07.01.09

Rob Weir Complains About Microsoft’s Manipulation of Wikipedia

Posted in FUD, Formats, IBM, Microsoft, OpenDocument, Wikipedia at 3:56 am by Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Microsoft carries on smearing ODF in public while pretending to support it

Microsoft is still changing ODF’s history and daemonising ODF using Wikipedia. We wrote about that in:

• Microsoft Starts Attacking the ODF Alliance, Sends Paid Wikipedia Editors to ODF Article (Updated)
• OOXML BRM Convenor (Alex Brown) Joins the Pro-Microsoft Wikipedia Spinners
• Microsoft Folks Rewrite ODF’s History and Build Anti-ODF Social Network
• Fraunhofer Again Lobbies for Microsoft Lock-in
• Is Microsoft’s AstroTurf Against ODF Still On?
• Microsoft Windows Discriminates Against ODF, FSF Denounces Microsoft for ODF Abuse
• Microsoft Agents from Waggener Edstrom Airbrush Wikipedia, Glorify Paymaster
• Microsoft Seeks Experts to Corrupt Wikipedia Information on Open XML

Rob Weir has already complained about this. It is part of Microsoft’s ongoing attack on ODF [1, 2] — an attack which it is defending by buying journalists lunch (now confirmed to us by the journalist) so that is can carry on breaking ODF interoperability [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] without public scrutiny.

Weir has just published another rant about Wikipedia, so obviously he keeps track of the continued manipulation by Microsoft — one that we too are seeing because all edits are visible.

I have a mental model of how Wikipedia works and behaves. This may not reflect reality, but it is how I, as an end-user, expect Wikipedia to behave. I think these are reasonable expectations regarding things like standards of proof and balance and that if the real Wikipedia differs substantially from these expectations, then we have a problem.

[...]

Does anyone know whether the above statements have any basis in the aspirations or actual practice of Wikipedia editors and admins? Sadly, my recent reading of some articles suggests that these reasonable expectations are routinely flouted and bear little resemblance to reality.

It’s obvious what Microsoft must be thinking.

“All those haters…”

But to characterise opposition as “anti-Microsoft” is like describing the police as “anti-criminals” and thus “irrational haters”. Microsoft’s behaviour speaks for itself. █

“Their documents display a clear intent to monopolize, to prevent any competition from springing up. And they have used a variety of restrictive practices to prevent that kind of competition.”

–Judge Robert Bork, former US Supreme Court nominee (on Microsoft)

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06.30.09

Microsoft’s Dublin DC Could be Indicative of the Notorious Tax Evasion Conspiracy

Posted in Deception, Europe, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, Search at 4:02 am by Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Ireland receives another favour for offering a tax haven to Microsoft?

LAST WEEK we wrote about how Microsoft rewards its tax haven, which is Ireland. This tax evasion in Ireland is a subject that we covered a long time ago and Microsoft’s special relationship with Ireland is only to be expected. Microsoft uses Irish commissioners to push for software patents into Europe, for example [1, 2, 3, 4]. Additionally, Microsoft hires more people in Ireland despite the fact that the company's global workforce shrinks rapidly. Now it is building a whole datacentre in Dublin.

Microsoft’s Dublin facility on the 19-acre site in Grange Castle Business Park currently has about 303,000 square feet of data center floor, with 5.4 MW of power supplied to it. Its power supply will be expandable up to 22.2 MW, as the facility scales up.

Microsoft is said to have pulled similar tricks in Norway, namely rewarding Norway with a datacentre after the country had made a mockery of the OOXML vote. █

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06.29.09

Microsoft’s ODF Lunch Paid Off

Posted in Deception, FUD, Interoperability, Microsoft, Novell, OpenDocument at 5:00 pm by Roy Schestowitz

Summary: ODF news which is more or less organised and some other picks from the news

A COUPLE of days ago we wrote about lunch that Microsoft was having with at least one journalist, to whom Microsoft lied. It is hardly surprising that this journalist has just published an article commending Microsoft and reciting the same deception he was spoon-fed. It is a familiar sight.

Interestingly enough, the reporter also ended up talking to Laura DiDio, whom we last wrote about right here. For years she has been slamming Microsoft’s competitors and parroting Microsoft/SCO. She was paid by Microsoft to do this inside the Yankee Group [1, 2], part of that Microsoft mill.

Anyway, the reporter, whose article might be verbally ghostwritten by Microsoft, is also using Novell to embellish Microsoft’s image. Here is just a portion from it:

Paoli also highlighted Microsoft’s work with Novell, including Microsoft Operations Manger 2007 Cross Platform Extensions for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server; sponsoring an open-source Eclipse plug-in for Silverlight development; and nurturing the Mono Silverlight plug-in for Linux.

Microsoft’s motivation for working on these projects is twofold: It wants to be more customer friendly, and it needs to compete in new markets, said Laura DiDio, founder of Information Technology Intelligence Corp., a Boston-based consultancy and research firm.

Microsoft has been “steadily trying to learn from its mistakes” and is trying to “turn the lemons into lemonade” with better licensing, security and interoperability, she said. The company is also entering into new markets that have higher profit margins to spur its growth—beyond its operating system and Office businesses, she added.

So, after lunch with Microsoft (and lies from Microsoft employees) he promotes the Microsoft party line. Why is nobody surprised? And yes, that’s DiDio right there who offers ‘independent’ perspective. Classic!

“[T]hat’s DiDio right there who offers ‘independent’ perspective.”One person in Twitter adds that “Microsofties should really stop trying to slant #Wikipedia articles to smear #ODF. It’s not like we can’t see the page history.”

hAl has been very busy at Wikipedia today, adding anti-ODF contents (about 12 more edits) to Wikipedia’s article on ODF. Here are just two examples among many others. Of course he is also linking to the blogs of Microsoft employees, keeping it where it’s warm and showing how much Microsoft really hates ODF, whose interoperability it knowingly subverts [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. One of our readers writes to say: “I am reminded in this piece by the efforts that Microsoft has gone to in preventing interoperability even with interoperability specifications like ODBC.”

The person in Twitter writes: “If everyone and their dog can properly support #ODF except #Microsoft, then that’s likely either incompetence or malice on their part.”

Microsoft is of course not interested in interoperability. It never was. It is not good (for shareholders) to allow people to choose office suites based on technical merits, as opposed to pure lock-in and preconceptions. That’s where Microsoft’s FUD and perception management [1, 2] helps, as whisper campaigns surely illustrate. Microsoft Office remains one of the few Microsoft products that are really profitable and that too is at great risk as the following new article suggests:

For now, according to the BW article, Microsoft will continue to deliver its core Office package as server-based package while offering a free neutered online version. Some may embrace the free one because they are dealing with a known commodity, but many have likely switched already to another vendor and won’t give it a look. Microsoft could go all the way here and offer a tiered online pricing model and compete directly with Google at something it does well, but it’s afraid of costs spiraling out of control and killing their cash cow.

Moving again to more positive news, Rob Weir concludes the ODF Plugfest.

We had an ODF Plugfest last week in the Hague. Although we’ve had interoperability workshops and camps before that attracted a handful of vendors, this was the first one that had nearly universal participation from ODF vendors. I’m not going to recap the details of the plugfest. Others have done that already. But I will share with you some of my conclusions, based on long discussions with other participants, from whose insights I have greatly benefited.

In the KDE camp, another important milestone for KOffice 2 is being reached and marked.

Today, exactly one month since the release of KOffice 2.0.0, the KOffice team releases the first bugfix release in the 2.0 series. This release contains no new features but lots of bugfixes for almost all of the components in KOffice 2.0. We are planning at least two more bugfix releases of 2.0 before starting the 2.1 series in October this year.

The OpenOffice.org project has this important post about federating its community.

Nevertheless, one still needs the political infrastructure in order to constitute a Foss community that has any chance of sustaining itself. Mere spirit won’t do it in the long run. This means that there must be in place the mechanisms by which any member of the project can communicate to another and freely discuss project matters with the expectation that discussions have effect and are not just politely ignored. As well, it is generally important, though I no longer think it requisite, that members have a sense of “ownership” in the community or at least in what they are doing. It’s a feature more important in some areas than others, and as Foss continues to move away from its origins in the West and find welcome homes in Asia and Africa and India, that model becomes less essential.
All the same, this is just another way of saying that what global participatory communities need is a structure of governance that can accommodate difference within the community itself. Governance means here the guidelines by which authority is coordinated. Given the global nature of, especially, large Foss projects, or even smaller ones (the Internet knows now boundaries), flexibility is crucial―but so are guidelines that ensure impartiality and nullify arbitrariness.

Lastly, having covered Free software that is honestly compatible with ODF, here is another piece of software called Oxygen XML Editor. It has a new release which the ODF aggregator seems to endorse. █

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06.27.09

Lunch with Microsoft to Talk About ODF, Which it is Attacking

Posted in Deception, FUD, Microsoft, OpenDocument, Standard at 3:49 am by Roy Schestowitz

Summary: ODF — just like Java — has Microsoft getting close to it only to break it

Microsoft, an ODF Slugfest

NOT much has changed since Microsoft bought dinner for ODF panels and even flew over journalists to nice places where they got brainwashed against ODF and in favour of OOXML. In general, this practice of pampering the press to control news coverage is particularly important when the products in question are simply terrible [1, 2]. Sponsorships, beer and bribes of some form are also common and those with impact are being stalked by Microsoft. It is part of its strategy to even keep dossiers on journalists.

It is with all that in mind that we found curious the following Microsoft encounter with David Worthington from the SD Times. He was having lunch with Microsoft and they told him lies. For example:

Paoli indirectly responded to recent criticism that Microsoft was engaged in a FUD campaign against ODF (I forgot what the criticism was exactly) by pointing out that Office 2007 adds support for the format, and that Microsoft has included ODF in its developers’ tooling and plug fests.

This is a lie. Microsoft has been engaging in FUD against ODF all along [1, 2]. The examples are well documented and it continues to this date. Microsoft perhaps hopes that by having lunch with journalists it can rewrite history and make people less aware of its real motives.

Microsoft’s editing of the Wikipedia article on ODF has not quite ended yet. Here is where one can find Alex Brown and Albert (HAl) telling people what to think about ODF. Also see:

• Microsoft Starts Attacking the ODF Alliance, Sends Paid Wikipedia Editors to ODF Article (Updated)
• OOXML BRM Convenor (Alex Brown) Joins the Pro-Microsoft Wikipedia Spinners
• Microsoft Folks Rewrite ODF’s History and Build Anti-ODF Social Network
• Fraunhofer Again Lobbies for Microsoft Lock-in
• Is Microsoft’s AstroTurf Against ODF Still On?

Over at Twitter, the Microsoft partners/MVPs/others still mock IBM regarding ODF. They also mock ODF, thus showing how much Microsoft hates ODF. Microsoft gets close to ODF only to cause it damage while pretending to support it [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Microsoft used the exact same tactics against Java.

ODF Plugfest

In more positive news, Rob Weir shares the ODF TC timeline, which he first presented at the ODF Plugfest. There is a lot of good coverage from the Plugfest, such as this from Heise.

The first ODF Plugfest has brought together both corporate and independent developers to test the interoperability of Open Document Format (ODF) documents. As Microsoft showed earlier this year, it is possible to comply with the ODF specification but not offer useful interoperability with other software that reads ODF. The Plugfest, held in the Hague, Netherlands, was initiated by the Dutch government which is promoting the “Three Os”, Open Standards, Open Content and Open Source, and is pushing for the adoption of ODF as an open document format. The Plugfest opened with a speech from Frank Heemskerk, the Netherlands’ Minister of Foreign Trade, who asked the attendees “to go beyond compliance and help achieve broad-based open standards”.

There is also some coverage in German, not to mention the following article where a Dutch minister fails to see that ODF interoperability issues are mostly caused by Microsoft.

The Dutch Minister for Foreign Trade, Frank Heemskerk, wants Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Google, Adobe and open source software developers to work together on interoperability in applications using the Open Document Format (ODF).

The minister’s opened the ODF Interoperability Workshop that took place in the city of The Hague on Monday last week. “ODF applications must have the right degree of interoperability. We have to come up with a joint course of action for developing effective ODF support in each other’s products.”

The FSF’s position is that “Microsoft Office tries to break ODF”. Microsoft is indeed trying to break ODF (in French), so Frank Heemskerk should be notified.

Here is KDE’s report from the event.

The first ODF Plugfest was held on the 15th and 16th of June 2009 in the Royal Library in the Netherlands. The meeting was initiated by the Dutch government and the OpenDoc Society. Jos van den Oever, brand new employee of KO GmbH and Sven Langkamp, proud developer, went on behalf of the KOffice team. With over forty organisations and a total of sixty representatives from businesses, public sector organizations, open source projects and research institutions, the meeting was an incredible success.

OpenOffice.org has meanwhile augmented language support [1, 2] and the OOo Ninja blog shows that Microsoft Office just keeps getting more and more bloated.

What’s worse is this diagnostic took at least 20 minutes to finish on a nice dual-core with 2GB RAM.

[...]

OpenOffice.org isn’t necessarily have a reptutation for being lean itself, but developers are pushing hard to make OpenOffice.org 3.2 the fastest version yet. Stay tuned for more.

Yet Microsoft insists that Office is a quality product. To ODF, Microsoft Office does more harm than good. It’s in the interest of shareholders, not computer users. █

“It’s a Simple Matter of [Microsoft’s] Commercial Interests!“

–Microsoft on OOXML

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06.26.09

Nathan Myhrvold/Bill Gates Use “Embrace and Extend” Against “Mak[ing] it Easy for People to Do Competitive Operating Systems”

Posted in Antitrust, GNU/Linux, Java, Microsoft, OpenDocument, SUN at 2:15 am by Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Microsoft talks about harming competition by embracing and extending

WHEN IT comes to Comes vs Microsoft, we have only just begun. So if you enjoy ’smoking guns’ that were hardly/never seen before, be sure to subscribe.

This next exhibit, Exhibit plex_5803 (1996) [PDF], is an excellent sequel to the one where Microsoft describes “Embrace and Extend” and the Windows API franchise.

Herein we find Nathan Myhrvold, the world's largest patent troll at present, seemingly passing a long message from Bill Gates, although it is not perfectly clear whether the message came from him or from Gates. The message paints a rather vivid picture of the company’s fear and predatory responses to competition.

For instance, how about this gem at the start?

I am worry a lot about how great Java/Javabeans and all the runtime work they are doing is and how much excitement this is generating. I am literally losing sleep over this issue since together with a move to more server based applications it seems like it could make it easy for people to do competitive operating systems.

The next paragraph is curious too.

I am very interested to get your thoughts on this. Prior to the advanced work you are driving what kind of defenses do we have against this? I certainly havent’ come up with enough to relax about the situation and it is undermining my creativity.

Microsoft fears fair competition where platforms can interoperate:

I think that the risk of Sun really taking the OS franchise away from us is much lower than the risk that they cheapen the entire business. They are so hell bent to give things away, and there is so much cross platform ferver that it will be hard for them or others to harness this energy toward a single platform. In the limit, they can make the web totally OS agnostic but there will still be other things that motivate one platform versus another.

Gates (or Myhrvold) then proposes a malicious “embrace and extend” in order to extinguish Java. Think about MSODF [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

The obvious things to do are:

Provide our own means of dramatically improving web pages.

- Continue to “embrace and extend” both at the level of new Java tools (like J++), and our broader browser strategy.

- Create some radical new approaches to improving web pages, or building web applications. I think that it is a big mistake to put all of our eggs in the “embrace and extend” basket. This thinking will lead us down the path to renounce any really interesting edge we could have. Over reliance on “embrace and extend” can lead to what I sometimes call the relentless drive to come in second, which does not help much in a winner take all world.

Here is an embrace (like Microsoft ‘joining’ ODF):

2. Pioneer other means to participate in the new market. It is very rare that there is only one asset that matters. Hell, look at Netscape and Sun - each have an interesting asset, and this is still the EARLY stages of the net. There will be other technologies which matter and we should try to own one of them, even if it is in a totally different direction.

Another last mention of “embrace and extend” (all very explicitly):

We need Windows to be the most compelling platform for users to choose Ideally this means that we win in every category. You are worried that we will only tie in the Java category because Javabeans and other runtime work will make cross platform really work well. I say we should try to tie (or win) with embrace and extend in the Java world.

For naysayings who speak about the age of these exhibits, the important points to be made is that these are new to the public eye and they help educate about Microsoft’s practices, which have never changed since. █

“This anti-trust thing will blow over. We haven’t changed our business practices at all.”

–Bill Gates, 1995

Appendix: Comes vs. Microsoft - exhibit plex_5803, as text

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06.25.09

Microsoft on “Embrace and Extend”, the “Windows API Franchise”

Posted in FUD, Java, Microsoft, Mono, Open XML, OpenDocument, Oracle, Patents, SUN at 12:39 pm by Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Old lessons about Microsoft’s intentional sabotage through “embrace and extend”; use of the Windows API with software patents (like Mono’s problem)

T

ODAY’S INTERESTING exhibit arrives after a lot of work on the Wiki. We have hundreds more coming. We will summarise key observations drawn from Exhibit plex_5906 (1997) [PDF], which contains an E-mail from Aaron Contorer to Bill Gates. The full exhibit is available as plain text at the bottom, but here are the bits worth paying attention to, as well as corresponding background.

We start with the realisation — as Microsoft confesses to it — that Windows is at great risk.

Today we face the largest threat Microsoft has faced since the success of Windows For the first time, there is a really credible threat to our position as the leading platform for ISVs to write to.

Fear of Java comes into play:

There are three possible ways to address the threat of the Java platform. One is to do nothing and gradually die as others innovate around us. The second is to join the parade of people who are saying “let’s kill Microsoft and share their market among us” - good for everyone else, but reducing us to the much smaller role of a common software company like Lotus or Borland or even Symantec. Thats a great way to make all our stock options worth zero, even If we would not technically be out of business. The third choice is to make major innovations to our platform so people still prefer to write to us instead of some tepid cross-platform Java layer. This is our only real option.

We have already revealed the gory details about Microsoft’s attack on NetPC (sometimes referred to as “NC”). The Gartner Group helped Microsoft's attack, as always. Here is some more information from Microsoft:

Our competitors are not stupid, so they are pushing the Java platform as the solution for programs that really need to run closer to the user. Sure, its a half-assed solution and isn’t compatible with anything and in fact scarcely exists, but hey, at least it’s not Windows. With Oracle and HTML-generating code on the server and a browser with Java on the client, you have a very crude, complicated, but functional platform for developing line-of-business applications more specifically distributed applications which take advantage of all the interactivity and media-richness that purely centralized mainframe apps never had

Microsoft is then defining “Embrace and Extend”:

In economics there is a well-understood concept called switching costs - how much it costs for a trading partner to change partners. Our philosophy on switching costs is very clear: we want low switching costs for customers who want to start using our platform, and we want to provide so much unique value that there are in effect high costs of deciding to move to a different platform. There is a name for this: it is called Embrace and Extend.

Embrace means we are compatible with what’s out there, so you can switch to our platform without a lot of obstacles and rework. You can switch from someone else’s Java compiler to ours; from someone else’s Web server to ours; etc. Customers love when we do this (as long as we don’t spend our energy embracing extra standards no one really cares about); our competitors are not so sure they like It because they prefer us to screw up.

Extend means we provide tremendous value that nobody else does, so (A) you really want to switch to our software, and (B) once you try our software you would never want to go back to some inferior junk from our competitors. Customers usually like when we do this, since by definition it’s only an extension if it adds value. Competitors hate when we do this, because by adding new value we make our products much harder to clone - this is the difference between innovation and just being a commodity like corn where suppliers compete on price alone. Nobody builds or sustains a business as successful as Microsoft by producing trivial products that are easy to clone - that would be a strategy for failure.

If we fail to embrace, we can lose because there are big barriers to buying our products. But if we Fail to extend, or do only humble work that is easy to clone or to surpass, we automatically lose because our competitors will spend literally billions of dollars to clone our work and replace us.

With that in sight, think about MSODF and how Microsoft broke interoperability in other malicious ways [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

The “Windows API” is then described as “Embrace and Extend” against NC specifically:

Windows was a very successful embrace-and-extend move. People already had DOS machines and DOS apps, and we were able to go in and say “add this to your machine and it wLll just get better.” Wow! What a deal! It seems to have worked out all right so far. NT is a very similar move; although It’s not trivial to upgrade from Win95 to NT. in general you can use the same computer, same apps. and same APIs as before, plus more.

The really big win in Windows is the API. An app that calls the Windows API is effectively calling upon thousands of person-years of engineering work to help their app get its job done in a very specific way. You could argue !hat the API is too hard to use, that not every library is as fast as it should be, or other serious imperfections, but the fact remains: if you took away Windows, that apphcation would no longer work.

The Windows API is so broad, so deep, and so functional that most ISVs would be crazy not to use it. And it is so deeply embedded in the source code of many Windows apps that there is a huge switching cast to using a different operating system Instead. You can’t just take a Windows app and stick it on some weird Java NC from Oracle, for example, and expect it to work - the guts just are not there. For many customers, the cast of reworking all their apps would be huge.

Watch this:

In short, without this exclusive franchise called the Windows API, we would have been dead a long time ago.

Think about the role of Mono and why it helps Microsoft. Remember that this whole memo is about fighting Sun’s NC and Java, which is cross-platform. Oracle, which now owns/buys Sun, was part of this programme at the time.

Watch how Microsoft intends to use software patents to shield its territory (it is just as though Mono is history repeating itself):

We are doing all of this. We are fixing TCO and further improving our dev tools. We are providing new value such as Viper and great multimedia and unified storage. We are making sure that Windows, not some new platform, is the most attractive place to run apps written in this now programming language. We are building the best virtual machine in the world, and optimizing it to run on Windows. We are even making sure you can run your Windows apps remotely on an NT server if all you have on your desk is a GUI terminal. As if all this work were not already hard to copy, we are also getting a bunch of patents to further protect It against cloning.

On the role of ActiveX and DirectX in merely preventing platforms from becoming a commodity, to use Bill Gates' explanation:

Let me be dear we have no problem with the Java language or with running Java apps really really well on our platform. But we are explicitly not in the business of making it easy for people to write apps that get all the features of Windows on a non-Windows platform. “Pure cross-platform portability” is another way of saying “commoditize the OS.” In this vision, every OS is just an engine for running this layer called Java as fast as possible, and adding any value below the Java layer Is explicitly against the rules.

Sun has already figured this out and has launched its 100% pure Java” marketing program, which literally certifies apps as running the same on any client OS. Programs that call a Windows API or use ActiveX or DirectX, or any platform-specific feature, are by definition not 100% Pure Java, and are therefore evil. Hey, If you were Sun, you would say this too!

As usual, there is a lot to be learned from this. Although it is over a decade old, this was not seen before in the public arena, just in courts for the most part. Microsoft settled to keep it away from the public eye. █

“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

                 – George Santayana

Appendix: Comes vs. Microsoft - exhibit plex_5906, as text

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Bill Gates: “We Should Look at Even Patenting the Things That We Do Add to Help Office”

Posted in Antitrust, Bill Gates, Formats, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, Patents at 3:57 am by Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Bill Gates wants not only to make IE ‘extend’ HTML but also to patent Office features that do so

For a little bit of essential background, see what was shown in:

• Bill Gates, 1999: Giving out the Office 2000 Formats to Competitors Seems Crazy
• Impressed by OpenOffice, Bill Gates Schemes to Use Software Patents Against It
• Patent Manoeuvres Fight Free Software, Have Roots in Microsoft’s Past

Today we look at Exhibit PX06508 (1998) [PDF], which was probably made famous by the following text it contains:

From: Bill Gates
Sent:. Saturday, December 05, 1998 12:4,t PM
To: Bob Muglia (Exchange); Jon DeVaan; Steven Sinofsky
Cc: Paul Maritz
Subject: Office rendering

One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company.

We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on
PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.

Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destory Windows,

I would be glad to explain at greater length.

Likewise this love of DAV in Office/Exchange is a huge problem. I would also like to make sure people understand this as well.

It basically shows that Chairman Gates wanted to ‘extend’ the Web with proprietary Microsoft bits, but it actually gets worse. In the same exhibit we find intent to use software patents to limit interoperability/compatibility:

Its right for business reasons because it supports competitive browsers but with a clear benefit for people who use our browser (particularly IE 5),

What I trying to say is that looking forward we should not do heroic things like add new capabilities to the standards to help Office.

We should look at even patenting the things that we do add to help Office.

I need to lean more about this whole DAV thing.

The reply from Steve Sinofsky starts with an admission that Microsoft has proprietary protocols:

I personally think this is an area that has been oversold as a benefit and in terms of interoperability. In essence, this is a proprietary protocol for us anyway since we are re-building MAPI on top of It.

The words “open” and “standard” are thrown out there yet again:

For me, DAV is a case where Microsoft is out there leading with the newly proposed (by Microsoft) but yet to be implemented “open” standard. In contrast, HTML is a case where we are dealing with an installed base and standard that already existed and our conflicts are how to work within that environment.

Another interesting bit says that proprietary IE ‘extensions’ are “are enough to convince people that Office requires IE in a proprietary way and that if you want to exchange documents, the odds are your recipients won’t be happy with anything but IE.”

For all practical purposes, Office 2000 requires Windows and IE. We started the project trying to be great on all browsers, and even greater on lnternet Explorer (from our vision and presentation we did for you), but the momentum inside the company essentially prevents that message from making it through development. Only the most basic rendering works in other browsers-IE is required for:

* PowerPoint (the default output is IE only, and that is essentially IE5)
* Access Data Pages (IE5)
* Web Components (IE5)
* Reasonable performance in Excel (due to big tables and the IE5 support for a predefined table width)
* Word and PowerPoint output tons of stuff that only looks good in IE due to the shared line layout code and bugs in other browsers implementation of CS(which is essentially an IE-specific feature)
* HTML email essentially requires Outlook Express or Outlook
* Vector Graphics (VML which renders using vectors rather than GIFs) requires IE

to name a few. I think these are enough to convince people that Office requires IE in a proprietary way and that if you want to exchange documents, the odds are your recipients won’t be happy with anything but IE.

There is also clear realisation that people loathe this:

If Office documents only render in IE then there is zero chance that anyone will be able to use Office to create documents that will be shared outside an environment with the standardized Window browsers (intranet perhaps, but only perhaps given the time to migrate and the minority of Win 3.1, etc.). Personally I put pictures of a trip out on sinofsky.com that were made with PowerPoint 2000 and got a dozen messages from fdends and family (including a webtv person) saying they could not see the pictures. Everything I’ve posted here at the business school has been “recalled” by me because students were not able to read it (all sorts of combinations of OS/browsers).

No area of the product has received more skepticism and push back than our HTML output-from reviewers, analysts, and beta customers. The other night I attended a 500 person Office 2000 event in Boston (the Team Web Tour”). The whole presentation was in IE and every time the browser was shown hands went up to ask “what about non-IE browsers?”. Finally the demonstration showed powerpoint 2000 in IE which is *awesome* output–then showed the non-IE output and it was just ugly (didn’t scale, fixed size slides, no slide show view, no DHTML, etc.). I thought the audience was either going to get up and walk out in disgust or rush the stage in protest.

All in all, what any person can learn from this 9-year-old antitrust exhibit is that orders come from the very top to add proprietary extensions to Internet Explorer and shield them even further with software patents. Microsoft knows that people would not like this, but being anti-competitive, this may seem like a priority. Had it been just about improvement, then patents would probably not be needed and the issue of breaking interoperability remains.

For people whose work is affected by the ODF/OOXML situation it is an important lesson to always bear in mind. █

Appendix: Comes vs. Microsoft - exhibit PX06508, as text

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06.24.09

Microsoft Forcibly Turns Washington State University Students to Customers

Posted in America, Interoperability, Microsoft, OpenDocument at 3:36 am by Roy Schestowitz

“The danger is that Microsoft is using strategic monopolistic pricing in the education market, with the government’s assistance, to turn our state university systems into private workforce training programs for Microsoft.”

–Nathan Newman

Summary: Students of WSU (Washington State University) are the latest victims of Live@Edu

SEVERAL MONTHS ago we leaked the details of Live@Edu. This programme is Microsoft’s way of turning students into customers [1, 2, 3] and personal bribes are given to those who enable Microsoft to accomplish this. Perhaps not surprisingly, Washington State University, which is located in the vicinity of Microsoft’s main headquarters, is turning its students to Microsoft customers as well.

Strapped for cash after the state Legislature cut higher education funding, Washington State University is using Microsoft’s free Live@edu system for student e-mail and other services, Microsoft announced today.

It would be interesting to know who received incentives to make such a foolish move. Universities have the capacity and the tools to offer their own mail services, but then there are no kickbacks.

Live@edu is about dependency, which is achieved through lock-in. E-mail may be only part of it (and probably just the beginning) as Microsoft is likely to bundle some other lock-in like Office as SaaS, with Microsoft OOXML as the proprietary format used. Data is then held hostage.

Speaking of lock-in, the ODF Plugfest we have been writing about [1, 2] is intended to accommodate interoperability and end lock-in. Here is another short report on the subject.

Rajiv Shah and Jay Kesan wrote the paper “running code as part of an open standards policy” arguing that the “running code” requirement - i.e. multiple independent, interoperable implementations of an open standard - should be part of governments’ open standards policies.

Last week the Dutch government hosted the first ODF plugfest: creators, implementors and end-users met up to improve OpenDocument interoperability for real, and it worked out well.

House’s ruless were clearly set, NoiV program and the OpenDoc Society created an appropriate environment to avoid flaming and to concentrate on fine tuning ODF interoperability.

Microsoft was there to disrupt of course. █

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