Now that Microsoft has lost its appeal (ain’t that the truth) and has to pay $290 million to Canadian company i4i and take the docx file format out of Word 2007, is it just me or doesn’t that sound like an improvement to the product?
The whole point of docx didn’t seem to be to help users, but rather to make life difficult for both Microsoft competitors and for users who decided not to upgrade from the previous Word versions that used only the .doc format.
Microsoft deserves to lose this one.
Yes, Bob, there is a God! The whole docx fiasco just created problems for everyone but mostly for the few individuals who actually tried to send documents in that format out to others. M$ really is losing it’s way, Ballmer should be shown the door before it’s to late.
I just skimmed over the patent in question. This is another example of how VERY VERY broken the patent system is.
Basically they have patented the idea of storing formatting information separately from the data (not unlike how HTML/CSS should be), and providing some indexing into the document content. I’m certain that I or any competent software developer/architect would have arrived at a similar solution given the same problem.
I think it is ridiculous that the first person to write down an idea and send it to the patent office gets to own it, even if any competent professional could independently create a similar solution when faced with a similar problem.
The problem isn’t the “obviousness” of the patent. The problem is the absolutely horrible and deceitful way that Microsoft acted. They didn’t come up with a “clean room” design that happened to do the same thing, Scott. They started in negotiations with i4i to include their technology, then dragged their feet, and then came out with something exactly the same. And there are e-mails to show that when they did this, they did it *explicitly* to cut out i4i.
It was an example of just how arrogant Microsoft acted. Regardless of how silly the patent might be, the fact is Microsoft acted in complete bad faith. They had no legal leg to stand on.
I have no idea what MS did or didn’t do in this case.
I think the patent is ridiculous and should never have been granted.
If MS negotiated with i4i and then stole their technology to build their own, then MS should get sued for violating NDA not a patent. If i4i had no contractual protections in place then they should feel quite silly.
If MS negotiated with i4i and decided the solution or price wasn’t what they wanted they should be free to build whatever suits them as long as they respect NDAs etc.
Interesting. You think what MS did is irrelevant because the patent is bad. But what was pretty clear from the court proceedings is that Microsoft didn’t think the patent was bad, and they didn’t seem to think the technology was all that obvious, because they were in negotiations to use the patent.
It would be nice if people would actually pay attention to what is going on before commenting on it. You clearly had no idea what was going on, and still don’t. There was a very expensive trial with a very experienced judge, and it was determined through that lengthy process that Microsoft didn’t have a similar idea, stole i4i’s, and is now getting spanked for it.
Oh, and MS did try to throw the patent out as being ridiculous or obvious, and lost that one, too.
Could it be that maybe you don’t know what you are talking about?
A similar thing happened with SQL server years ago. My understanding is that they had some kind of arrangement with Sybase then pulled out of the arrangement and then about a year later came out with a product themselves which was more-or-less identical.
They then proceeded to eat Sybase’s market share until Sybase was gone. I never understood how then weren’t sued for millions. Perhaps somebody can enlighten me.
I’m not saying what MS did, I admittedly don’t know the details, was irrelevant because the patent is bad. I’m saying i4i should not have protection from a bad patent.
Like anyone who doesn’t hold a patent on their technology i4i should, and probably did, establish contracts to protect themselves from being ripped off by potential customers. If those contracts are violated sue for every penny you can get.
Ideas at the level described in the i4i patent are not terribly difficult to come by. Many people are capable of conceiving a similar design. Good implementations on the other hand require considerably more effort. Just because i4i wrote down those ideas and sent them to the patent office first no one should not be required to pay a license fee for building a similar system.
Ooops grammar error.
The last sentence should read “… no one should be required to pay a license fee…”
Ben, that’s no quite what happened with Sybase and MS. The original product was developed by Sybase on SunOS and was called Sybase Dataserver. Sybase subsequently got into bed with the Evil Empire for the Windows version and agreed to call it SQL Server on both Windows and other platforms (for uniformity). They shared the rights to the source code for SQL Server on Windows (but not other platforms where it remained with Sybase).
Time came to renew the agreement and they couldn’t agree on future directions, pricing, revenue splits, etc. so they each took their toys and went home, as allowed for in the original agreement. MS had the rights to the name SQL Server so Sybase changed the name of their version to Adaptive Server Enterprise, forked the Windows code, and they’re still selling it on Windows, Unix, Linux, etc.
Scott,
You hit it on the head.
Thank God the first cave man to rub two sticks together didn’t get a patent for fire! Under our present body of laws, we would all be paying royalties for the the privilege of keeping cooking our food and staying warm.
What will happen to Office/Word 2008 for Mac?
From what I understand, there’s actually a specific bit of software code involved in Word 07 and that that is not in Word 08, even though it also uses docx format. I guess it’s more how the file is created/parsed that is what this trial’s about?
Interesting. I wonder what will happen to docx on mac now. I’m just glad I switched over to OpenOffice.org and Bean so don’t have to worry about any of this (apart from be happy about the decision!)
This doesn’t mean that docx is going away, just that you can no longer add your own custom XML elements to it.
The Office 2007 file formats were not introduced to make it harder for competitors or consumers – rather the opposite. It was envisioned as a much easier format for 3rd parties to write tools against, since it is really just a ZIP file containing some XML documents and images and such. Far better than the old binary formats that were (a) extremely hard to maintain and extend for newer versions of office, and (b) very hard to write good 3rd-party tools for.
In defense of DocX…
Have you ever compared file sizes between Word2k7 and Word2k3 files? I’ve got NO beef w/ the conversion, and wish it would come quicker.
Actually, the docx format is much nicer to work with than the old doc format, especially from outside office. Writing your own docx handler from say a web app is a breeze (And I’m a sysadmin, not a programmer). Oh, and it’s still in Office 2010 beta…
My favourite is the press release after MS heard that they had lost the appeal and they say: “…and have put the wheels in motion to remove this little-used feature from these products.”
It’s so funny when companies put themselves in this position. Surely if it is a “little-used feature” they should not have spent millions of dollars defending a court case by implementing the feature? And then lost millions more when they lost the case itself? They probably spent about $3million defending this case and then lost $240million in court for a “little-used feature”? I think if that is true then their shareholders should be very interested in a lawsuit, talk about waste and mismanagement. Surely senior management has a responsibility to not let this happen?
If on the other hand that’s not true, and it is not a “little-used feature” then they are lying.
So MS, which is it? Financial mismanagement or you’re a bunch of liars?
I would love to hear the answer to that one.
The original doc format is a piece of crap. Kludged left and right. Difficult to parse, index and implement in your own applications. It’s got so many nuances and hilarious historical offsets and crazy schemes that have been injected over the years that even M$ is dumbfounded. The XML implementation is far better. I don’t use office, but I hope docx or anything other then doc lives, manifests or survives. Heck, I’ll take RTF over doc -say it isn’t so!
Just the other day, MS, through their lawyer, said they respect other people’s IP. HA!
What about OpenOffice.org , this the program that I use most frequently and it’s also XML based as well ? Can i4i still sue Sun for StarOffice?
Cringe your post is wrong. Docx lives on. Just a minor tweak to take out custom XML. You should change your post – you are supplying bad information.
The problem with docx is the same Java issues that Sun had with Microsoft. It’s nice that Microsoft embraced a standard (XML), but docx implemented that standard in a very proprietary fashion that makes it difficult for third parties to parse docx documents.
What good is following a standard and then simply doing it in a way that isn’t standard? The whole purpose of docx is to force Windows Office users to upgrade. If you get enough documents in docx format, you’ll be forced to upgrade. The XML implementation was simply a red herring.
OpenOffice doesn’t have issues because it uses a standard implementation of XML and doesn’t infringe upon i4i’s patents. Microsoft purposely chose to work with i4i in order to make it impossible for others to parse docx documents without infringing upon i4i’s patents. What Microsoft was attempting to do is get an exclusive license from i4i and i4i refused.
Thank you for the explanation. This makes a lot of sense and it also reminds me of maxim:
If you lie down with dogs, you will rise up with fleas
David, you are confused about XML, and your post is at therefor misleading.
XML is a meta-language. You use it to create new languages. You can think of it like a programming language. You use them to create new applications. (In fact, new XML languages are sometimes called XML applications).
If you create a new language using XML (for example docx, xhtml, xslt, xul or the Open Office format), then all you are doing is using the XML meta-language to invent a new language.
By definition, your new language is “non-standard”, because it is your very own creation. If you want it to be proprietory, so be it – just like if you write a proprietory application in a programming language.
You can’t use XML in a non-standard way, it’s just not possible. It’s either XML or it isn’t. Just like if you write a program in Java. It’s either a Java program or it isn’t. Sure it can be badly written, badly implemented or hard to understand. But it can’t be non-standard.
So the stuff about “Microsoft embracing a standard”, and “using the standard was only a red herring” is not relevant. Just as irrelevant as the choice of programming language to write Word in the first place.
Am happy to discuss further.
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth…
Perhaps justice was served to MS for once.
Fact check? The Docx is not going away, just a small feature of it that most of us have never heard of, let alone used.
Word isn’t losing the docx file format. It is only losing custom tags. See http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=4835&tag=nl.e019 for details.
For those fearing that the decision affects OOXML or ODF, see TalkBack entry #8 at that link for an explanation of why it doesn’t.
Bob, one could write a book (and you should!) on illegal and unethical Microsoft business practices. A favorite tactic is for Microsoft to approach a developer, gain access to their code, break off negotiations, and implement as their own. How many examples of Microsoft taking from others can you think of? This week is i4i. Last week was Plurk (Club MSN China). In the past, the more notable examples off the top of my head are QuickTime (Video for Windows) and Stac Electronics (DoubleSpace). Others?
Wasn’t the big one Netscape which was used to write Internet Explorer?
Not to my knowledge. Internet Explorer was a mutation of an earlier browser, Mosaic from Spyglass. Netscape built their own.
No the big one was when they used Q-DOS from Seattle Computer to develop MS-DOS. Without that, they never would have grown big enough to do all the other products.
I believe our host already wrote the book about that one (among others).
Others? Pen
You are forgetting the original ripoff, the one that allowed MS to exist in the first place:MSDOS. Or as Gary Killdall named it-CPM
Dan,
Did you mean QDOS instead of CP/M?
Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products wrote QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) in 1980. In 1981, Microsoft bought all rights to it. MS renamed it MS-DOS.
See http://www.patersontech.com/Dos/Byte/History.html.
Bob Cringely’s “Triumph of the Nerds” has an interview (the interviewee was MS cofounder Paul Allen?) about the QDOS deal.
Winston
“Accidental Empires” was the book.
I don’t know the underpinnings the latest Office and I’m not a computer jock. From reading the comments, it seems that an older convoluted code has been replaced with a newer one that has better innards. That sounds good. Our company directed the upgrade because of some other issue about Calendar compatibility mix-ups, otherwise I never would have changed. The older version worked for me, so why change?
With the new -x files, some persons on my distribution list complained they couldn’t read the x-files. At first, I started send out doubles (-x AND pdf or 2004), but making that extra copy got old real soon. To save myself that bother, I now save everything in 2004-2007 format (“compatibility mode”). I’m not sure I have gained anything; I’m still having Calendar mix-ups. Microsoft gained because they got another sale of my “upgraded” Office.
What MS did was crummy and justice of a sort has been served. Nuff said about that.
However, this has little to do with .docx format files. The feature in question is used primarily by in-house IT departments for encapsulating custom data sources and presenting complex reports, all using Word as a container object. Basically, EXTENSIONS to the xml schema within a Word document.
The actual infringement is the custom XML editor MS includes as a tool for managing these extensions, which bears suspicious resemblance to i4i’s proprietary application.
Only this tool is impacted. It will be dropped from Office2007 in 2010. Existing copies of Word (even with the tool) are not subject to the ruling.
MS already has compliant product ready to ship for 2010, but honestly: the impact on 99% of Word users will go unnoticed. And those that care will probably end up with i4i’s tool so they can manage their Word XML extensions. 🙂
Bob,
Love ya bud, merry christmas from just down Highway 17….
But I think you’re wrong on this one, as others have pointed out. .docx ain’t going anywhere, just the ability to ‘edit’ the schema used to add your own tags to the underlying format (the so called ‘custom’ code part).
As a DoD guy (but one who has no indepth knowledge of this particular case), I’m sure i4i was making their pitch based on the department’s long running fascination with ‘metadata’ and ‘structured’ tagging. Which in theory would allow a user to ‘google’ documents based not only on content, but specific tags. We’ve been through this before mind you (USMTF, TADILs, etc. etc. etc.). None of them have been very elegant or useful.
The .doc format is horrible for that ‘extra stuff’ part however, because you can’t seperate ‘the data’ from ‘the formatting’. That has the nasty side affect of making search engines choke on it consistently (not to mention really nasty bloated file sizes).
While David W’s conclusion above may be true (about exclusive licensing), the rest of his thought couldn’t be more wrong. You don’t have to upgrade to get .x capability; Microsoft backported it to at least Office 2003 as I use it at work on that version quite regularly. The fact is, as Steveroro states above, .doc had outgrown it’s usefullness and it was a bloated mess that NOBODY could hope to pull off, which is why so many other application only import .doc files as .rtf files and loose 50% of your formatting in the process.
The ODF standard is no less or more ‘proprietary’ in technology than .docx, it just enjoys the aura of having it’s tagging conventions and schema come from a free and open standard, where .docx is Microsoft’s own standard… but BOTH are based on the same basic XML technology and tagging. You could have done the same thing in SGML.
So ODF itself might be off the hook (as is .docx really), it’s the SOFTWARE that’s in question (i.e. Word and OpenOffice Write)… and the open source one could run afoul of the same issue just as easily as MS did if they allow their users to add a custom set of tags to the ODF files for context information.
It seems your RSS feed is broken after your recent DVD story.
It is common knowledge that Microsoft and most other large corporations will try and trick you into giving up your trade secrets. Anybody who does business with them is an idiot.
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Now’s the perfect time for Adobe to step in with a office/consumer word processor app. PDF is universal, InDesign is now neck-and-neck with Quark Xpress as far as professional publishing apps go, and it makes sense.
MS Word has been the biggest piece of clunkware I’ve ever used. it’s time to put a bullet through MS’s feeble brain when it comes to apps like this. Google is breathing down their neck, but I think Adobe could walk in and grab this market.
Your thoughts?
I knew (like so many people did) from the day I saw it that DOCX was the dumbest thing I had ever seen. I am relieved. Jerks.
[…] [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11], OOXML should be removed from ISO [1, 2]. Moreover, as Cringely puts it: The whole point of docx didn’t seem to be to help users, but rather to make life difficult for […]
Well the problem with your logic is that you’re a fucin pedophile
I liked the i4i patent the first time I saw it: when Donald Knuth invented it in 1979.
Just another reason that WordPerfect was always better than MS Word. Too bad too few of you realized it and went ahead and bought the crappy MS product, which now has little or no competition. Really, have you tried to use Pages or Open Office? I don’t even know if they are any good because they are so different from the WordPerfect/Word model that it nver seems to be worth the time to learn how to use them. Maybe I’ll give Pages another shot using MacDictate and let my secretary make the edits! It’d be a helluva lot cheaper than yet another version of Word (assuming Steve doesn’t take Bob’s advice and scrap Word for Mac)! lol
I’ve got to admit, it’s fun extracting the files from a docx file (it’s a zip-compressed file) and reading through a file that way. Too bad microsoft is still focusing on presentation-based formats as opposed to semantic.
Jsut read this and you’ll see what I mean,
http://ooxmlisdefectivebydesign.blogspot.com/2007/08/microsoft-office-xml-formats-defective.html
Y’know, at least for not-too-complicated documents, even Open Office v.2.6 could decipher .docx. Now long, heavily formatted documents might be another matter. . .
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I’ve written a program to batch convert docx to doc or doc to docx files. This script will only work on Mac OS X, however. Sad, but many individuals are stuck with incompatible file formats, thanks to Microsoft.
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