Fear! That should work!

So, after Doug voluntarily excused himself from TC4 [as we did not 'throw him out' as he claims], and after I gave my presentation on the BRM, and after Ditesh gave his technical evaluation of the resolutions, the TC4 Chair opened the meeting to the floor. Mr Cheong Yuk Wai, from IASA Malaysia, volunteered. We expected him to delve into the technical matters which Microsoft should have braindumped him.

Instead, we got a rant.

He started off saying that back in the old days of e-commerce, he was in discussion with the board of major banks trying to work out the best way to do internet transactions. The Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) payment method was decided to be the best method, which protects both Banks and Merchants. It failed miserably. He didn''t elaborate why, but I'll answer that later.

The issue, was that SET was designed by people in the boardroom without the proper input of the people that mattered; the Customers. I tried to find a link to our discussion here, but the next point was that "That is why we shouldn't just have one standard as we may have made a wrong choice" ... in reference to ISO 26300 (ODF) I'd assume. He did after all have the same preamble last year when he tried to present the case for TC4 not to send contradiction comments to ISO. After a year and a bit of think about this, I still do not see the link. Ho hum.

Anyway, after that, he demonstrated his Google skillz. Or so we thought. In a snazzy pre-recorded vidcast, Google was brought up, and searched for "patrick odf". The first entry of course was Patrick Durusau's plead to adopt OOXML as an ISO standard in his open letter entitled "The Importance On Being Heard". Not sure why a simple URL to the file wouldn't have sufficed.

Now Mr Cheong said that Mr Patrick Durusau was the ODF Author, Ditesh interjected and said that that was not accurate. He is the ODF Editor. There is a big difference being and author and an editor. I also wanted to interject to say that Patrick was making his remarks in a personal capacity, and his official capacity should not have been brought into discussion, nor relevant. But Mr Intel, who was suppose to remain an 'Observer' decided to play the role of the Chair and asked me to remain silent to give Mr Cheong a chance to speak. I let that slide.

Mr Cheong then went on to highlight some sections of the open letter:

"That point of agreement is that everyone at the table was heard. That may not seem like a lot to an Oracle or IBM, but name the last time Microsoft was listening to everyone in a public and international forum? At a table where a standard for a future product was being debated by non-Microsoft groups?"

With this Mr Cheong said, and I have to paraphrase, because I too am trying to grasp the logic: "See, here is our chance as Malaysia to be AT the table! So that we can contribute to the development of this format!"

[I digress here, but I think this paragraph is worth mentioning:

"... name the last time Microsoft was listening to everyone in a public and international forum? At a table where a standard for a future product was being debated by non-Microsoft groups?"

I love this subtle trick which Mr Durusau managed to get ALL the Microsofties to openly admit that Microsoft has the bad reputation of NEVER listening to the public in the development of their products. I mean All of them, in their zeal to reprint the Durusau letter, had to include this paragraph in their blogs and Press Releases, and it just made them admit that they have been all the time customer insensitive. Tee Hee]

Anyway, Mr Cheong troops on with his pre-recorded presentation:

"Reject DIS 29500? The cost of rejection is that ordinary users, governments, smaller interests, all lose a seat at the table where the next version of the Office standard is being written.

"Approve an admittedly rough DIS 29500? That gives all of us a seat at the table for the next Office standard. Granting that I wince at parts of DIS 29500, it is hard for me to argue with that rationale.

"Because approval of DIS 29500 insures an effective international and public forum whose members will be heard by Microsoft I recommend approval of DIS 29500 as an ISO standard."

So Mr Cheong pleaded to us, "Dont give up this chance for Malaysia to be heard. If we vote Disapprove, Malaysia will NEVER be on that table! We have already implemented OOXML in our products, and if its not standardised, the format will change!"

Oh Noes! Malaysia will be blacklisted! Microsoft will go dark again! We will never see the light in our documents ever! The world is going to end!

Yeah. Fear. Uncertainty. Nice try.

Fortunately it was time for me to add my dua sen. I properly requested permission to speak from the Chair: [This is what I intended to say, but how I said it, and what people perceived, could have been completely different]

I thanked Mr Cheong, for bringing up this important letter from Mr Patrick Durusau. His case just highlights the strange situation we are in today. If you know the background history of Mr Durusau, you will understand why he may have to write a letter like this.

You see, Mr Durusau is the Editor of ODF, but more importantly he is also the Chair of the US Technical Committee V1, which is equivalent to Malaysia's TC4 here. What is interesting, is that because of this OOXML issue, his committee has been stacked. Now it's OK for them in the US to stack their committees because that's how their system works, so they grew from a committee of 7 members before OOXML to 26 members after it started. Fortunately, in Malaysia, ISC-G  prevented this from happening at TC4.

[Here is a graph by Rob Weir which plots the "growth" of V1 just before the emergence of OOXML

quite spectacular, eh? ]

So in essence, V1 has been taken over by Microsofties, and Mr Durusau is in a tight situation. If he were to be negative towards OOXML, his stacked V1 will retaliate and bar the progress of his normal work: work on ODF 1.2.

The best and most logical option for Mr Durusau is of course to "agree" with his captors 'demands, and hopefuly they would be merciful later on. So its a strange political play which he has to act out.

Now, about the case about Microsoft retracting OOXML as an international standard is erroneous fear mongering. First of all, OOXML is already an international standard. Although less glamorous than ISO, it's stated as an international standard by Ecma International: Ecma 376. So your precious file format specifications will never go away.

Additionally, Microsoft HAS to standardise its file formats. In 2004 the European Union requested Microsoft to publish and standardise their file formats. So Microsoft does not have an option! Its just that this time, they need to do it properly instead of rushing it through the Fast Track process.

Malaysia as a 'P' Country in ISO, will always have a table in the development of OOXML, if Microsoft is sincere in its standards initiative.

 

With this, the Fear and Uncertainty issues raised by IASA has been addressed. OOXML will not go away, and we are merely requesting Microsoft to resubmit it in the normal ISO process for standardisation.

FUD-busted.

So, to tie the story up, it's quite a coincidence that Mr Cheong should bring up the story of SET, because 'back in the old days,' I too was embarking on e-Commerce as a Merchant. And this was when I was really young and inexperienced. Even though the SET proponents said that SET would be great for us, we rejected it completely. We as a Merchants, didn't like the idea of SET. The reason was, SET was troublesome to customers, and more importantly the responsibility of indemnification was transferred from Merchant to Customer. Meaning if there are any cases of fraud (oh no, that would never happen! It's all encrypted!) the Customer would have to pay for the transaction No Matter What!

As Merchants, we were willing to bear the risk of fraud cases. And we were NOT willing to mandate a system which forces the customer to bear all the responsibility. This system would drive them away by the droves, and kill ECommerce in Malaysia in its infancy.

So that was the case of SET, and how it ties in with OOXML, I don't really know, but Mr Cheong keeps bringing it up year after year. I guess one lesson I can derive from it is that big, bad, unintuitive, unfriendly, designed in the cathedral, customer insensitive, vendor driven initiatives which only protects its interests, are doomed to fail.

yk

BTW, the SET initiative was rammed through to deployment. The SET guys tried to outlaw SSL transactions on a government level. However, in the marketplace SET never went past the first 2 local banks on rollout. It died a quiet death. I rejoiced.

I wonder if OOXML will beat SET? Will we ever see a second office suit which implements OOXML as its native file format?

Comments

[Daniel Juliano]

It seems to me that one of the better arguments against fast tracking ooxml and a good explanation of why the ooxml spec is such a poor document is the intended longevity of standards. Which is to say, a standard should be supportable decades down the road.

Here's an example of a spec which is still widely in use and was drafted back in 1993:
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt

For the most part, HTML 1.0 (less than 100 pages in the spec) will render in most browsers - many different vendors there! - 15 years after the original spec was drawn up.

Or howabout ASCII (7 pages)?
http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/ISO-IR/001.pdf

Once again, many vendors have implemented ASCII document parsers, and I can still create and read ASCII documents 33 years after ISO approved the specification.

Will ooxml be able to say the same about support for their spec 10 years from now? Fully implemented by multiple vendors and full support for the original spec? I'd bet a year's salary that it won't.

[John Drinkwater]

Gareth, my general point was, if one is a Microsoft shop, you’re less likely to see the non-Microsoft activites on your doorstep.

The beauty of Jeff’s comment is that one would have to agree to his opinion to believe it, no? :)

For my country (UK), I can only mention Bristol Council as an ODF adopter, probably one of the smallest adoptions ever, but it’s a start. A press release mentioned they’ve found it troublesome to convince companies that it’s worth supporting it… bit chicken and egg at the moment.

As for the partners comment, I haven’t seen many IBM partners joining the ISO process so I would hope you can understand my skepticism. You seem to be speaking on behalf of DataWatch, on a Malaysian blog… you don’t find that queer?
[disclaimer: I’m completely independent, RSS subscribed here after an article by YK well over a year ago]

The most depressing thing about this standards debate: the only important thing is the standard. And from reading through it, it’s poor. Insanely poor as a standard.
Market adoption shouldn’t matter one jot in validating it.

I shant reply again, I’m sure the .My bloggers are finding the current influx a little strange :)

[Gareth Horton]

@John

I think you should read the following quote from Jeff Waugh, a great advocate for OSS.

"The open source movement needs to recognize that those with differing opinions or points of view are not enemies but merely people with whom the industry needs a better dialogue."

You mention that our customers are always going to be MS ones, well in terms of they run our software on Windows, yes.

But if they have mandated ODF, that is irrelevant, since I doubt they are all pure non-Windows environments, so they will require the production ODF on Windows machines.

I did find the ODF Alliance annual report.

It appears that most of these adopters do not specify what governments/agencies use internally, so that must be why we have had no communications from them. It would be unlikely for us to be involved in government to citizen documents.

We only have a handful of customers under these mandates at the moment anyway.

Answering the question on ODF adoption may be boring for you, but for us it is vital. If the demand is there, we need to ensure we can meet that need.

If customers aren't telling us, we need to have our finger on the pulse.

Here's something I get bored of repeating: We are also IBM Advanced Partners.

Gareth

[John Drinkwater]

Gareth,
When goverments update their Office software (those that use Microsoft products), they’ll be pushed into using OOXML by default.
Is that *adoption* of the format?
Do you think anyone has gone out of their way to adopt this new format?

I find it a little bothersome that Microsoft partners troll on blogs wrt this process, it’s unlikely you’ll see ODF requests because your customers are always going to be MS ones. The repeatitive “We see no demand” chant gets a little boring from the self-fulfillers. In the UK, BECTA (UK schools IT Agency) has requested ODF support, yet I don’t see Microsoft acknowledging that!

As for ODF mandation, try a Live! search. Repeatedly answering this question gets boring.

[Gareth Horton]

@Ed

They have already released an Open XML SDK, which we are using. I know that isn't an actual application, but I think they will filter through Open XML support in other products where it makes sense, such as the Dynamics products.

Which governments currently mandate ODF?

We have government customers around the world and have not been specifically asked by any of them to implement ODF support as yet.

It might be a case of these mandates being observed with the same vigilance as the smoking ban in France, I suppose ;)

Gareth

[Jeetje]

D'oh, I meant the original vote in September, not the BRM :sheepish grin:

Anyway, I think my point is still valid: if MS wasn't interested in sending comments to improve DIS29500 then, why would they be interested in improvements once it becomes an ISO standard? Who fed Mr Patrick Durusau the notion anyone would have a seat at the table, when MS specifically denied NBs that seat on the road to voting on the specification?

[Jeetje]

YK, as Mr Patrick Durusau choose to use the medium of an open letter instead of a blog I'm unable to entice him to evaluate his stance taken in "The Importance On Being Heard" in the light of the events that took place in the Netherlands leading up to the BRM: http://isoc.nl/michiel/nodecisiononOOXML.htm

I have a hard time connecting the dots between a vendor (MS) frustrating a 'No, with comments' vote up to the point the NB from the Netherlands was forced to cast an 'Abstain' in the BRM (hence the comments that rose out of months of evaluating not being fed into the BRM with the goal of improving the proposed standard) with the opinion of Mr Patrick Durusau that MS would be willing to let everyone participate in developing OOXML, were it to become an ISO standard.

Would you care to either bring this to his attention and ask whether those facts change his opinion or comment on this chain of events yourself?

Thanks in advance.

[Ed]

I feel fairly confident that there will never be another Microsoft application which even attempts to produce OOXML files. This is simply a ploy to get around various government's recent interest in open file formats. Even if the ploy works, before Microsoft's next major office version, most governments will have realized that OOXML is not the answer Microsoft claims it is, and they will be mandating ODF.

Further, I do not feel that "Microsoft" was listening at all at the BRM. There were representatives from Microsoft there, and those representatives listened. However, I don't believe the company ever had the slightest interest in learning from what those representatives heard.

If Microsoft had truly been listening, they would have heard the comments that there was not sufficient time at the BRM to cover what was needed, and they would have gotten the time extended. But extending the time doesn't serve Microsoft's purpose - they need an ISO format to counter ODF *now*, because it's eating their government lunches. The quality of whatever ISO format they get to counter ODF is not their concern. They just don't care.

[nksingh]

Thanks for the detailed reply. That certainly sounds a lot more reasonable than the blanket statement that the pro-OpenXML people have been pushing.

[Yoon Kit]

nksingh,

If you were to study the Ecma proposed dispositions which was intended to address the concerns of the countries, you will see a general pattern. Ecma will state "Agree," but then proceed to either disregard the concern, or propose a totally inefficient solution.

For example, for MY-0009, where we asked for ISO 639 country codes to be used instead of the string table, Ecma agreed, and then added in one more entry for ISO 639 usage.

This means that developers now still have to implement the 'legacy' string table, and then also implement the new (and proper) way of doing things, which is ISO 639 codes.

In the BRM, the Czechs, (see Resolution 4,) managed to come up with a wonderful resolution. From that string table, they mapped it from the 'binary' form, which was represented in a number, to the country and culture codes which will be encoded in XML.

Now this is a completely useful and realistic solution! Here we have a prime example of a 'binary' to XML mapping between the old and new encoding of data.

This is how ALL the string tables should look like, instead of Ecma's half hearted approach.

Now the work done by the Czechs is just a fraction of the remaining work needed, to translate all the String Tables from 'binary' to XML.

Malaysia submitted 6 concerns (which makes up 26% of our submissions) regarding these string tables, and only now, 1 has been sufficiently resolved at the BRM.

This is why the Ecma's responses, and the time limit at the BRM does not bode well in our confidence of the quality of the spec at this point in time.

Additionally, the remaining 5 concerns were not addressed by Ecma.

We suspect, (and it has been proven) that the quality of Ecma's proposed dispositions are just as low as Malaysia has experienced for other countries.

That is why our justification to default "Disapprove" all the dispositions is a more responsible decision than to blindly "Approve" the remaining dispositions which were not heard at the BRM.

Voting "Abstain" would have the same effect as "Approve" as well, because of the 6-8 voting bloc which evidently approved all of the resolutions.

I hope that clarifies our decision, and if you need any more information, please don't hesitate to ask!

The forum is right here.

yk.

[nksingh]

Hi Yoon Kit,

Would you kindly explain the logic of Malaysia's BRM delegation voting against some ECMA responses that accepted its suggestions? Is this story entirely a fabrication of the pro-OOXML side, or did it really happen?