An Antic Disposition

Some interesting news, via Bob Sutor.

Let's take a closer look at the what is being offered as part of this “royalty free” deal from Microsoft.

At first it appears like an early Christmas present from Microsoft, a royalty-free license to the Office UI for “software vendors who wish to incorporate the 2007 Microsoft Office User Interface into their own products.” Woo hoo!

Now to be totally honest, I must admit that I'm not a big fan of the new Office ribbon UI. It smacks a bit too much of the kind of New, Improved Packaging! campaign that snack food companies engage in periodically. It is the same junk food in the end, with a new wrapper. But the domination of Microsoft is so great on the client, that their UI whim is practically the law for everyone else. So we must pay attention. Their market presence defines the norms, and these norms define user expectations and therefore intuitiveness. User interface guru Jakob Nielsen said it well:

If anybody else introduced a new user interface paradigm, it would probably remain a curiosity for years, but Microsoft Office has a special status as the world's most-used interaction design. We know from user testing that users often demand that other user interfaces work like Office. When you're used to one style most of the day, you want it in other applications and screens as well.

So, any genuine attempt to encourage the free and open use of new UI paradigms is to be applauded. The current Windows UI is certainly the result of an industry-wide evolution, with contributions from Xerox, Apple, IBM, NeXt and many others. Although Microsoft is the main beneficiary of this UI consolidation, they were not the sole contributors. So it is good to share the love and continue this evolution.

But then we read the fine print in what Microsoft is offering:

The program does not involve code or technical specifications and there are no protocols or file formats either.

OK. So what exactly are they offering? Answer:

pending utility and design patent claims, copyrights, trade dress and trademark rights.

OK. Another one of those, “We got stuff; you'll need to deal with us” FUD messages. Odd that they aren't offering any code or technical specifications, but they are still claiming copyright? Anyone remember Lotus v. Borland? “Method of operation” ring a bell?

We read further:

Your Licensed UI must comply with the Design Guidelines. If Microsoft notifies you that the Design Guidelines have been updated or that you are not complying with the Design Guidelines, you will make the necessary changes to comply as soon as you reasonably can, but no later than your next product release that is 6 months or more from the date you receive notice.

So once you accept this license, Microsoft can pretty much jerk you around whenever they want. I've seen terms like this before when licensing redistributable code modules. But has anyone seen this for merely following someone's UI guidelines?

It gets still stranger:

This license contains no sub-license rights. If you allow others to use, copy, modify or distribute your Licensed UI in their products, your contract with them must state that they receive no Microsoft rights in the Licensed UI from you.

Not very open source friendly, is this? You can marry into the family and get protection from the Godfather, but you can't transfer this to anyone. They need to make their own accommodation with Microsoft.

This makes me wonder about the Microsoft-funded ODF Add-in for Word that Clever Age and others are working on. This add-in does UI-level manipulations of the Office 2007 ribbon. Are they covered under Microsoft's license program? Are their user's covered? What about anyone who takes the source code and modifies it and redistributes it?

And then the nail in the coffin:

“Excluded Products” software products or components, or web-based or hosted services that perform primarily the same general functions as the Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access software applications, and that are created or marketed as a replacement for any or all of those Microsoft applications.

So here the mask of openness falls off and we see this for what it is. This is very reminiscent of the original license on the Microsoft binary file formats, back in the days when the specifications were published on MSDN CD's:

[Y]ou may use documentation identified in the MSDN Library portion of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT as the file format specification for Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, and/or Microsoft PowerPoint ("File Format Documentation") solely in connection with your development of software product(s) that operate in conjunction with Windows or Windows NT that are not general purpose word processing, spreadsheet, or database management software products or an integrated work or product suite whose components include one or more general purpose word processing, spreadsheet, or database management software products.

Interestingly in that case, once they achieved their goal of total market domination, Microsoft removed the file format documentation from MSDN and it was only available under a special license. They started open, in order to gain market domination, but once their goals were achieved, the openness ended. What prevents this from happening again?

Caveat emptor, even when it appears to be free. The first one always is.

Labels: Office

This, fresh from from Office Watch: “Office 2007 compatibility pack disappoints”.

Update 11/15: Some readers have written with more information. This may be an issue between the pre-1.5-final-draft version of OOXML and the final RTM Compatibility Pack. Evidently there were some late changes to the OOXML specification, including a change in namespace URI's. So the problems seem to be between documents created in the beta version of Office 2007 (not sure whether all beta's including the Technical Refresh) and the RTM version of Office. Confusing to say the least. It looks like the referenced article is being updated with additional details.

Update 11/7: The cited article updated again. This seems to be an issue related to what patch level you are running. If you have all of the updates applied to Windows/Office, the Compatibility Pack works as advertised.


Since there are a number of convertor initiatives under development, it is probably worth backing up and taking a survey of where we stand today:

ODF = Open Document Format, an XML-based document format used in products like IBM Workplace, the next version of Lotus Notes, OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord, GNUmeric, etc. ODF is an ISO standard and is maintained at OASIS.

OOXML = Office Open XML, an XML-based format which will be used in Microsoft Office 2007 when it is released in January. OOXML is currently a draft specification in Ecma, though it will certainly be adopted as an Ecma standard in December.

The Legacy Formats = the proprietary binary formats that Microsoft used before Office 2007, the familiar DOC, XLS and PPT files.

So, what can be converted to what, using what, and does it really work?

If you upgrade to Office 2007 when it comes out, you will be able to read and write both the OOXML and the Legacy formats. Both are supported out-of-the-box.

If you want to stay on an older version of Office, and need to exchange documents with someone using the new OOXML formats, then you need Microsoft's Compatibility Pack. As the above article points out, getting this to work in practice requires first ensuring that your patch level is current.

What about ODF? If you are on Microsoft Office, then there are two initiatives underway to bring ODF support to Office. One is the Microsoft-supported (and now Novell as well) odf-convertor project on SourceForge. Their initial deliverable will be the “ODF Add-in For Microsoft Word”. I didn't have all that much luck with an earlier “alpha” version of the Add-in, but I've heard it is much improved. However, in the near term it only supports reading ODF text documents. No support for writing, and no support for presentations or spreadsheets. These other features are slated to be delivered in future phases of the project. The Open Document Foundation is also developing a convertor, which they call the “ODF Plugin”. Sam Hiser will be presenting on it at XML 2006 in Boston, so hopefully we'll learn more about it then.

If you are running OpenOffice.org, then you already have excellent integrated conversion support between ODF and the Legacy Office formats. But if you need to exchange documents with someone using Office 2007 and its default OOXML formats then you are out of luck for now. However, please note that the recent Novell/Microsoft agreement included a statement (if I'm reading this correctly) that Novell would help add OOXML support to OpenOffice.org. So this support should eventually make it into OpenOffice.org.

So, based on what really works today, I'd offer this recommendation: If you must upgrade to Office 2007 , then turn the default file formats to be the Legacy binary formats. Until the OOXML convertors mature and all Office users have migrated off the beta and have compatible OOXML versions, you'll only be causing chaos with those you exchange documents with if you save as OOXML.

Labels: ODF, Office, OOXML