5 ms·

Microsoft is making it really hard to continue to blatantly dislike them.

by jameskilton 12y ago

sliverstorm 12y ago
Just tell people you are certain they are "up to something", perhaps trying to gain our trust and catch us napping.
- smacktoward 12y ago
  They are up to something, namely trying to become relevant again. When you rule the world, you can get away with all sorts of obnoxious things. When you don't, it's either play nice or go home.
Mikeb85 12y ago
I'm beginning to like some parts of Microsoft. Babylon.js and TypeScript are both pretty cool projects, and their work on Haskell, F# and the new .NET compiler is all very cool.
higherpurpose 12y ago
Really? I find it pretty easy, especially after all the "team play" revelations they've been having with NSA. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c... http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/13/nsa-docs-detail-efforts-to-collect-data-from-microsofts-skype-skydrive-and-outlook-com/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/13/nsa-docs-detail-efforts-to-... Not to mention that pushing Metro to my desktop didn't exactly win them brownie points with me, nor did being essentially the biggest patent troll around by asserting 300 patents against an open source project, and then helping Oracle in the ruling that decided API's are copyrightable.
yuhong 12y ago
I wrote a wishlist for Satya sometimes ago on Hal Berenson's blog (I even suggested MS withdraw the OOXML standard while not changing the format itself): http://hal2020.com/2014/03/03/satya-shuffles-his-leadership/#comment-14856 http://hal2020.com/2014/03/03/satya-shuffles-his-leadership/...
bachmeier 12y ago
I agree, but not on the basis of this. "Note: for this first release, you must have some version of Visual Studio installed." Until that changes, it's just another product in the Microsoft ecosystem.
- cwyers 12y ago
  Really? Because you can fix that. You can distribute those fixes. You can submit those fixes for Microsoft to consider making an official part of the release. Or you could fork it, fix it, and relicense your fork under the GPL.
  - hrktb 12y ago
    I understand the order of magnitude is different, but until now the huge work made on OpenOffice/LibreOffice was on the same principle as what your are saying: "if MS doesn't do it, we'll make it ourself". So, saying you can have it as great as you want as long as your are willing to commit to it isn't really informative. Also I might be tainted by the years and years of Microsoft screwing with Office, but I'd wait until there is at least one or two serious players validate this project as fully working at scale until I'd give them the full credits.
pling 12y ago
Spend some time with VSTO on the client and the OOXML SDK on the server and I assure you that you'll still want to kill yourself. I just spent three months doing this and it was akin to knawing your own limbs off. The Office VSTO API is poorly designed, a mishmash of shims that barely work and are impossible to debug. The documentation is awful and their support teams don't even know how to fix problems. It's also absolutely painful making something work on Office 2097, 2010 and 2013. Its bad news when after a week you start wrapping all entry points to stop managed exceptions crashing office. Open sourcing stuff doesn't make it magically entirely pain free nor does it make a quality product. This isn't a quality product and neither is the thing that generates the documents you will need to parse (and clean all the incongruous crap) from.
- toyg 12y ago
  I know it's just a typo, but I hope our children will never have to suffer "Office 2097"...
  - pling 12y ago
    Well spotted. I'll leave it in for posterity :) However I expect our Surface 2095 will run Office 2097 and it'll still have VBA jammed in due to some legacy clients moaning that they can't run their financial app in it any more :)
    - jameshart 12y ago
      If it survives the VBA-pocalypse in 2030, that is, because it interprets dates with two digit years ending in '/30' - '/99' as referring to 1930-1999...
      - pling 12y ago
        Ah yes I'd forgotten about that. Good point!
    - peterkelly 12y ago
      And the iOS 39 version of Office will still be ahead of the Surface version
shmerl 12y ago
Not really. There was no need in OOXML to begin with. Especially in the ISO mess that MS created. It was born in the old MS, which was heavily into standards hijacking and vendor lock in. So it remained the child of that idea. Current day MS is still strongly dominated by the lock-in mentality. So this change is welcome, but they have a really long way to go to repair all the damage they caused and gain some trust.

Microsoft is making it really hard to continue to blatantly dislike them.

sliverstorm 12y ago

Just tell people you are certain they are "up to something", perhaps trying to gain our trust and catch us napping.

smacktoward 12y ago
They are up to something, namely trying to become relevant again. When you rule the world, you can get away with all sorts of obnoxious things. When you don't, it's either play nice or go home.

Mikeb85 12y ago

I'm beginning to like some parts of Microsoft. Babylon.js and TypeScript are both pretty cool projects, and their work on Haskell, F# and the new .NET compiler is all very cool.

higherpurpose 12y ago

Really? I find it pretty easy, especially after all the "team play" revelations they've been having with NSA. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c... http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/13/nsa-docs-detail-efforts-to-collect-data-from-microsofts-skype-skydrive-and-outlook-com/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/13/nsa-docs-detail-efforts-to-... Not to mention that pushing Metro to my desktop didn't exactly win them brownie points with me, nor did being essentially the biggest patent troll around by asserting 300 patents against an open source project, and then helping Oracle in the ruling that decided API's are copyrightable.

yuhong 12y ago

I wrote a wishlist for Satya sometimes ago on Hal Berenson's blog (I even suggested MS withdraw the OOXML standard while not changing the format itself): http://hal2020.com/2014/03/03/satya-shuffles-his-leadership/#comment-14856 http://hal2020.com/2014/03/03/satya-shuffles-his-leadership/...

bachmeier 12y ago

I agree, but not on the basis of this. "Note: for this first release, you must have some version of Visual Studio installed." Until that changes, it's just another product in the Microsoft ecosystem.

cwyers 12y ago
Really? Because you can fix that. You can distribute those fixes. You can submit those fixes for Microsoft to consider making an official part of the release. Or you could fork it, fix it, and relicense your fork under the GPL.
- hrktb 12y ago
  I understand the order of magnitude is different, but until now the huge work made on OpenOffice/LibreOffice was on the same principle as what your are saying: "if MS doesn't do it, we'll make it ourself". So, saying you can have it as great as you want as long as your are willing to commit to it isn't really informative. Also I might be tainted by the years and years of Microsoft screwing with Office, but I'd wait until there is at least one or two serious players validate this project as fully working at scale until I'd give them the full credits.

pling 12y ago

Spend some time with VSTO on the client and the OOXML SDK on the server and I assure you that you'll still want to kill yourself. I just spent three months doing this and it was akin to knawing your own limbs off. The Office VSTO API is poorly designed, a mishmash of shims that barely work and are impossible to debug. The documentation is awful and their support teams don't even know how to fix problems. It's also absolutely painful making something work on Office 2097, 2010 and 2013. Its bad news when after a week you start wrapping all entry points to stop managed exceptions crashing office. Open sourcing stuff doesn't make it magically entirely pain free nor does it make a quality product. This isn't a quality product and neither is the thing that generates the documents you will need to parse (and clean all the incongruous crap) from.

toyg 12y ago
I know it's just a typo, but I hope our children will never have to suffer "Office 2097"...
- pling 12y ago
  Well spotted. I'll leave it in for posterity :) However I expect our Surface 2095 will run Office 2097 and it'll still have VBA jammed in due to some legacy clients moaning that they can't run their financial app in it any more :)
  - jameshart 12y ago
    If it survives the VBA-pocalypse in 2030, that is, because it interprets dates with two digit years ending in '/30' - '/99' as referring to 1930-1999...
    - pling 12y ago
      Ah yes I'd forgotten about that. Good point!
  - peterkelly 12y ago
    And the iOS 39 version of Office will still be ahead of the Surface version

shmerl 12y ago

Not really. There was no need in OOXML to begin with. Especially in the ISO mess that MS created. It was born in the old MS, which was heavily into standards hijacking and vendor lock in. So it remained the child of that idea. Current day MS is still strongly dominated by the lock-in mentality. So this change is welcome, but they have a really long way to go to repair all the damage they caused and gain some trust.