https://www.lobbyfacts.eu/datacard/microsoft-corporation?rid...

The crazy dogma around these issues hurt everyone.

The smart move is the pragmatic one - just like I can access any of the billions of US Federal Court filings in the intended presentation, mandate production of documents in a standards based PDF or PDF/A format. Then history gets accessible documents for eternity, and entities can choose to use what application makes sense for them.

Or we can bikeshed over the format dick-measuring contest.

I'm talking about what comes before. Most don't have the luxury of a publishing department producing a clean pdf from what's no doubt a handful of Word inputs. Apart from horrendous formatting issues introduced by incompetency and variety of Word versions (including limited mobile/online versions), the purpose would be astronomically better change integration when 10 people concurrently review for starters. If you've never had to integrate changes from a handful of people for 100+ page documents, praise your deity.

The trick is to use open source version tracking and a simpler text editor. I suspect that markdown in a gui editor could do everything that actually needs doing.

Every employee with a reasonably recent office suite can produce a high quality PDF of whatever they are producing.

I actually have done such things. It’s not that bad - the process of review is the painful part.

Nobody has the skillsets to manage latex source code in a collaborative environment. I actually did a pilot a few years ago with Markdown and GitHub to collaborate on a large report for a multi-organization project. We quickly abandoned it for Word/Sharepoint and it worked fine.

The only practical exceptions I can think of are typesetting for publishing and bill drafting. Both are narrow use cases with specialized staff and tools. I definitely see where having a system output LaTeX could be useful for those use cases. But not the the collaborative aspects.

This kind of problem should be solved from schools, but to happen we need the masses feel the need of that, and they do not even know that's a problem, most fails to understand the difference of local/remote contents, have no clue about what is a file https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc... so there are few Alphabet-s, owning Meta-information, being Oracle-s of a large mass of illiterates...

You have your problem right there...Would the Commissioners ramblings be less brilliant in .odt ??

That's the level of the issue. I regularly bark against some executive sending a doc printed, then scanned, then mailed, and they do not understand...

co-author of the ODF spec (2006 ISO) here, I also got involved via NLNet to work with my local standards office to improve OOXML.

The OOXML spec was offered to the ISO standard along an unusual path, a fast standardization lane. Where there was no option for any of the people reviewing it to actually change anything. It was rubber-stamped in other words.

That fact alone doesn't mean it is a bad, but it is a bit of a red flag. The fact is, it is a really bad specification. It is a full 7000 pages long with lots of conflicting details. On top of that it is full of references like "this works like wordperfect version-n". While references are useful in specifications, they need to be to existing open standards to be meaningful. Wordperfect has never standardized its format, so referring to it is meaningless.

To implement a competing application that can use this format you'd not be able to do that from this specification alone. Next to that it is so massive that it is essentially an undertaking that makes no sense. Compare it to ODF which is 1/10th of the size. Has a lot of reuse of concepts and was written under OASIS, a standards organization, unlike the OOXML spec which was written by Microsoft and the full 7000 pages dropped on the world.

I stopped looking at the OOXML stuff for some years, so the next part may be outdated. I noticed that after MS got this ratified by OSI, and thus they dodged the threat of law requiring governments to switch to ODF, they never did an update to the spec even though the applications have seen plenty of new features.

Quoting the article:

   "Microsoft Corp. admitted Wednesday that an employee at its Swedish
   subsidiary offered monetary compensation to partners for voting in
   favor of the Office Open XML document format's approval as an ISO standard."

A few things worth noting. First, the size comparison was done by counting pages in the PDFs of the two from their respective standards committees. The OOXML PDF used something like twice the line spacing of the ODF PDF, and may have also had a larger font size. Print the two with the same settings and OOXML still was a lot bigger.

Second, ODF deferred some important things to be done in later revisions of the spec. For example spreadsheet formulas. OOXML on the other hand had hundreds of pages covering spreadsheet formulas, including detailed mathematical definitions and explanations for functions.

> On top of that it is full of references like "this works like wordperfect version-n". While references are useful in specifications, they need to be to existing open standards to be meaningful. Wordperfect has never standardized its format, so referring to it is meaningless.

I believe those were in a draft but taken out in the final spec. Also, I think you might be overlooking what those references were meant to be used for.

There were lots of organizations with lots of documents that were created in older proprietary products like WordPerfect, Lotus, etc, and many of those organizations had reverse engineered or partly reverse engineered those formats and built toolchains around them.

Let's say such an organization would like to switch to ODF. They would have to rewrite their tools but they are willing to do that because an XML format will make future development easier. They will also have to convert their existing documents to ODF, which they can do.

But there are things in those documents that must work like they worked in WordPerfect. For example if they print an old document it may be essential that it has the same line breaks that it did when WordPerfect printed it.

They accept that StarOffice or OpenOffice won't be able to do WordPerfect line breaks but that's fine. Their toolchain can handle document printing. And for new documents that they create in StarOffice or OpenOffice using whatever line breaks those programs use is fine--it is just dealing with legacy documents that requires matching what those old programs did.

What they want, then, is when using ODF as a storage format for their legacy documents for some way to mark in the ODF that the document needs WordPerfect line breaks.

Now imagine two different organizations both are doing this. So they both come up with some way to add to their ODF files that some text needs WordPerfect line breaks. But one of them calls it "WP6LineBreak" and one calls it "LB_LIKE_WP6".

Wouldn't it be nicer if all the organizations that are adding a "Use WordPerfect 6 line break" indicator to their converted-to-ODF legacy files did it the same way? It would make it easier if they ever exchanged legacy files, and it would be less confusing to the rest of is if one of these files ever got into the wild.

I remember some people brought up adding support to ODF for legacy documents early in ODF standardization but Sun was not interested. Their attitude generally was ODF was going to support everything StarOffice needed and nothing more.

Microsoft on the other hand did want to support people using OOXML for legacy document storage, and so they made a big list of the various things from the most popular earlier word processors and spreadsheets that they thought people would be wanting to extend OOXML to store, and reserved some names and markup for them.

They were quite clear that these were not meant to be used by general purpose OOXML word processors or spreadsheets. They were just for people in the scenario described above.

Those "standards" are just Office vomit in XML format. The standardization process was really controversial. IBM once threatened to leave ISO/IEC over this. It's not a good standard. It's bad faith effort from Microsoft.

But most likely collaboration is now done via SharePoint and the cloud version where you can track changes live.

- There's no equivalent of "git blame" that I can find to see who/when a particular line/paragraph/section changed.

- I can't see if there's a way to view my changes separate from other edits to the document, or isolate changes by single authors generally.

- "diffing" via the "compare documents" action seems to want to generate a new document with track-changes edits for changes from old/new, but mangles the histories to present all changes as by the invoker of the diff, at that time, which isn't all that useful.

It's definitely better than nothing at all, but a long way short of where I'd hoped we'd be regarding collaborative document authoring at this point.

First of all, most developers can’t use git blame

Secondly, there hasn’t really been a good diffing / compare documents experience for complex documents, with images and tables. The experience we have with HTML occasionally breaks the document itself, it’s not suitable for an average office worker.

You have to keep in mind that the tools being complicated are a not just a training problem - every time I see a developer making a blog, they spend more time on the technology than on the content they want to write. That’s why I don’t host my blog, I need the tool to get out of the way so that I can think about the relevant issue - communication.

If necessary, could treat tables or other complicated compound entries as a single editable item, although given the mysterious passion everyone I've ever worked with seems to have for putting just about everything into a table regardless of need, I'd hope it could be granular to a cell-level, at least.

Trying to collaboratively write complicated documents with a bunch of inter-relations between sections, from different people (in my case, documentation & regulatory paperwork for medical devices) is a massive pain, and I feel like it's too obvious a problem to be confined to my particular niche.

I vaguely recall Word is widely used for preparing huge legal documents, where the content and stakes are probably similar, so maybe there are some solutions, unless they're just "throw interns at it".

Plus, Sharepoint still has no concept of concurrent editing, so you better hope that nobody works on the same document at the same time. Also, it doesn't track changes.

It is only better than a file on a Windows share by a hair. A very thin hair.

Word's diff is Not Great (tm), but yes, at least it's there. Have you tried using it with more than 1 other changeset?

I share a lot of your sentiment about open formats in previous comments, but this is classic FUD and demonstrably wrong.

No change tracking is visible to me, other than a timestamp and name of last edited.

FUD is isn't. Please don't use buzzword gratuitously, I know _a lot_ more about the deployment here than you. Also, you didn't counter the statement that it doesn't do concurrent editing (like Google Docs, OnlyOffice), which in 2024 is a major gap imho.

As for concurrency, read my comment again, I use the specific word.

What did you do to have concurrent editing (or what did you not do), and how does it integrate the various diffs?

Sharepoint also tracks all versions automatically which is quite handy.

Haven’t yet found anything resembling this in the LaTeX world. Does OpenOffice offer this?

[1] https://github.com/CriticMarkup/CriticMarkup-toolkit

git

Seems like Libreoffice needs this feature soon

While I understand that looks isn't everything (I use Eclipse with great joy), it's to the point that hinders productivity in these tools.

The development model is a bit sketchy (e. g. they have a separate private issue tracker and sometimes ignore tickets in their open source repos), but the sources are there.

Yes, the same Fujitsu implicated in the UK Post Office scandal gets EU money for Microsoft licenses.

It's an open secret in EU IT consulting circles but nonetheless hilarious.

One big difference is that while OpenOffice can open MSO files, LibreOffice compatibility is higher and it can also save to MSO files, both the older (doc, xls) and newer (docx, xlsx) formats.

its not black and white as you can see

You don’t see this kind of treatment even for domestic issues, let alone third countries.

US is kind of above the law on most issues.

That's not as pragmatic a statement as people try to make it. So, also, I don't really believe the feeling is completely honest instead of driven by propaganda.

Is asking US to comply with the law is offensive, as in giving the middle finger?

American exceptionalism is truly exceptional.

And I say that as someone who earns his keep doing cloud stuff.

It doesn't, and Word works fine entirely offline.

If you want live collaboration on a document, or integration with AI, or if you want your employees not to have Word installed because that requires an IT department to manage at scale instead of running the app in a browser, then you need a network connection.

I have never wanted that ever. There are wikis with markdown for that.

> Integration with AI

AI still creeps me out to this day. Why would I want Microsoft to ingest my documents to train their next gen AI blackbox on it? Besides, the only thing AI can do is take the information the document has, and say it with more words.

> if you want your employees not to have Word installed

Got it, package management is still busted, and MS is disincentivised from fixing it.

Another story is the fact no wise user have reasons to have modern office suite to work on office task, but that's a more complex and broad topic about regressive evolution and computer illiteracy...

Its not. If you buy the desktop apps in the subscription, you get winword.exe.

Microsoft 365 includes the robust Office desktop apps that you’re familiar with, like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-365-...

Microsoft does provide the tools to keep data storage compliant with EU data rules.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/privacy/eudb/eu-data-bound...

It doesn't matter; the CLOUD Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act) means that, even if Microsoft (or any other USA company) takes every care to keep data storage compliant with EU data rules, that data can still be transferred to the USA. The only way around it is to have a completely independent non-USA company hold the EU data; I've heard that Microsoft used that trick in the past, but they stopped doing it for some reason.

https://hackernoon.com/microsoft-announces-the-end-of-the-ge...

I keep reading that, and I somewhat agree, yet I keep seeing a majority of people still exchanging docx files on email or even teams( by uploading new documents each time!) instead of using the collaborative features of office 365.

I think it's habit more than anything - if you've been using Word for 20 years and there wasn't a better option than email you're likely to continue that instead of taking time to learn a new workflow

Uploading word documents to Teams like that is extra ironic because Teams uses SharePoint to store attachments, so you're taking more steps to do the same thing and end up with less functionality

This is exactly what the press release above disproves.

The wider problem is that when governments and (non-profit) organizations did create alternatives for Microsoft products, the governments themselves ended up showing they are corrupted and the internal rules quickly changed to stop allowing the competing (open source) offerings.

A good example here is the Munich Linux desktop efforts a couple of decades ago. The actual workers were much happier, the sysadmins were ecstatic (much less work) and there wasn't really anyone that had problems with Openoffice and kmail at the time.

Yet, the funding to companies supporting the features they wanted dried up. Requirements got written that disallowed upgrades to "dangerous" new open source releases and after some time they went back to Microsoft because problems were not getting solved. (duh!).

So, sure, we'd need a set of alternatives. But what we really need is not the end-products. What we really need is more honest bureaucrats that actually work for the benefit of the people. And those I have not yet found.

Not just government, also corporations. How many times, has superior product being ignore because it doesn't have some MS/Google/Oracle (fill in the blank). Current politics in the world does NOT support meritocracy. Doesn't matter if in gov or corporate.

I once worked for a company that was building among other things a videoconference app. The quality of the product only really started to increase when employees were sent home during covid and they started using their own tool.

There's always some tiny little thing which is missing for someone. If you demand 100% completion before you can switch, you will never switch.

> we need to fund their improvement, and use them once they are ready

That would mean funding for a long time, without getting any tangible results (since you refuse to use it until it's "ready") until the very end. The end result would be that the funding is abandoned after a while, and you never switch.

It is unrealistic to play catch-up with Microsoft, let alone exceed their current pace of development.

If tools were "easy", ReactOS would be beyond the NT4 era.

Drupal is already the default CMS in EU institutions and it can replace Sharepoint and Microsoft Word, but this requires a massive change of workflows, breaking of habits and quite some training.

git (yes, git) can be use by Publications Office to track recitals and publish directives.

It's just a matter of concerted work together against the dominance of US IT companies.

It will be hard.

But possible.

The first move is to ban Active Directory. Without it, the house of Microsoft cards will fall apart in a decade.

Are you familiar with SharePoint? Drupal and SharePoint are not the same.

Word, especially co-authoring, can't be replaced. LibreOffice/OpenOffice are not alternatives.

> git (yes, git)

This is unfortunately what engineers think an appropriate UX is for end users. It isn't. git is far too complex, too convoluted, and doesn't bring SharePoint's strong advantages for Office-related content.

It isn't possible. Simply is not. Google demonstrates it isn't possible.

> The first move is to ban Active Directory. Without it, the house of Microsoft cards will fall apart in a decade.

AD is not required for M365.

Not always practical, especially in older companies.

This is exactly my point. Replacing Word is impossible, because you will always have a worse version of Word. Libre Office demonstrates it pretty clearly.

Reorganizing work so that Word falls out of use is totally possible and even desirable as a long-term strategy.

Lots of people here talk about collaboration, but how many actually worked on documents where every word matters and sidenotes are important?

Are you aware of state of the art collaborative tools, like those offered by genious.com?

Or stet, for that matter?

See stet used in https://gplv3.fsf.org/comments/gplv3-draft-1.html

So is commercial fusion power. And between commercial fusion and the reorganization of work so that Word falls out of use, commercial fusion is likely to happen decades sooner.

(And MS/Google can just use their deep pockets to make an offer you can’t refuse, or to lobby against you, or both.)

The linked article talks about limiting international data transfers, but that wouldn't fully address the s.702 issue, would it? Do they also have to ensure that the data is subject to the new DPF framework negotiated with the US (replacement for Privacy Shield)?

I think it's doubtful that Europeans know their own laws, but if we could, it's probably reciprocal in most if not all EU countries. As if foreign spying were conducted in public, or was somehow not authorized by the country doing the spying.

I hope they also hold the Commission and member state governments to account w.r.t. regulation 2016/679 (more commonly known as GDPR).

Not because I care very much about personal data, but because knowing how things are done in civil service organizations, all government business will grind to a halt for a decade or so.

Is there any evidence of the transfers of personal data outside the EU?

On your new topic, I doubt Microsoft would risk their multi-billion/year cloud business complying with illegal requests from the US government.

And there’s a relevant execution order signed by President Biden in 2022: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

2. Fail to follow them yourself

3. Profit?