The Dead Microsoft Sketch

The first time I was really impressed by Microsoft was back in the 1980s. I was being given a private demonstration of a hot new program for the Macintosh. I was struck not just by the beta's cool new graphical interface - a clear advance on existing DOS programs like 1-2-3 - but also by the infectious enthusiasm of the Microsoftie showing me around the beta. The program, as you've probably guessed, was Excel; the person doing the demo was Bill Gates.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Live Documents and Let Live Documents

It's not really clear whether we need yet another online office suite, but at least Live Documents seems to have understood the importance of freeing users from dependence on a certain offline one:

"From a technology and utility perspective, Live Documents offers two valuable improvements - firstly, it break's Microsoft's proprietary format lock-in and builds a bridge with other document standards such as Open Office and secondly, our solution matches features found only in the latest version of Office (Office 2007) such as macros, table styles and databar conditional formatting in Excel 2007 and live preview of changes in PowerPoint 2007. Thus, Live Documents lets consumers and businesses to derive the benefits of Office 2007 without having to upgrade," said Adarsh Kini, Chief Technology Officer, InstaColl.

Decoupling Software and Standards

As you may have noticed, there is a big bust-up over office file formats going on at the moment. On the one hand, we have ODF, which is a completely open, vendor-independent standard that is supported by multiple programs, and on the other, we have Microsoft's OOXML, which is a vendor-dependent standard of sorts, unlikely to be fully implemented by anyone other than Microsoft.

The only reason this debate is taking place is because of the huge installed base of Microsoft Office, which is naturally biased towards OOXML. But with the release of Sun's ODF Plug in 1.0 for Microsoft Office, things have changed:

The Sun ODF Plug in for Microsoft Office gives users of Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint the ability to read, edit and save to the ISO-standard Open Document Format. The ODF Plug in is available as a free download from the Sun Download Center (SDLC). Download the ODF Plug in.

The Plug in is easy to setup and use, the conversion happens transparently and the additional memory footprint is minimal. Microsoft Office users now can have seamless two-way conversion of Microsoft Office documents to and from Open Document. The ODF Plug in runs on Microsoft Windows and is available in English. More language support will be available in later releases.

This is important, because it decouples the file format from the program. Now anyone - including Microsoft Office users - can opt for a truly open format, not one that aspires to this condition.

We can only hope that the UK's National Archives, making an extraordinary amount of noise about solving a problem largely of Microsoft's making, will use the new plug-in to convert files stored in proprietary formats into the safest long-term solution - ODF.

Why Collaboration, Why Now?

A good point:

Word, Excel, Powerpoint were all about making me, as a worker at my desk, able to create more work per unit of time. But, I think we've eeked out the last bit of individual productivity gain at this stage. I mean, does the new ribbon on MS Word make me more productive as an individual? Probably not. It's a great interface, but it's unlikely that there is a massive gain in personal productivity.

This next wave that we're in is about productivity gains achieved NOT by making the individual more productive, but by making groups more productive. The massive penetration of email means that we're in touch with one another like never before and dependent on teams like never before. That means that there is a huge opportunity for productivity gains through more effective collaboration.

- Joe Kraus, co-founder of Excite and JotSpot, now at Google.

Time Jumps When Microsoft Snaps Its Fingers

I missed this the first time around:

So, for most of the world, the Gregorian calendar has been the law for 250-425 years. That's a well-established standard by anyone's definition. Who would possibly ignore it or get it wrong at this point?

If you guessed “Microsoft”, you may advance to the head of the class.

Datetimes in Excel are represented as date serial numbers, where dates are counted from an origin, sometimes called an epoch, of January 1st, 1900. The problem is that from the earliest implementations Excel got it wrong. It thinks that 1900 was a leap year, when clearly it isn't, under Gregorian rules since it is not divisible by 400. This error causes functions like the WEEKDAY() spreadsheet function to return incorrect values in some cases.

Here are Rob's updated thoughts on the subject, and how the problem is being propagated by Microsoft's rival to ODF, OOXML.

Plugging Away at ODF Plug-ins

According to this article, there are plenty of people beavering away on plug-ins for Microsoft Office to allow users to open and save files in the ODF format. But the interesting bit is this comment from Gary Edwards, one of the top people in the ODF world:

other developers, such as Gary Edwards, head of the OpenDocument Foundation, said he demonstrated his plug-ins to officials last week.

"They've been incredibly systematic, throwing hard stuff at us," he said, noting that his plug-in enables Microsoft Office to open a 16,000-row spreadsheet saved in the ODF format in 31 seconds. Opening the spreadsheet in Excel takes 43 seconds, he said.

Despite Microsoft's concerns that the rise of ODF could prove problematic for Office in the marketplace, Edwards said Microsoft was very helpful with his development efforts. Microsoft has "the best third-party developer model," he said. "They gave us what we needed, and it works beautifully."

Hm: I wonder what Microsoft are up to here? Could it be that they are resigned to ODF compatibility becoming a common requirement, and therefore accept the need to support it?