Standards?
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| techiem2 Aug 18, 2008 1:00 PM EDT |
Quoting:Many will disagree with me, but I’d rather use Word for group collaboration than something else, despite its flaws. It is universal and you can count on your file being usable by others. The old "MS is the Standard so everyone should use it" argument, as well as the "Standard file formats are good" argument. He seems to be forgetting/ignoring that MS has done just about everything it can to make sure it's file formats AREN'T usable by other programs to force themselves to be the "standard" for both the application and the data.... |
| gus3 Aug 18, 2008 1:05 PM EDT |
Judging by the tag cloud, DaniWeb is a Microsoft shill. |
| tuxchick Aug 18, 2008 1:14 PM EDT |
This is a 100% pure shill article. I'm glad LXer runs these occasionally; it's a good reminder that a lot of brainwashed people are still zombie-ing around :) |
| bigg Aug 18, 2008 1:32 PM EDT |
Word files do not always come up properly even if you have Word. These days I just ask the sender to convert to a PDF file. A few minutes later I have a file that always appears and prints correctly. That's a real standard. |
| jhansonxi Aug 18, 2008 5:21 PM EDT |
I disagree with the general "shill" label. I didn't find the article that biased considering it's from the viewpoint of a Microsoft product trainer. Anyone who has been in an engineering or technical writing environment knows the value of file format standardization. Microsoft Office products provided that advantage over competing products if only by market dominance. Having a closed format designed by fools isn't good for interoperability or for promoting competition but a standard is a standard. Even if documents created by much older versions of Office or Works look like hex dumps in Office 2007 most users learned long ago to accept that. Most companies update their office suite when they start having lots of complaints of file incompatibility with customers using the newer versions. A better file format like OpenDocument would solve that problem for office documents but there are dozens of other document files that lack truly universal standards like CAE/CAD/CAM. File format compatibility is always a problem so business aren't opposed to blowing a lot of money on an expensive office suite to reduce the problem somewhat. By "somewhat" I mean file compatibility only as it doesn't help with the rest of the problems they encounter like trying to standardize styles, fonts, layout, grammar, and document control. Arguably LaTeX could be a better solution. I especially agree with Don Lesser's observation of user understanding of modern office applications. It greatly undermines the Microsoft/VAR message of the value of new Office 2007 features and their criticisms that OpenOffice.org is a bad clone of Office 97. Almost none of my clients have the vaguest notion of how a modern word processor works. Don's comment about the "super typewriter" mindset fits perfectly. Every document they write is tab and space formatted. They use spreadsheets for lists because they don't know how to create a table in a word processor. Their skill level is in the Notepad/WordPad range. They are not even close to Office 97 proficiency and certainly are not going to fully utilize Office 2007 "features". One of the reasons PDF is so popular is that it is usable by most anyone as long as they don't need to edit and share changes bidirectionally. Just like with a printed document - you only see the result, not the implementation. It's hard to tell tab and space formatted letter or PDF from a one that was properly created using styles (except maybe in consistency). Don's comment about the usability of open source applications is not surprising and is shared by a lot of IT people. There are a lot of non-free applications that are way better than their free competitors and likewise closed-source apps that are better than open-source. There are also many examples of the opposite. Sloppy GUI design and the lack of documentation doesn't help the learning curve with F/OSS applications. He says there are things he doesn't like about Office but it's popularity and usability outweigh it's disadvantages. But remember that his training market is businesses and they are more accepting of the Office product price. Outside of that market it becomes a significant factor if you exclude piracy. On-line apps have their share of problems like bandwidth requirements and latency. Security is also a concern for many companies who are paranoid of malware and hackers caused by experiences with a particularly bad web browser and OS. It doesn't matter if Firefox and Linux are better because they are conditioned to think that the Internet is a bad place for everybody. Don agreed that Linux has a future on servers but not yet on desktops. That is directly due to his position in the Microsoft product training market and, as he admits, the annual "this is the year of *nix" predictions. He does say that there is no demand for Vista training but I wouldn't use that as a measure of adoption rates. The Vista desktop didn't make any radical changes to the WIMP paradigm and most XP users can figure it out without training. |
| hkwint Aug 18, 2008 5:51 PM EDT |
Quoting:Anyone who has been in an engineering or technical writing environment knows the value of file format standardization. Indeed. I'm in that area and it's a 'real challenge' to use an euphemism. Sadly I'm probably not allowed to tell too much about it; but it suffices to say lots of different incompatible file formats and db's are used; all of them - except for PDF - proprietary. It would make an interesting scenario for open standards. And indeed, we would be glad if there was such a thing as the 'MS Office file-standard' in our field of work; even if it was proprietary it would make work easier. |
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