November 29, 2005

Don't Reinvent The Basics? Since When Did Sun Have Anything To Do With "Inventing" The Office Software Basics?

ongoing � Catcalls

Turning to the office-document space: right now the world has exactly one finished, delivered, standardized, totally-unencumbered, multiply-implemented XML-based office document format. You are the guys who want to introduce another, incompatible one. And I think that’s OK; but restrict your invention to the specialized Microsoft stuff that ODF can’t do, and don’t re-invent the basics. Why is this controversial?

So I admire Tim Bray probably more than I admire most anybody else on this planet, so I am leaving room for the fact that I could simply be misinterpreting this part of the above statement:

You are the guys who want to introduce another, incompatible one. And I think that’s OK; but restrict your invention to the specialized Microsoft stuff that ODF can’t do, and don’t re-invent the basics.

First off:

You are the guys who want to introduce another, incompatible one.

I'm quickly running a historical regression test through my brain to see just where it was that things began to break as far as introducing new formats into the already crowded office document types namespace. While MS Office wasn't the first Word Processor, which, if I have my facts correct, the first GUI-based word processor was Bravo, which was followed by Gypsy. Both of these were created, in part, by Charles Simonyi who would later take a position with Microsoft and would eventually drive the development of Microsoft Word and Excel and who until recently(a few years back) continued as Microsoft's Chief Architect. Of course the market for commercial desktop applications didn't become possible until there was a solid base of desktop computers to sell licenses to use such software. With this in mind, it was the early 80's that Wordstar, WordPerfect, and MS Word would hit the market, I believe Word being the last of the three in 1983.

I will concede that who beat who to market at this stage in desktop computings history would make a great question for Trivial Pursuit, But it would make a horrible basis for any sort of argument against Microsoft's "Pioneer" status in the office document processing software business.

On the other hand, while StarOffice historically has its roots in the mid to late 80's, it wasn't until 1999 that Sun purchased the rights to StarOffice, so to claim that they had ANYTHING to do with the development of any sort of major office-type software developments anytime before 1999 simply means you haven't done your historical homework.

Now, even if Tim is not so much refering to Sun and instead to Oasis and their efforts to develop the XML Open Document format, this only makes the gap even smaller as the Oasis effort didnt, from what I remmember, start until the 2002 time frame, and the first draft wasn't made available until the first part of 2004.

So I geuss my question with this is:

Just who's re-inventing the basics, and why?

Sounds a lot more like politics and a lot less like a legitimate argument in favor of the obvious late comer to the game looking for any possible way to seem like the good guy (refering to Sun, not Tim... Tim is a good guy :) when in fact they are the ones responsible for confusing matters more so than anyone else. Thats not to suggest that the OASIS Open Document Format is confusing. In fact, just the opposite! But the mere fact that theres no legacy document formats to support is exactly the reason for the "agile" appearance and has nothing to do with Microsoft being slow. They just have 100's of millions of customer to worry about supporting and OpenOffice/StarOffice... well, definitely not 100's of millions, and even further no real concern for breaking compatibility between document versions... well, this does break compatibility, but when theres only a handful of people to worry about (of which are all anxious supporters of the new format anyway) theres certainly not a whole lot to lose, now is there.

Now, can we all move on to something more interesting and exciting... Like compound document formats? ;)