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> Why Microsoft’s Motive Wasn’t Deliberate Sabotage I absolutely do not agree. Not only is the standard overly complex, Microsoft also indulged in all sorts o
by s20n 1y ago
> Why Microsoft’s Motive Wasn’t Deliberate Sabotage
I absolutely do not agree.
Not only is the standard overly complex, Microsoft also indulged in all sorts of unscrupulous activities to corrupt various National Standards Organisations to get it approved through the ISO <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML#Complaints_about_the_national_bodies_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...>, which is clear evidence of malicious intent.
This is a quote from Richard Stallman:
> The specifications document was so long that it would be difficult for anyone else to implement it properly. When the proposed standard was submitted through the usual track, experienced evaluators rejected it for many good reasons. Microsoft responded using a special override procedure in which its money buy the support of many of the voting countries, thus bypassing proper evaluation and demonstrating that ISO can be bought.
- monocasa 1y agoSpecifically what I heard on the grapevine was that Microsoft sponsored a collection of small island nations into the ISO process, in exchange for their vote on OOXML.
- miohtama 1y agoNot only small islands nations. For example in Finland Microsoft partners invaded the local working group to get the standard passed in the voting process.
- Yizahi 1y agoThat is not on MS though. That is a fault of those in change of ISO, that they assign same vote weight to the enormous empires and to the microstates. Votes should be proportional to the population, full stop. Then no one would be able to abuse the system by simply playing by the rules.
- MereInterest 1y agoSo, if I'm understanding your argument correctly, failure to stop a bad actor from taking a hostile action absolves the bad actor of all responsibility for that hostile action? Because that seems to be what you're saying.
- Yizahi 1y agoHostile to whom and on what basis? If two companies decide to merge, is it by default a hostile action? I don't think so. And what if later anti-monopoly agency decides that it was an infraction and blocks the merger? Then I think it was. Does informing voters about something is a hostile action by default? I don't think so. But if it was later decided that there was a law breach, then it would be hostile action. All people and even megacorps are innocent until proven guilty. Maybe even until accused of being guilty by some authority, though it is pushing it. But until someone at least does something to show their displeasure and point fingers, then yeah, no hostile action has happened, it was fair play. So to answer your question - vote bribing is 100% a failure of the organizer of said vote and of the law enforcement system (in bigger cases) IF that organizer or govt never complained about it or did jack shit in general. But if they at least complained or better did something about the problem, then yes, vote bribing failure would be a shared responsibility of both bad actor doing it and the people who hadn't done any reasonable prevention in advance. Since it is obvious that assigning equal weights to the countries can and did lead to the vote manipulation, I can say that ISO committee had NOT done reasonable prevention of vote manipulation and so is also guilty, just as bad actor MS.
- quotemstr 1y agoSome myths just won't die. OOXML is complex because it has to be. It has to losslessly round trip through an open format every single feature of Office. That's a lot of features. Yes, it's complex. Should Microsoft have cut features of Office just to make OOXML simpler? That's ridiculous. What about users who relied on those cut features? It was fair to ask Microsoft to open the file format. It wasn't fair to expect them to cut features and compatibility. The complaints about complexity from RMS and others represent outsiders seeing the sausage factory and realizing that the sausage making is complicated and needs a lot of moving parts. Maybe life wasn't as simple as the Slashdot "Micro$oft" narrative would suggest. Maybe the complexity of the product was downstream of the shit ton of complexity and sweat and thought that had gone into it. But admitting that would have been hard. Easier to come up with conspiracy theories.
- dullcrisp 1y agoThe…sausage has a lot of moving parts?
- user3939382 1y agoSo you put extensions in the spec you don’t make it impossible for anyone else to implement. They knew open source suites were competing with them they did it on purpose.
- quotemstr 1y ago> So you put extensions in the spec ... which are either public, in which case people complain that the spec+extensions is too long instead of that the spec is too long, or ... which aren't public, in which case people complain that there's no interoperability. You can't win. > impossible for anyone else to implement Except for all the people who did implement it?
- fsflover 1y ago> Except for all the people who did implement it? It was never fully implemented. LibreOffice has been trying since then and there are always problems.
- gregopet 1y agoMy wife worked in one of the national standardization organizations. She was urgently called into her boss' office: "Please be on this meeting with me, I think they will try to bribe me if I'm alone". It only happened once while my wife worked there and it was right before the vote where Microsoft tried to fast track their office format.
- shaky-carrousel 1y agoIt's what we the old farts have been saying during decades. Do not ever trust Microsoft, they are corrupt beyond hope, they're evil. But people got blindsided by the new Microsoft propaganda.
- bayindirh 1y ago> But people got blindsided by the new Microsoft propaganda. This is sadly true. I tried to warn many young folks about VSCode, Copilot and whatnot, and they all laughed at me. Now, they're not laughing either.
- CorrectHorseBat 1y agoBoth can be true at once. They didn't want a standard other people could adapt easily nor do the work to make Word adhere to one and it had to happen fast. By doing it the way they did they got everything they wanted and only needed to buy ISO.
- fsflover 1y agoSounds exactly like deliberate sabotage to me.
- thomasfl 1y agoI worked for the Norwegian standard organization at the time. After seing with my own eyes how Microsoft was able to get OOXML approved, I quit doing standards. The OOXML standard is a joke. Three different ways to store basically the exact same thing. Like dates.
- fsflover 1y agoWhat if they could do it, because people like you had quit?
- hoistbypetard 1y agoThe format wasn't the act of sabotage. The way they drove it through the standardization process was. It couldn't have been standardized through the normal process. Similarly, pointing to it, afterwards, as if it were just as implementable as any other standardized format, was an act of deliberate sabotage.
- fsflover 1y ago> The format wasn't the act of sabotage. The way they drove it through the standardization process was. Why not both? You didn't provide any arguments against it.
- hoistbypetard 1y agoWhat I mean is that it is just the internal binary format they were using before, converted to XML. I don't believe the file format was developed as an act of sabotage; it was just some internal shit they were using because that's how the product had evolved. Standardizing it as if it were an actual designed, open standard, was, however, very much an act of sabotage. That's my read, anyway.
- amiga386 1y agoThe format itself is an act of sabotage. The format is basically Microsoft's internal formats for Office, with all their bugs and flags and features, for which Microsoft already owned the only working implementation that works correctly. They completely rejected what standardisation processes _do_, which is to subject the format to scrutiny, criticism and change, to make it universally useful and implementable. Microsoft absolutely did not do that. They rammed through their proprietary bullshit and slapped an "open standards!" label on it. https://www.consortiuminfo.org/opendocument-and-ooxml/the-contradictory-nature-of-ooxml/ https://www.consortiuminfo.org/opendocument-and-ooxml/the-co... > 2.15.3.26 footnoteLayoutLikeWW8 (Emulate Word 6.x/95/97 Footnote Placement) > This element specifies that applications shall emulate the behavior of a previously existing word processing application (Microsoft Word 6.x/95/97) when determining the placement of the contents of footnotes relative to the page on which the footnote reference occurs. This emulation typically involves some and/or all of the footnote being inappropriately placed on the page following the footnote reference. > [Guidance: To faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of that application, which involves many possible behaviors and cannot be faithfully placed into narrative for this Office Open XML Standard. If applications wish to match this behavior, they must utilize and duplicate the output of those applications. It is recommended that applications not intentionally replicate this behavior as it was deprecated due to issues with its output, and is maintained only for compatibility with existing documents from that application. end guidance] > Typically, applications shall not perform this compatibility. This element, when present with a val attribute value of true (or equivalent), specifies that applications shall attempt to mimic that existing word processing application in this regard. The format was _written_ to include specifics that only matter for one product - Microsoft Office - and don't even reveal in that format how those specifics should be interpreted faithfully. This is of ZERO use to anyone looking to make interoperable software that can make use of this standard. And that's the point - it's NOT an open standard, it's quite deliberately Microsoft's proprietary and closed bullshit with "open" shat on top of it, and a paid-for endorsement by a standards body that completely detonated its own credibility by approving it.
- conartist6 1y agoI seriously don't see the author's purpose in trying to establish a distinction. If I act like I hate you: say I come and light your house on fire and salt the earth where you raise your crops and poison the water from your family's drinking well, would it not be reasonable to say that I hate you? If you can then confirm that I have no intention to stop (even though I know I'm hurting you) and all I have to say in my defense is, "Actually I do exactly whatever I want and just don't care about you at all," what is the difference to me at that point? In practice total indifference is even more toxic than hate, because it denies engagement. I owe no extra charitability for callous indifference being the root cause of the actions taken. Company or person, society reserves the right to judge you on the effects your force of will brings forth on others. They used theirs to kill their competitors.
- me-vs-cat 1y agoIn other words: "the purpose of a system is what it does". Duck-typed ethics?
- jrochkind1 1y agoOne difference it might make is a warning for those who aren't deliberately trying to make something complex, and think they might thus be immune from the result. In fact, you can wind up with something terribly complex as a result of other pressures, incentives, history, and context, without it having been deliberate. It takes active investment and skill to avoid complexity, even if not intended.
- devnonymous 1y agoFrom the same wikipedia article: > An Ars Technica article sources Groklaw stating that at Portugal's national body TC meeting, "representatives from Microsoft attempted to argue that Sun Microsystems, the creators and supporters of the competing OpenDocument format (ODF), could not be given a seat at the conference table because there was a lack of chairs."[55] Sure, yeah, that's not deliberate Sabotage /s
- devnonymous 1y agoAlso this: > Google stated that "the ODF standard, which achieves the same goal, is only 867 pages" and that If ISO were to give OOXML with its 6546 pages the same level of review that other standards have seen, it would take 18 years (6576 days for 6546 pages) to achieve comparable levels of review to the existing ODF standard (871 days for 867 pages) which achieves the same purpose and is thus a good comparison. Considering that OOXML has only received about 5.5% of the review that comparable standards have undergone, reports about inconsistencies, contradictions and missing information are hardly surprising.[118]
- dfox 1y ago> The specifications document was so long that it would be difficult for anyone else to implement it properly. In contrast to ODF specification that is long, complex and written in such a terse way that it really does only specify what is a valid ODF file and not in any way what it means. Good luck implementing that without just copying whatever LibreOffice does.
- happymellon 1y agoI can't find it now, but I'm pretty sure that Pages was "corrupting" docx files because Apple followed the spec to a tee, and it turned out that Office didn't actually follow the spec that they had published.
- layer8 1y agoNot only is the standard overly complex, it’s also missing clarifications to the extent that it has to be considered underspecified. Moreover, MS Word in particular doesn’t precisely implement the OOXML standard (or any reasonable reading of it), but a buggy and subtly different variation of it. Complexity alone would just make it laborious to implement, but the underspecification and subtle deviations of Microsoft’s implementation makes it virtually impossible to achieve full compatibility.