temper, hostility, homicidal impulses, loss of mental clarity, diarrhoea, mental confusion and liver damage from excess alcohol consumption.
Doctors have recommended victims of Word use OpenOffice instead, its "majestic" startup time giving one healthy pause to catch one's breath, make a cup of tea and nip off to the loo, and its fibrous composition providing the same health-giving effects and taste sensation as eating a bowl of sawdust with milk every morning for the rest of your life. Many sufferers have instead opted to write on toilet paper with a burnt stick.
Yay. Software patents. (Score:5, Insightful)
Steve Ballmer screams (Score:4, Funny)
YOU HAVEN'T HEARD THE LAST OF MEEeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!
* /steve shakes fist angrily.
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Or something like this... [youtube.com]
Will this be a foreced patch? (Score:2)
Will this be a foreced patch? that can not be blocked?
The Patent, itself, is a joke. (Score:2)
So essentially, Microsoft got sued for, putting extra data in a file. What a joke.
A good start (Score:2)
IF Microsoft wants to really blow openoffice out of the water, they need to make sure that when you export a CSV, it doesn't go all Y-2-Krazy on standard ISO dates. OpenOffice can't compare with that!
(And before you try to tell me OO.o doesn't do that, I'm looking at a fresh file that says it does... goddamn it...)
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Because OO isn't compatible enough. If it doesn't look 100% the same, and I mean 100%, it's not good enough.
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Then why does every new version of Microsoft Office look 100% different than the previous version?
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I should have clarified; what I meant was that if the document doesn't look and behave exactly the same when opened in OO (including macros, VBA etc etc which are in use everyday at every corporation) then it's not an option.
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People don't like when a new version of Microsoft Office looks different. People at my company, my wife's company, and many neighbors refused to use 2007 for a long time and even removed it on new computers to install an older version.
But when you finally learn the new version of Microsoft office you know you'll be able to use that learning at the office and friends' houses and other places. If you take the time to learn OO, there's a good chance you won't see it anywhere except your house.
When my wife ha
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Because OO isn't compatible enough. If it doesn't look 100% the same, and I mean 100%, it's not good enough.
It's not that it isn't 100% the same. Its that OO tried so hard to make a clone of MS Office and only got it about 80% the same. If you're going to be a blatant rip-off of an existing product, at least try to implement the same features in the same manner. Nothing like having almost identical menus, except the shortcut keys are slightly different.
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It doesn't try to be a clone.
OpenOffice.org includes interface and workflow design to make switching between MS Office and OOo easier. The developers are very well aware [linuxjournal.com] of the tradeoff between duplicating MS Office's rather haphazard menu/button layout and replacing it with something more logical but unfamiliar.
Re:Open Office is there (Score:5, Informative)
That's utopian thinking. For home use, I more or less agree with you. Business users have a lot of finely detailed and rigidly laid out documents, sometimes with proprietary macro or VBA coding in them. This stuff would be a huge pain to translate to an open standard, and there's no guarantee that OOo will display them faithfully and with fidelity.
Plus, with a MS Office contract, you have a software vendor to fall back to when things go wrong. You don't get this to the same extent with OSS, which is why business is often slow to adopt it.
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That sounds very odd to me considering that to my knowledge, a large majority of the income for OSS projects come from support contracts. Is it that businesses at large don't know about them or is this one more case of using MS Office because everyone else is?
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A lot of OSS projects don't sell support contracts; you might be able to hire a key contributor to an OSS project on some kind of consulting basis, but they aren't really on call for support.
There may be third parties good at implementing and possibly troubleshooting some OSS software or components, but if you need some fix implemented due to a bug you're back to being at mercy of the OSS developers unless your third party has developers on staff who can fix OSS products.
None of this is to say the existing
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It also supports it via contracts with third parties such as this one [sctech.es]
There is plenty of support out there for OO and other Open Source Projects. Digium will sell support for the Open Source Version of Asterisk. The OS is will supported also. I think that the support for OO is at or near the level that MS can provide for MS Office if you know where to look.
Re:Open Office is there (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't totally honest.
The transition from Office 97 to Office 2000 caused major headaches because of the lack of proper support for .doc format. People got thru that by recreating many documents, or just doing without them, or waiting until a service pack came out many months later.
Ditto with the transition from Office 2003 to 2007. I've dealt with numerous cases, especially with Powerpoint, where opening and saving in Office 2007 totally fucked up a document. Stuff disappeared, or was rearranged. One case, where the boss got a new laptop 2 days before a conference. His old one died and his new one came with Office 2007. He edited his presentation, saved it as an Office 2003 .ppt and sent it to his assistant to finish. It was totally fubar, but she only edited a few slides in the beginning and didn't see the mess later on. When she sent it to him, her edits looked like crap to him and his earlier edits were gone. It was a nightmare that saw the assistant recreate the entire thing from a printout the day before the conference -- and a total office ban on Office 2007 the day after.
Shit happens, even when exclusively in the MS world. People would redo the documents that didn't translate properly. They'd bitch, but they'd do it. I've seen it time and time again over the last 20+ years. Wordstar (dot commands FTW!) to Wordperfect to Word; Lotus 1-2-3 to Excel; god-knows-what to Visio; and don't even get me started on CAD!
And SuSE, Red Hat, TRW or IBM would be happy to take your money for a support contract.
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I work for a fortune 50 company that sadly still uses some shoestringed Excel VBA for production stuff. (It started as a engineering test, and just migrated with everything else).
We're still running Office 2000 and I don't see us changing anytime soon.
Re:Open Office is there (Score:4, Interesting)
Semi-OT, but a handy way to use different versions of Office on the same PC, and portably on a USB key, is to modify their installation via VMWare ThinApp:
http://www.vmware.com/products/thinapp/ [vmware.com]
I found out about Thinstals/Thinapps/"portable" versions when I accidentally browsed a torrent site where they are popular for various reasons, but the concept works well and it's easier to copy/paste a folder than do a conventional install.
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Oof!:
http://store.vmware.com/store/vmware/en_US/DisplayProductDetailsPage/productID.105855000 [vmware.com]
Not a big deal for lots of groups, but a show stopper for lots of others.
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That is amazing. I never knew that existed until now. Are they claiming they can make any application portable and you can just throw all of your apps on a drive and access them forever and retain their settings? Do you need their software to run the apps after they have been virtualized? Interesting stuff....for as bad as most of Mac OS used to be, that was one thing they got right. You had a file called preferences that referred to your application. I know unix has this concept as well (and fairly elegant
Re:Open Office is there (Score:4, Informative)
APP-V for Windows does the same thing at, I want to say $20/client/year. Virtualizes apps, lets you manage them from group policy, etc.
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Yeah, I thought about doing something similar to this back when I was in grad school for a thesis or paper.
Essentially you can just hook into an application writing or reading from the registry and redirect it to a local file in its folder instead.
Too much work, though.
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I'd just like to point out that there's no guarantee, or reason to believe, that open source office software is any better in this regard.
And, hell, OpenOffice's presentation software is so weak, even a completely corrupted Office 2007 file probably looked better.
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That's a pretty broad statement. Would you be a little more specific please?
OOo presentation works fine for me, and imports Powerpoint presentations at least as well as different versions of Office do.
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Well, it's been awhile, but last time I used it:
1) It wasn't able to import an outline from a document and automatically convert it into slides
2) It totally didn't have the concept of "master slides", where you can change the appearance/behavior of a slide, then apply that new appearance to all the other slides automatically
3) Related to that, if you changed a slide's template, it lost the content of the slide. (Actually, IIRC, it kept the title but deleted everything else.)
4) The fonts and drawing tools we
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I'm not sure I understand this. I copy and paste documents into Impress's Outline view all the time, same as I do with Powerpoint. Can you please explain the sequence you follow in Powerpoint?
2) It totally didn't have the concept of "master slides", where you can change the appearance/behavior of a slide, then apply that new appearance to all the other slides automatically
I just click View/Master/Slide Maste
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It was the inability of 2000+ versions of office to read my 97 version of office that finally drove me to OO.org. The transition from Macros to VBA in Excel almost did it, but there was nothing like Excel until the recent updates of OO.org.
In all honestly I understand
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I agree -- more significantly, Microsoft has no ability to maintain parity between platform versions of MS Office. While I tried running MS Office on my Mac, the lack of support for VBA Macros made it almost impossible to use with documents my colleagues were sending me. Fortunately, OpenOffice has excellent support in this regard and after navigating the security settings I was able to run the same macros my Windows counterparts are running.
Microsoft is seriously missing the boat here, I gather they are go
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Users with a support contract (read: volume license) are under no obligation to use the most current version, and can in fact install any previous versions.
As Windows 2000 has not yet fallen out of support, our Windows Server 2008 R2 licenses may be used to acquire and install Windows 2000. I don't know if we can get Office 2000 still, but definitely 2003.
Ugh. If it worked, I'd use it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Open office's word processor isn't bad. I've been forced to use the powerpoint replacement (called "Impress") recently and the word "SUCK" doesn't even begin to cover just how badly unworkable it is. In fact, I've renamed it "Repress" because that's a more accurate description of what it does.
I'm not trying to do fancy transitions or stupid animations either. Just basic slideware for hour or 90 minute long technical presentations. It can't even do a fsking "replace template" or "master" properly. It ju
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Re:Open Office is there (Score:4, Insightful)
There is even _less_ guarantee that MS format documents will be correctly displayed or formatted by _any_ tool. Microsoft has repeatedly been shown, in court, to publish documentation of their formats so bad that it is useless to other developers. And the changes between MS Word versions are frequently terribly mishandled by even the best of Microsoft's tools.
In general, the few documents that do not display correctly in OpenOffice which I've not encountered were prey to time-wasting layout micromanagers, who specified every single character's position for esthetic effects that have nothing to do with actual content, and the mishandling is a good indicator that the document itself is written by a paper-work pusher collecting their management salary for picking fonts.
And have you ever _tried_ to get MS Office support, as opposed to commercial OpenOffice support or even open source support for OpenOffice? Go ahead: try to get help with Hebrew printing, or Microsoft mishandling of Unicode.
Re:Open Office is there (Score:4, Informative)
Business users have a lot of finely detailed and rigidly laid out documents
And then they use Word... of all programs... to do that?
That’s like drawing pictures in MS Paint. ^^
For that task, the area is not “word processing”, but “DTP”.
InDesign, QuarkXPress, Scribus and (La)TeX would be the tools for that.
The “quality” of layout that you can do in MS programs, you can do in OOo too.
There is no guarantee that MS documents look right in OOo, true. But on top of there also being no guarantee that MS documents will display right in other versions from MS, there is a guarantee that open documents will not display right in MS at all.
For sending around documents, with a guaranteed layout, you use PDF anyway. Anything else would look ridicoulous and pointy-haired.*
Plus, with a MS Office contract, you have a software vendor to fall back to when things go wrong. You don't get this to the same extent with OSS, which is why business is often slow to adopt it.
Stop spreading that lie. There are many companies out there who gladly sell you professional support. :)
I wonder if MS will ever change the application and add new code for you... Because they can, and you can afford it too.
* Yes, I laughed at my ex-boss for sending me stuff in MS formats. Then I founded my own company, telling them I’d come back when I could buy them for some peanuts. Now they were sold for a single peanut. I was there. I laughed. ^^
In the end you control your own value, what you accept, and what not.
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For that task, the area is not “word processing”, but “DTP”. InDesign, QuarkXPress, Scribus and (La)TeX would be the tools for that.
Years ago, I was working with a contractor to write some user manuals. I assumed it'd be done in some desktop publishing software package like you listed - these people are pros, right? (I didn't write the contract or have much control over it.) I was stunned - and scared - when the manuals came back in Word format. The files have held up reasonably well through several cycles of edits, so perhaps it's not as insane as I first thought, but I'm damn glad I'm not the one that has to edit them. And I'm su
Re:Open Office is there (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not worth the electrons you used to type that sentence. Through work, I have had a "platinum" trouble ticket open with these idiots for about 6 years now. It's a pretty serious issue - documents that become corrupted either while they are being edited, or when opened and then closed. Not trivial stuff - characters just change from one thing to another. They haven't even made a decent effort to resolve it. Their solution to document corruption is to get a correct printed copy, somehow, then scan it in as a TIFF file. This from a senior tech at MS. Not only that, they have consistently been unable to get a simple NDA signed and ITAR certification so that I can give them some of the examples. The sticking point is that they seemingly can't ensure that all the people working it are US citizens. That's not asking a lot for the kind of money that my very large aerospace company pays them in support costs, for this serious an issue.
Brett
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He (his company, anyway) is a platinun buyer of Microsoft. That gives him access to some (large volume) discounts and gives him support tickets on every aquisition, that he hardly spend at all*, so he always have some to spare.
It is no wonder that you can't find platinun contracts on the internet, Microsoft makes sure it is nearly impossible to any buyer to discover what are the licensing options, so they can price target everybody.
* They won't work, so why subjecting yourself to the hassle of calling Micro
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Business users have a lot of finely detailed and rigidly laid out documents, sometimes with proprietary macro or VBA coding in them. This stuff would be a huge pain to translate to an open standard, and there's no guarantee that OOo will display them faithfully and with fidelity.
I take it you haven't tried to upgrade to the most recent version. Good luck with that proprietary macro support and having things not lose fidelity and work the same.
You don't get this to the same extent with OSS, which is why business is often slow to adopt it.
The majority of what prevents adoption of OO is FUD, plain & simple. Software vendor contract with MS Office? Are you kidding? Most businesses don't HAVE a vendor contract they just have a pack of licenses, and any issues with it working your "support" is to report a bug on their forums.
People are afraid to move to something new, and they'
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When is the last time you ever heard of anybody going back on MS because of some issue with Word, in particular with Word not rendering earlier documents correctly? As to Word 2007 compatibility, I did a number of tests on custom macros for Word 2003 that did indeed break on running on Word 2007, so I wouldn't go around lauding interoperability between versions that much.
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I forgot to add that, at the end of it, the problems with the macros we were using were substantial enough that I pretty much abandoned any plans for an Office 2007 rollout (we have the licenses via Software Assurance) and stuck with 2003. If I'm going to rewrite those macros for anything, it will be for OpenOffice, where licensing won't be a concern at all.
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At least there's also no guarantee that future versions won't, which is more than can be said for MS Word.
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The number one problem I used to have was in style codes with built-in numbers, which is a very useful thing for the documents I write. They used to get f*cked from time to time, with the font of the number ending up different from the rest of the line. Then,
rats ass, given by, nobody (Score:2)
This is such MSBS; ranks up with 'its not because our sw is complete shit, its because we are popular' excuse for providing an ease-of-abuse platform to one and all.
People make plain simple documents and need to distribute them. There is nothing about these documents that wasn't fully served 15 years ago. The add-on-pointless-crap is only about lock-in. Look at any "business user" you know, and think carefully about their need for anything beyond what can be faxed.
Adobe were doing well on being the defa
Re:Open Office is there (Score:5, Interesting)
So angry.
Have you ever had a support contract before? At the university where I'm the backup software license officer, we've got a Microsoft Campus Agreement, as well as software site license for SPSS, and multiple other statistical and mathematical software packages. If a widespread problem occurs due to a software fault, such as the calendar issues we were having on the 2003-2007 Office switch, they had someone on the problem and the problem resolved in less than a day.
When a similar glitch occurred in our Evolution users, we had to submit a bug report, then wait for a new version to be released to repository, as we couldn't expect our users to compile from CVS, as the majority of them don't even have a build toolkit.
There's anecdotal evidence for both sides of the argument, but I stand by what's been said.
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Open source has support contracts too. I'm pretty sure that's how the big open source companies make most of their money.
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Have you ever had a support contract before?
This is not the same thing as he is talking about.
He's talking about the whole "well if the software eats our data we get a reimbursed by XYZ company" mentality.
Even with a support contract, you don't. PERIOD. They'll work to make sure that your problems are repaired so it doesn't happen again. But if data is lost, it's gone. They're not required in any way, shape or form to make monetary, product, or technical restitution for it.
If you don't believe
Re:Open Office is there (Score:4, Insightful)
We have a very unique structure at the university. Our clients are our 4000+ staff, faculty and students, all of whom have standalone laptop systems, not part of our managed systems. We are currently looking into putting our own ubuntu repository online for custom packages and updated revisions, but the headaches of this breaking mainline repository updates is daunting.
The bulk of the systems (again, 4000+ laptops) never pass through our hands, so we can't configure them ourselves, and would have to provide documentation on this to the masses, 80% of whom would have no issues, and 20% of whom we'd end up having to handhold through the process of adding custom respositories, 5% of whom we'd have to see in person.
We have a not insignificant amount of users, primarily library staff and long time faculty who are on the far side of 60 years old, and are resentful and afraid of the picture box with the typewriter.
All in all, not insurmountable, just daunting, and it will be tackled some day, but the 2008-2009 school year marked the first year of official adoption by the faculty of OSS packages. We're still hammering out the wrinkles.
And no, my official title is "Technology Services Consultant", but I act as backup to the software license officer when he is otherwise indisposed.
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Making your own repository is ridiculously easy. [mediakey.dk]
20% of whom we'd end up having to handhold through the process of adding custom respositories,
That only takes a few mouse clicks or a very simple script.
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Except that those old docs still exist in the corporate library. Do they now support two office suites?
hmm....what do I use to open this document?
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Correct. We actually have OOo on our *server* and use it to batch-convert MS Word files to PDFs.
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Since Open Office is there, why would anyone go for this?
Open Office, while good, just isn't an option for a lot of business users.
I've got business clients who can't handle the minuscule UI changes from Office 2000 to XP to 2003... They've actually avoided 2007 like the plague... There's no way in hell they'll go to a whole new program.
And then there's the issue of things opening and rendering correctly. I don't know how good OO.o is these days... It may be nearly perfect... But the first time someone opens a document that looks wrong, or the first time som
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But the first time someone opens a document that looks wrong, or the first time someone sends a document that nobody else can open, will be the last time they use OO.o
Would you like me to send you a DOCX document? ;-)
I think after the third time my dad phoned me and said other people were having trouble opening his documents he installed OO.o. (He's retired, but does some charity work -- which means people opening the documents have a huge range of old to new software, and often very little technical ability.)
Plus, when things go really wrong you can always call Microsoft and complain... Pay for some technical support or something... Does OO.o offer support contracts?
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Would you like me to send you a DOCX document? ;-)
I think after the third time my dad phoned me and said other people were having trouble opening his documents he installed OO.o. (He's retired, but does some charity work -- which means people opening the documents have a huge range of old to new software, and often very little technical ability.)
There's the converter [microsoft.com] available from Microsoft, that allows older versions of Word to open .docx documents... And you can always save as the older formats in the first place... Most of my clients still use 97-2003 .doc format documents... Very few are actually using .docx format documents.
My comment was less about random issues because you forgot to save as the right filetype, and more about how good of a job OO.o does (or doesn't) do in opening the filetypes it claims to support. It has been a while si
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Since Open Office is there, why would anyone go for this?
The legit copy of MS Office for home use is free to many who use MS Office at work. Microsoft Software Assurance Home Use Program [microsoft.com]
The MS Office "Ultimate Steal" for a full or part time student with an .edu e-mail address is $60. Win 7 Pro $30. the ultimate steal [microsoft.com]
Since Word 97 or theabouts Microsoft has offered a Home office bundle for around $100-$150 list. Currently with a three-seat license. That's the price of a serviceable multifunction printer o
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MS Office skills are marketable at any age.
What exactly are MS Office skills?
Re:Open Office is there (Score:5, Funny)
MS Office skills are marketable at any age.
What exactly are MS Office skills?
Typing, and bold.
"Advanced skills" include italics and
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What exactly are MS Office skills?
Your first full-time job after a year on unemployment and welfare:
Newport Training Facility Helps Unemployed Find Work [kypost.com]
The baseline clerical skills needed for advancement in any trade or profession you could name:
Administrative Assistant : Hyderabad India [nature.com]
I use OO.o with business documents; works fine. (Score:4, Insightful)
I do exactly that with business documents every day. I open them in OpenOffice.org, print them from OO.o, and if something doesn't import/open correctly due to mistranslation, I make do with what I've got just like millions of users have done across decades of opening important documents in various versions of Microsoft office programs. Microsoft's office programs don't always open and work flawlessly across operating systems or even versions of Microsoft Office. Any talk about "guarantees" and 100% perfect conversion, that's the utopia.
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This has been a complaint since even before WYSIWYG. In the olden days when I first started with computers, if you wanted that you used TeX or Postcript (which PDF is a descendant of) or some other typesetting format. Word processors alone could never, and were never designed to allow absolute 100% rendering every time. Differences in operating systems, software versions, printers and other rendering/printing devices are so substantial that it would be impossible. Even with modern printer abstraction la
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Outlook, group policy, VBA macros, Active Directory deployment, Sharepoint integration, widespread compatibility with third party software.
I'm not a Microsoft troll. But you asked and that is the answer.
-Graham
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I'm using Open Office on my gaming PC to track my Warhammer Online auctions.
I've actually considered buying whatever the cheapest version of Microsoft Office for Windows is, just to make that less painful. That's how bad Open Office is.
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I'm curious. I use OO at work all the time (today, in fact). The only time I've ever felt inclined to turn to Google Docs was to toy with shared access (and limited syncing to my Droid). And the only time I've had to turn to MS Word was when someone generated a MS Word doc that OO couldn't handle properly (or rather - once OO saved it, Word couldn't handle the formatting). Maybe I'm missing something very important about Google Docs? And likewise, I've never hit the need for complexity with Word docs t
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I've used the markup feature in OpenOffice Writer several times (I moonlight as a technical writer sometimes and
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You mean sort of like what happened when all these Office 2000, Office XP and Office 2003 shops suddenly started getting these weird .docx and .xlsx files that they couldn't open.
Yes, you could downloa
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That's the problem with sites like Digg and Slashdot, where people submit things and they show up without any editorial review.
What? Slashdot is edited? That's a joke, right? Nice try, but I'm not falling for something that far out of whack with empirical evidence.