I ask the national members of ISO to vote "NO" in the ballot of ISO DIS 29500 (Open OfficeXML or OOXML format) for the following reasons:

1. There is already a standard ISO26300 named Open Document Format (ODF): a dual standard adds costs, uncertainty and confusion to industry, government and citizens;
2. There is no provable implementation of the OOXML specification: Microsoft Office 2007 produces a special version of OOXML, not a file format which complies with the OOXML specification;
3. There is missing information from the specification document, for example how to do a autoSpaceLikeWord95 or useWord97LineBreakRules;
4. More the 10% of the examples mentioned in the proposed standard do not validate XML conformity;
5. There is no garantee that anybody can write a software that fully or partially implements the OOXML specification without being liable to patent damages or patent license fees by Microsoft;
6. This standard proposal conflicts with other ISO standards, such as ISO 8601 (Representation of dates and times), ISO 639 (Codes for the Representation of Names and Languages) or ISO/IEC 10118-3 (cryptographic hash);
7. There is a bug in the spreadsheet file format which forbids to enter any date before the year 1900: such bugs affects the OOXML specification as well as software versions such as Microsoft Excel 2000, XP, 2003 or 2007.
8. This standard proposal has not been created by bringing together the experience and expertise of all interested parties (such as the producers, sellers, buyers, users and regulators), but by Microsoft alone.

7echno7im wrote:Saying no to progress? Do you guys even know what you are signing? Is it just because it is MS? The open office xml format is a highly customizable easy to follow format that is based on where the market is going already, XML. Plus it's open and royalty free, something that MS bashers always complain about. How can you bash them when Sun, IBM, and OpenOffice all collaborated and decided not to include MS for the OpenDocument format when Microsoft has 94% of the office productivity share. Seems like they should have consulted with the one who has the highest stakes and sets the standard, as they are about to again.

7echno7im wrote:Saying no to progress? Do you guys even know what you are signing? Is it just because it is MS? The open office xml format is a highly customizable easy to follow format that is based on where the market is going already, XML. Plus it's open and royalty free, something that MS bashers always complain about. How can you bash them when Sun, IBM, and OpenOffice all collaborated and decided not to include MS for the OpenDocument format when Microsoft has 94% of the office productivity share. Seems like they should have consulted with the one who has the highest stakes and sets the standard, as they are about to again.

Specifications that say "clone this product," instead of explicitly stating what behavior is required, have no place in an international standard.

I am really tired of the people like you who say "you hate them just because they are Microsoft"

Microsoft controls the current PC software market and has a de facto monopoly on the desktop. This monopoly has not been achieved and is not being maintained by offering the user community better products than Microsoft's competitors can offer. On the contrary, Microsoft has earned a reputation for selling unreliable products, thrown together from third-party technology, full of bugs and security holes, and in need of constant maintenance and repair. Windows is a technically inferior operating system with a seriously flawed architecture, a weak security model and sloppy code, while other Microsoft applications are equally kludgey. New Microsoft products are essentially re-wrapped bits of old technology which offer no essential improvements over previous or competing products, and with a Return On Investment between small and zero. In spite of this Microsoft boasts about about being innovative and customer-driven.

Instead of making better software, Microsoft has focused on using brilliant but doubtful marketing tactics to force their products upon the user community in order to establish and maintain their monopoly. These methods include a tight integration of applications into the operating system, the bundling of applications with Windows to force competing application vendors out of the market, the mandatory bundling of Windows with new computer equipment, deliberate limitations in the compatibility of their own software with competing products, contracts that prohibit third parties to do business with anyone but Microsoft, and retaliatory practices against non-cooperating vendors. In addition to this, third-party developers are induced, through cheap or free development programs and the sabotaging of alternatives, to develop applications based upon proprietary methods of interfacing with the operating system. This results in third-party applications that are virtually non-portable, which in turn locks both developers and users into the MS-Windows platform.

These methods only serve to further inflate Microsoft's already obscene profit margins, at the price of the interests of the user community, the IT market and the field of computer technology as a whole.

MS-Windows could have been a new start, but (mainly for strategic and marketing reasons) it wasn't. It tightly clung to the mistakes of the past, being based upon the underlying MS-DOS architecture for basic OS functions such as file system access. It added a simple cooperative multitasker to MS-DOS, in a manner strangely like that of DesqView (a multitasker for DOS that had been available from Quarterdeck for years). It also sported a GUI that was so close to the one used by Apple that it kept lawyers occupied for over half a decade. But as far as innovation was concerned, that was it.

Initial versions of Windows were very bad, but Microsoft kept promising that a better product would come out Real Soon Now, still as part of their joint OS/2 efforts with IBM. But then they suddenly turned their backs on OS/2. They cried "innovation" and went back to DOS in spite of earlier having admitted it to be obsolete. Then they went and dropped out of the collaboration with IBM entirely, taking with them a lot of IBM technology that had ended up in Windows 3, which they now suddenly positioned as the operating system of the future. They never mentioned their earlier promises about OS/2 again.

(...)

Microsoft already sold applications for the Apple Macintosh. This gave them a good look under the hood of Apple's operating system software, and enabled them to muscle Apple into granting them a license for portions of the MacUI. (They threatened to withdraw all Mac applications, unless Apple would grant them a license to use MacUI code to port Macintosh apps to the PC.) They then raided MacUI for extra ideas. The remaining few bits (e.g. the font technology they later called TrueType) they bought, occasionally bartering vaporware that later failed to materialize. They also threw in a random collection of small applications, completely unrelated to an operating system (e.g. Paintbrush) which they had bought from various sources to flesh things out a bit. The resulting mixed bag of bits and pieces was massaged into an end product and released as Windows 3.0.

It was not too difficult for Microsoft to adapt the Apple versions of Word and Excel to run on Windows 3. There is some indication that Windows was adapted to Word and Excel as much as Word and Excel were adapted to Windows. By the time Windows 3.0 hit the market, competing application developers had already put their R&D money into OS/2 versions of their products, on the assumption that OS/2 would be delivered as promised by the IBM/Microsoft partnership. And now OS/2 did not materialize. But a blown R&D budget was only half the problem. Even if most of the application manufacturers had been wealthy enough to fund two separate development efforts to upgrade their DOS products, there was not enough time to do the Windows version before Windows' projected release date. So Microsoft shipped both an OS and an application suite, several months before their competitors had a chance to catch up with Microsoft's last-moment switch to Windows.

And that was that. All those who had expected to sail with the IBM/Microsoft alliance missed the boat, when Microsoft suddenly and deliberately decided to cast off earlier and in another direction than originally promised. Most of the independent application vendors never recovered.

The Windows 95 architecture was merely a continuation of Microsoft's uninnovative strategy. When Windows 95 was released no less than three years later (Windows 93 was planned but never made it) it still turned out to be a disappointing rehashed DOS-based product. It still ran on top of DOS as an application-level shell, although DOS and Windows were now installed from a single bundle rather than as separate products. Basically Windows 95 was nothing but plain old Windows 3.x with a new GUI and a souped-up memory manager, and the formerly separate DOS code integrated in the bundle. This did not stop Microsoft from marketing it as a completely new 32-bit OS, which of course it wasn't. Granted, portions of the code were 32-bit, but there was still a lot of 16-bit code running under the hood, and memory protection was partially functional at best. Windows 95 and its successors still relied heavily on obsolete DOS code. Windows 98 (Windows '97 was planned but again never made it) was not a significant improvement in this respect either. And Windows ME (ME stands for Millennium Edition) is just more of the same tired old stuff. It's still DOS-based, although Microsoft has gone to great pains to hide that fact, through many cosmetic changes and the bundling of application software with the OS. Basically there's nothing new to the whole Windows 95/98/ME product line; the design flaws from previous Windows versions are still present, and many new flaws have been introduced. When you get right down to it, Windows ME isn't much more than the repackaged Windows 3.x descendant that Windows 95 was, full of design flaws and based upon technology that has been obsolete for decades, with a lot of extra bells and whistles thrown in to confuse the issue.

(...)

Windows NT finally appeared to be a step in the right direction. At least the NT product line (which includes Windows 2000 and Windows XP) is the better one. 'NT' stands for 'New Technology', presumably because Windows NT is one of the few products in the history of Microsoft that they didn't buy outright. Instead they hired David Cutler, who had played an important role in the development of VAX VMS at Digital. (VMS was a successful and innovative industrial OS in its days, and Digital had been working on it since the 1970's.) Cutler took some 20 former Digital employees with him, and he and his team began the development of NT. The project eventually involved hundreds of other coders and testers, but Cutler and his core team of VMS engineers provided most of the know-how that went into NT's kernel code.

As a result, many design principles found in the VMS kernel ended up in Windows NT. (The number and splitting of priority levels in the scheduler, the use of demand-paged virtual memory and the layered driver model are only a few examples of many, many similarities.) The first version of VMS was released in 1977. Without trivializing the efforts of Cutler and his team (they did a lot of work on the project) one has to wonder what Microsoft really means with "New Technology". To illustrate, in a little known out-of-court settlement Microsoft paid Digital Equipment $150 million in compensation for using portions of an old Digital OS in Windows NT.

(...)

Cutler's team had to operate within Microsoft's additional design restrictions, and the result was a tradeoff. Cutler took a number of design principles from VMS, which was good. They expanded on that, so in a way NT can be said to contain at least some "New Technology" and perhaps Cutler's work even represented (dare I say it?) some innovation, in that it brought robust design priciples to the IBM PC platform. Had that been all, the end result could have been a good, efficient and robust OS. But Gates needed a vehicle that would further Microsoft's marketing strategies, rather than a robust OS. And of course much of the eventual coding on NT was done by Microsoft engineers, so in the end the quality of NT's final code wasn't even in the same league as VMS.

VMS was an industrial-strength operating system with native clustering, but NT was to be a single-user desktop operating system. Account and data management were rudimentary; the user home directory resided on the workstation's local harddisk, under the subdirectory that held the bulk of the operating system code. Applications and user settings were system-based rather than account-based. Separation between OS code, user settings, application code and configuration data became all but impossible; application and GUI settings were stored along with vital operating system information in an insecure central registry that was also system-based. Therefore network-based user accounts could only be implemented with complex and cumbersome workarounds. One of the biggest design mistakes in the history of Windows (the design of the DLL subsystem) was perpetuated, and networking was initially based on the hopelessly inadequate NetBEUI protocol. Even though NT followed a peer-to-peer networking model, a separate "NT Server" version was shipped. (NT Server contained exactly the same code as NT Workstation, with a few additions that amount to only a fraction of the product's total code set.) Initially there had been intentions of portability to non-Intel hardware, the incorporation of a Hardware Abstraction Layer, and versions of Windows NT on Digital and other platforms, but as the market became more and more monolithic these good intentions fell by the wayside.

(...)

XP is the next version of the Windows NT/2000 product line, but is marketed as a replacement for Window 9x/ME. It sports a seriously dumbed-down user interface (a toy box that comes close to being insulting, apparently aimed at users aged 1 - 4 and technophobes who are scared off even by Macintosh desktops) and it has a Windows-2000 kernel under the hood. (There are a few slight upgrades to the kernel code, but nothing dramatic.) And of course there's a lot of additional application software bundled with it, expecially third-party multimedia products that MS bought and re-branded. XP's release coincides with the discontinuation of the 9x/ME line, as part of Microsoft's repositioning of their Windows product lines. As a result of this (admittedly clever) marketing trick, end users tend to compare XP with Windows 9x/ME and think of it as a new product, which is of course rather misleading. It's an overpriced point release of Windows 2000 and nothing more.

Design flaws common to all Windows versions

All versions of Windows share a number of structural design flaws. Application installation procedures, user errors and runaway applications may easily corrupt the operating system beyond repair, networking support is poorly implemented, inefficient code leads to sub-standard performance, and both scalability and manageability leave a lot to be desired. In fact, NT and its successors (or any version of Windows) are just not comparable to the functionality, robustness or performance that the UNIX community has been used to for decades. They may work well, or they may not. On one system Windows will run for weeks on end, on another it may crash quite frequently. I've attended trainings at a Microsoft Authorized Education Center, and I was told: "We are now going to install Windows on the servers. The installation will probably fail on one or two systems [They had ten identical systems in the classroom] but that always happens - we don't know why and neither does Microsoft." I repeat, this from a Microsoft Authorized Partner.

Be that as it may... Even without any installation problems or serious crashes (the kind that require restore operations or reinstallations) Windows doesn't do the job very well. Many users think it does, but they generally haven't experienced any alternatives. In fact Windows' unreliability has become commonplace and even proverbial; the dreaded blue screen has featured in cartoons, screen savers and on t-shirts, it has appeared at airports and on buildings, and there has even been a Star Trek episode in which a malfunctioning space ship had to be switched off and back on in order to get it going.

(...)

Soon the whole system locks up entirely or becomes all but unusable and has to be rebooted. In short, Windows' process management is as bad a joke as its memory protection and resource management are, and an operating system that may crash entirely when an application error occurs should not be sold as a serious multi-tasking environment.

Even more problems are caused by the limitations of Windows' DLL subsystem. A good multi-tasking and/or multi-user OS utilizes a principle called code sharing. Code sharing means that if an application is running n times at once, the code segment that contains the program code (which is called the static segment) is loaded into memory only once, to be used by n different processes which are therefore instances of the same application. Apparently Microsoft had heard about something called code sharing, but obviously didn't really understand the concept and the benefits, or they didn't bother with the whole idea. Whatever the reason, they went and used DLLs instead. DLL files contain Dynamic Link Libraries and are intended to contain libary functions only. Windows doesn't share the static (code) segment - if you run 10 instances of Word, the bulk of the code will be loaded into memory 10 times. Only a fraction of the code, e.g. library functions, has been moved to DLLs and may be shared.

The main problem with DLL support is that the OS keeps track of DLLs by name only. There is no adequate signature system to keep track of different DLL versions. In other words, Windows cannot see the difference between one WHATSIT.DLL and another DLL with the same name, although they may contain entirely different code. Once a DLL in the Windows directory has been overwritten by another one, there's no way back. Also, the order in which applications are started (and DLLs are loaded) determines which DLL will become active, and how the system will eventually crash. There is no distinction between different versions of the same DLL, or between DLLs that come with Windows and those that come with application software. An application may put its own DLLs in the same directory as the Windows DLLs during installation, and may overwrite DLLs by the same name if they exist.

7echno7im wrote:Back up bud, it was a question, not a statement.

Again, who is to blame?

Do my homework? I obvioulsy have if I have many reasons to stand behind them.

I am just saying the market/the world has chosen their standard many times over, for office productivity and for desktop and server os, the market has chosen Microsoft for many of their quality products.

Just as the world has chosen the best search engine, Google.

I asked questions, not made statements, to try and understand how this is not a good thing and a win-win situation for the market, end users, and office productivity in general. And for you to thorm me into a "category" is quite ignorant too.

I live by and support "software that works." Some times Microsoft fills that gap for me, some times it is another vendor. I don' throw people in categories as "hate them just because they are MS", scroll up, read up, and slow down bud...

7echno7im wrote:It's not even worth the keystrokes. Only time will tell. We shall see what happens. 94% of the market share is pretty hard to argue with.

7echno7im wrote:94% of the market share is pretty hard to argue with.

7echno7im wrote:I am not saying anyone is right, I am giving up. You guys' minds are set. The original post was about signing a petition not to allow MS to publish their OOXML as a standard, not MS' business practices thru the times. I asked a few questions (with a little spin I admit) as to why not sign it for the sake of OOXML.

7echno7im wrote:I simply think that MS has provided my company (2600 Widnows PCs, 560 Widnows notebooks, 280 Windows servers) with an excellent centrally managed soltuion (Active Directory/Group Policy, SMS, Exchange, OWA, Project Server, RIS, WSUS, SQL, DNS, DHCP, WINS, etc...)

7echno7im wrote:Few working problems? heh. I wouldn't promote something if it was a management nightmare, that's my job ya know. If you ever support thousands of systems in a corporate critical environment, you may appreciate MS a little more. Maybe that's our differece. Centrally managing 1000's of machines.