FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another

OPINION The best way to bust out of jail is not to get locked up in the first place. There are options once you're inside, legal and illegal, and all are complicated, time-consuming, and probably won't work. Microsoft Office users have been banged up since 1990, a 36-year stretch normally reserved for the most horrendous crimes …

[Dr Paul Taylor]

M$ has killed email

I have successfully defended myself from M$'s hideous "operating system" and "word processor" for forty years, whilst successfully using email, the Internet and (to some extent) the Web.

However, M$ has now prevented me from communicating with my academic colleagues, even though most of them prefer to use FOSS, because it has conned university manglements to hand over their email systems. Now whenever I attempt to contact someone about an academic question, DMARC tells me that my email has arrived at the boundary of an M$ fiefdom, but then it is filed as spam.

[fnusnu]

Re: M$ has killed email

Use the University email system then

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: M$ has killed email

Not all academic colleagues work in the same, or even any, university.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: M$ has killed email

It's the university email system that has the M$ paywall.

[A Non e-mouse]

Re: M$ has killed email

I like to bash MS as much as the next person but DMARC isn't an MS-specific technology. Gmail and other email providers use it too. It's a tiny step in preventing the spoofing of email addresses.

If DMARC is rejecting your messages, either your organisation’s DMARC settings are wrong or you're trying to side-step the system. If the DMARC settings were wrong, your local IT helpdesk would be drowning in tickets so I'm inclined to think you're trying to side-step the system.

[Dr Paul Taylor]

Re: M$ has killed email

I didn't say that DMARC was M$. Mxtoolbox told me I had to use it to get email through to M$. As a result I get multiple copies of the same report from M$ and G. I had to write a program to interpret the stupid bureaucratic format but got no useful information from it. Apart from the fact that my emails are being accepted at the boundary of M$ (and G) sites. But then they're filed as spam.

BTW Please don't lecture me about spam and "reputation". I don't send much email. I frequently check my own domain name and IP against the spam databases listed on mxtoolbox, along with those of my hosting and ISP companies: they are all clean.

The problem is, as stated in this article and elsewhere, M$ (and G) want to turn email and everything else in the tech world into a cartel. University manglement (in many universities and many countries, but notably not France) has been sucked into this, despite the history that FOSS software was developed to a large extent in academic and quasi-academic settings.

[doublelayer]

Re: M$ has killed email

They didn't lecture you about spam and reputation. They lectured you about using the tools that, like it or not, are mandated by a bunch of mail servers. It's an open standard, and lots of systems have had to add support for it. You probably have to if you want your mail delivered, and Microsoft isn't responsible for that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: M$ has killed email

Your IP address won't necessarily show in a blacklist, if you're sending from a "known" IP in an ISP block, then you will be greylisted by default until your mail server talks the talk...most major providers will always treat an ISP dynamic IP as a spam address because of the sheer number of infected machines out there sitting on botnets.

Your problem isn't Microsoft, your problem is you're trying to not pay for email at all. If you ask your ISP for a static IP (which usually attracts an additional charge) you will get an IP assigned from a different pool and you will have fewer problems. Your other option is to put your self hosted email server in COLO where you can also pay for a proper IP address.

These barriers need to exist because otherwise it's trivial for spammers to be spamming the spam.

[SsiethAnabuki]

Re: M$ has killed email

DMARC isn't a M$ protocol and certainly not unique to M$ servers. Most sizeable email systems will use DMARC, SPR, DKIM etc to protect the systems from excessive spam and if the email system you are sending from doesn't support them then you are going to have problems generally, not just when you encounter a corporate email system.

Most email providers will already have these set up and have guides if you are using your own domain. If you are hosting your own email system, then really, it's down to you to ensure that you have them in place if yoiu don't want your emails to be treated as potential spam. It's just part of running an email systems in the age of ubiquitous spam.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: M$ has killed email

If, however, you're looking for a sin MS has committed against email I suggest defaulting Outlook to top-posting.

And who was it who decided that email clients should be enabled to include HTML? That might have been Netscape rather than MS.

[captain veg]

Re: M$ has killed email

> who was it who decided that email clients should be enabled to include HTML?

If Microsoft had got its way it would have been RTF. At least HTML is an open standard. (Personally I only send plain text.)

-A.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: M$ has killed email

Microsoft is guilty of implementing Rich Text formatting in emails which no other mail client can properly support. To this day, I've never seen anyone use Rich Text formatting.

Anyone using anything other than plain text for emails is a fucking psychopath.

[Psion1k]

Re: M$ has killed email

I would say that enforcing SPF, DKIM and DMARC is the best thing that M$ and G and have done for the world. From a security standpoint, some of their defaults are even too lenient.

The WHOLE IDEA is to make this impersonal. BECAUSE of these protocols, you have a fairly good idea that the email you receive is actually from who it says it is from, WITHOUT having to do something horrendously stupid like whitelisting '[e-mail]'. Guess what that sort of stupid whitelisting means? If anyone finds out you deal with that address (and most people whitelist entire domains FFS), you are going to get thousands or even millions of spam/scam/phishing and possibly even malware etc. emails that will sail right past all your security (gotta have that newsletter, no matter the cost!).

It isn't hard to set up IF you control your email properly.

- SPF gives a list of servers that are allowed to send email for your domain. Idiots that use ~all instead of -all make that a nearly pointless exercise.

- DKIM (with domain alignment) ensures that your domain controls which servers are able to sign sent emails and ensure they arrive unchanged. Non-domain aligned only proves it wasn't changed, NOT that it came from an Allowed email server.

- DMARC ensures that the FROM: address listed where the user can see it matches the underlying SMTP address AND that at least either SPF or DKIM (domain aligned) worked. This tops [e-mail] sending out emails purporting to be from [e-mail].

It is possible that any single one of the above could be bypassed or rendered irrelevant, but I doubt all three together could be.

It isn't rocket science. The hardest part is getting your email under control, if you have let it run wild. It is stopping random people setting up random mail services under your domain's name across the globe, claiming to be you.

It is also important to realise that all these protocols do is protect the delivery pipe. If the legitimate source is hacked, you will get email correctly signed, from legitimate servers, and that is where your local server / PC logic handles known or heuristic scanning etc.

FIALING to set up these protocols for your domains shows that you are a Ma and Pa Kettle type of operation that gives zero hoots about security, yours or others.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: M$ has killed email

...and of course, don't commit the cardinal sin of trying to self host on a residential IP address.

[Tron]

Re: M$ has killed email

It's not personal. E-mail is filed as spam when someone reports it as spam (sometimes accidentally) or when nervous admins set the bar too high. Contact the relevant uni IT team and they will whitelist your address. I run my business on e-mail and e-mail is not dead. Webmail is good for most and brilliant for corporates (if they would use it) as it does block a lot of dodgy stuff. Just make sure you use a client like Thunderbird to keep a copy of your mail locally, and backed up.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: M$ has killed email

Not quite true: Microsoft recently tightened its spam filters, catching a lot of legitimate stuff that previous went through. For example, e-mails to me from the BSI (German Office of IT Security) are being held silently in quarantine, despite having correct DKIM headers (SPF was always a joke) from well-established servers. Mind you, Mailbox has decided that all Apple Developer e-mails are spam and my ticket about this is in its third month.

To make things worse, the rules are stricter for new accounts and must be overruled per account. GMail is similar as my initial e-mails to be people tend to land in their spam. :-/

[I could be a dog really]

Re: M$ has killed email

Mind you, the much, much, MUCH bigger sin committed by MS (and all the other megacorp manure heaps offered as email systems) is that they will accept mail, tell the sender they've accepted it for delivery - and then not deliver it. Thee is absolutely no excuse whatsoever for ever accepting an email and not delivering it - OK, I'll allow for bugs and technical failures, but by design, no f'in way.

If you aren't going to deliver it, don't accept it "<"period">"

Icon: What I'd like to do to all those megacorps that actively make the spam problem worse. Because unreliable email is worse than spam. Not getting an email and the sender thinking you've got it is worse than spam.

And it's not like there haven't been alternatives to SMTP proposed which would in practical terms kill much spam simply by changing the economics. True, massive upheaval in changing - but given the manure forced on the internet by the big megacorps, it could have been done and settled a decade ago had they actually wanted to improve things rather than use spam as a sales tool.

[doublelayer]

Re: M$ has killed email

If you think megacorps are the reason the protocol you linked wasn't adopted, you're going the wrong way. The only place to attempt implementing that was Google.

The only anti-spam measure that protocol included has already been accomplished in email, namely sender domain verification. That was a problem behind a lot of spam when it was suggested in 2000, when spammers were able to send anonymous and impersonating mail and expect it to arrive in inboxes anyway. Neither is practical nowadays with enforcement of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC or a subset of those. The protocol would do nothing against spam sent the way modern spammers do it, from real accounts, usually free ones or ones they've broken into. It would have plenty of other implementation problems, hence nobody implemented it in the first place.

Email has a lot of problems due to its age, and a new replacement protocol would let us do several useful things. It would be good for us to be realistic about what we could really accomplish though.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: M$ has killed email

I think it's debatable whether we need email at all anymore. I don't think we do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: M$ has killed email

"Thee is absolutely no excuse whatsoever for ever accepting an email and not delivering it"

There is, quarantining it because the spam filter isn't sure.

Most people using Microsoft 365 have no idea how to access the quarantine.

[I could be a dog really]

Re: M$ has killed email

NO, no, and thrice no.

Deliver it if you think it's ham, reject it (i.e. don't accept it) if you think it's spam. It's really that simple.

The message either arrives in the recipients inbox, or the sender gets a message from their server to say it couldn't be delivered.

Quarantining stuff is a f'in stupid idea. Users either never look in their junk/spam mailbox, or they just go and delete everything unread. Either way, it is part fo the problem - mail was sent, recipient didn't see it, sender has no way of knowing that it wasn't seen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: M$ has killed email

Have you ever worked in support?

Quarantining is the compromise that prevents people being a full time "spam detective".

With quarantining, I get maybe 10-15 requests a month asking why an email didn't arrive, and in those 10-15 cases it's usually pretty trivial to work out why they weren't delivered or even quarantined...if there was no quarantine and just straight up delete, that 10-15 cases would balloon to hundreds. Most of the time, email gets quarantined because some bonehead put a dodgy attachment on the email without password protecting it or they have the social skills of a sales brochure and just naturally score highly in a spam filter because of how they write emails / talk to people.

Users do look if you train them...I've been in tech for 25+ years...I spent my first 10 years trying to be the best damned techie Planet Earth ever saw, and I was fucking awesome...but I was always fucking busy and stressed, so much shit to do...the last 10 years I've focused on properly training people. I'm still fucking awesome, but I have about 75% less work to do because my users know what they're doing because I trained them...it's amazing how many tickets come up simply because users haven't been trained.

If your users don't know how to use something that you implemented, that's entirely on you...get out of your basement, lair, whatever it is you hide in and start organising training sessions. Your stress levels will reduce, your workload will reduce and most importantly, your attack surface will reduce.

Across all of my customers, I've only ever had one user in the last 5 years click a dodgy email...I have tried training them, over and over again...they cannot be helped...my customer won't fire them either...so they have a special "crash helmet" laptop build.

[I could be a dog really]

Re: M$ has killed email

Well done on missing the point.

At no point did I suggest deleting any emails - quite the opposite as I think it's a s**t idea.

What I suggest is outright REJECTING emails that fail whatever tests you have in place. That's not the same as deleting them, because for any legitimate email (leaving aside mail servers configured by idiots), the sender will immediately get a bounce message back telling then a) that their message didn't arrive, and b) most likely given them some clue as to why. If it's important, and b) doesn't apply, then they can try sending the bounce message to the recipient who can then send it to you to look in the logs - but i.m.e. this is rarely necessary.

With quarantining, I get maybe 10-15 requests a month asking why an email didn't arrive

That's only the ones the recipient knows that they should be getting. They don't know about the messages they didn't know they were supposed to have got and so won't ask about them.

it's amazing how many tickets come up simply because users haven't been trained

On that I think we are 100% in agreement :)

If your users don't know how to use something that you implemented, that's entirely on you...get out of your basement, lair, whatever it is you hide in and start organising training sessions. Your stress levels will reduce, your workload will reduce and most importantly, your attack surface will reduce.

Agreed, but why would anyone build a system that's so obviously a pile of s**t by design ? I don't. This isn't about what I do, it's about the absolutely s**t by design mail service provided by just about every online mail provider - and especially the big ones. For a previous employer, I successfully ran a reliable mail service for clients which works just as I describe - it either delivers mail into the users inbox, or it REJECTS. It's not hard. I did have a "technical problem" once that resulted in the loss of some emails, but because this was the exception rather than the norm, I was able to easily identify them and notify the users concerned.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: M$ has killed email

I think the battle about delivery confirmation was lost decades ago and greylisting has long been an accepted practice.

As for charging to send, it's clear who this would really benefit, but it would be almost be impossible to implement worldwide. DKIM and DMARC are great but what's the point when spam filters don't prioritise them?

[Homo.Sapien.Floridanus]

Re: M$ has killed email

“For example, e-mails to me from the BSI (German Office of IT Security) “

I thought the German office of IT security was the Schtoppenfromhakken.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: M$ has killed email

Common mistake, it's actually the SchpämmWaffe.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: M$ has killed email

If it's a good IT department, they won't white list your address at all. They will send you their requirements to pass through the filter.

[tango_uniform]

Re: M$ has killed email

Filed under "Old man yells at cloud; gets rained on".

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: M$ has killed email

Careful, most of the folks that post here are old, you will become the cloud.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: M$ has killed email

If you're self hosting email, this isn't a Microsoft problem. It's an IP greylisting problem. Most ISP IP ranges are treated as spam addresses by default. You need to configure your email server to hold and try again instead of outright fail on a bounce.

I can't remember the specifics (it's been a while since I self hosted email, I rarely use it anymore, most of my client comms is via Signal, WhatsApp or Teams these days, but not Slack, fuck Slack), but you need to configure your queues to catch the bounce, hold it for a specific amount of time and try again, then your email will make it through (assuming your DMARC, SPF etc is properly setup and your IP has a good reputation).

It's harder than it was to get email passed the various defenses, but I wouldn't pin the blame entirely on Microsoft...as cack as they are. It's the ever escalating arms race against spammers.

I think the more accurate statement would be that you've been cut off communicating with colleagues because someone somewhere is still insisting on email.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: M$ has killed email

I always thought it was Google who killed it

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: M$ has killed email

"it has conned university manglements to hand over their email systems"

Yup

UCL spent over £5million to implement the "free" mail system, which was then turned into a size-limited and then a fully charged system over the following 5-7 years

More importantly, it went from 1/2 FTE admin and helpdesk load to needing 3-4 fulltime helpdesk ON TOP of ordering departmental IT groups to provide frontline support for a service which they had exactly the same access to as endusers

They weren't the only ones conned this way.

[richdin]

Re: M$ has killed email

Oh, the halcyon days of Pegasus Mail (I'm dating myself)

[A Non e-mouse]

For individuals & probably small businesses, it's probably easy to use another tool.

The ubiquity of MS-Word is no longer the file format: It's the integration into SharePoint for live document editing and all the business systems that have integrated with Word.EXE

Those are the harder features for open source to replicate.

[SsiethAnabuki]

This hits it exactly. If you want Teams/Sharepoint integration then it's word for you, or a massive headache.

Microsoft has also always (at least in my living memory) been very good (compared to other options) at supporting enterprise deployment and management for IT teams.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sharepoint integration has been a thing for quite a while in LibreOffice. It's worked for me for a long time...and by extension, Team integration (file sharing on Teams is basically just Sharepoint).

It's all CMIS protocol stuff.

[brep51r]

managed nextcloud?

i know it’s not the same but managed nextcloud is a thing and very competitively priced at most retailers. and by nextcloud i mean whichever of that family of managed officelikes.

[Noodle]

Exactly, this article does appear to be trying to relitigate an argument that for most MS based enterprises is no longer really relevant. A big proportion of docs and spreadsheets now only ever exist as online versions in Office 365 and SharePoint and no open source rendering engine is going to affect that no matter how good it's fidelity.

[_wojtek]

the problem is the integration itself. I'm general integrations good but MS abuses it's dominant power to cudgel into using their tools and formats...

Does anyone remember Slack? The tiny app that promoted MS to create Teams and then bundle it into Windows and Office? which then resulted in Slack basically falling of the cliff? Lovely monopolistic practices...

[doublelayer]

Based on the organizations I've worked for and with, Slack is a lot stronger than Teams is, scoring at least a 3-to-1 anecdotal ratio. It doesn't seem that dead to me.

[_wojtek]

Oh, it's still used, but it wasn't sold to Salesforce without reason...

[Flocke Kroes]

Patents

I do not know if the promise still stands but years ago Microsoft promised not to assert its patents against standards compliant implementations of OOXML. Of course if any such implementation was ever created it would not render OOXML documents the same way as Microsoft Office. Creating something compatible was and probably still is an invitation to litigation.

The way out is the same as it was 20 years ago: Use ODF.

[Roland6]

Re: Patents

Microsoft will only come into line when governments actually mandate and use open document standards, of which there is only one: ODF managed by OASIS.

The absence of any reference to ODF in the article, along with unquestioning acceptance and promotion of the fundamentally flawed OOXML STD. suggests Rupert Goodwins is a MS stooge…

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Patents

It's not the formats that are the problem these days, it's the fonts.

Docs look weird in LibreOffice etc because by default the fonts don't exist on Linux. Once you install the ttf-msfonts package on your distro of choice (and adjust the default margins to match Office) you're usually golden.

The exception is if someone sends you a badly formatted document. Microsoft Office takes into account piss poor formatting, they know what you "intended" to do and display things accordingly...a lot of the Open Source solutions are a lot less forgiving.

For example, we all know that one wanker that uses SHIFT + RETURN to create paragraphs and ends up formatting their entire document inside one single paragraph element...those kinds of documents look like hot garbage on most Open solutions because they're interpreted correctly and the users sloppy formatting isn't accounted for.

Open solutions aren't formatting your documents incorrectly, what they're doing is exposing how shite you are at using a word processor.

[Roland6]

Re: Patents

Fonts… yes..

These are one reason why I have adhered to a convention I started using in the 1980s: use the fonts supported as standard by Postscript printers.

formatting… totally get where you are coming from. Even with Word 3.0 (yes the MS-DOS edition) and it’s really easy to set up stylesheets/templates and hot keys, I saw users struggle with formatting in the ways you allude to.

[IvyKing]

Re: Patents

I liked the way stylesheets worked on Word for DOS much better than the templates now used. The feature I really miss was being able to attach a different stylesheet to document (assumes one was consistent in naming and using the various styles).

[My other car WAS an IAV Stryker]

Re: Patents

Fonts aren't just a Microsoft problem or Linux problem.

Recently (2 days ago), I imported a data package from a non-office program on Windows 10 to a Mac. Same program on both machines, same major/minor version (18.4.1) but smaller patches may differ. Half the layouts looked like crap because the fonts render differently (especially vertical spacing) even though I'm the one who installed the particular font files (TTF or OTF) on both machines.

If I had just rendered every layout as an image, they'd look the same but wouldn't be editable. I could use one of Microsoft's programs, which probably would -- gasp! -- render correctly but is lacking key features I need at the destination.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Patents

I would say MacOS is the outlier in this case. They pad *everything* to get that "Mac" look...some of their devices also have weird resolutions...like iPhones for example...My Pixel 7 Pro is 1440 pixels wide, the latest iPhone 18 Pro Max is 1320 pixels wide...so anything that is designed for common resolutions looks perfectly fine on a Pixel, but goes slightly off the screen on an iPhone. It's fucking annoying.

[Anonymous Coward]

... because it has always been a standards-led organization dedicated to maximizing the options for its customers.

No.

... because it has always been a standards profits-led organization dedicated to maximizing the options stock dividends for its customers shareholders.

While screwing over its customers with faulty, undercooked code and crap support.

There you go.

Today is monday, no free pass for you.

.

[Anonymous Coward]

"... because it has always been a standards-led organization dedicated to maximizing the options for its customers.

No."

You realise that sentence was satire?

[Roland6]

I suspect many don’t know the difference between a “standards-led organisation” and a “Standards-led organisation”.

Microsoft is most definitely a lower-case ‘s’ “standards-led organisation”.

[JoeCool]

It's monday

because we don't have the attention span to read both halves of sentence ?

[Doctor Syntax]

"The internet had been born open and its protocols evolved rapidly without the weight of corporate motivation around their ankles. Open source servers and networking worked better and could be deployed at scale without the need to generate revenue. Open source rendering engines and frameworks freed the browser market to out-innovate the lock-in machine of Internet Explorer"

I wish that were true. For a while it may have been but no longer. Using my preferred browser, SeaMonkey, I can't see the comment ling on TFA nor on any of the other articles, not even by unblocking everything on the entire page in NoScript.

That's a silent one and an oddity in only, AFAICS, blocking one aspect. Some will just display a screenful of the first page and refuse to scroll to the rest of it, fail to follow links or whatever. Others will simply display a message to the effect that they don't like your browser and list the ones they prefer. They'll even complain about your browser being out of date which suggests they only deal with recent ones.

I don't think we can lay that at Microsoft's door. Possibly at marketing specifying something which pushes the limits so that the quirks of every single browser has to be taken into account. More likely, I suspect, of developers of frameworks trying to be too clever by half and not being half clever enough and the site developers using those frameworks. If only there were tests that could be run against sites known to and used by those developers.

[FirstTangoInParis]

So while trying to debug a web page that was refusing to display on the gang of three (Chrome, Edge and Safari) it was only Firefox that pointed out the error of my ways as I’d missed a tag. Fixing that fixed the problem. Kudos to Firefox devs.

[Doctor Syntax]

Kudos to you for debugging a web page realising that a web page might need debugging.

[frankvw]

The W3C HTML Validator was created to help clean up the mess of the Browser Wars and I've been religiously running all my web pages through it as a matter of routine for the past 28 years. Maybe you should, too. It saves oodles of time and lots of aggravation.

[Alan Brown]

https://validator.w3.org

You're welcome

[AndersH]

People issue is not to be overlooked

People who barely use Microsoft Word effectively resist adopting a product they know nothing about.

[doublelayer]

Re: People issue is not to be overlooked

This is unfortunately a large part of it. I know two people who felt the pain of Microsoft breaking Office 2019 on Macs. While I think the right solution to this is Microsoft getting sued for theft of the product people paid for, unless that happens, these users needed some software to edit documents and spreadsheets. I suggested to both of them that they try LibreOffice, or since they were on Macs, Apple's Pages and Numbers. I prefer LibreOffice because it's not as insistent at making you use their default format, but either of those would probably have worked for what they needed and were free.

They rejected both suggestions without trying either of them. They suggested familiarity and compatibility concerns to explain that, explanations I don't count very highly since they hadn't tried either of them, but this is a problem even when the software's entirely capable.

[Corinth]

Re: People issue is not to be overlooked

This is what I get. People demand Word, because they've been emailed a Word document and only Word will do.

We then give them Word and they still can't edit the document because it's a mixture of tempate, themes and local formatting.

Round tripping between Word and LO Writer still has issues. The fundamental concept of a document is slightly different betweeen the two applications.

[Anonymous Coward]

Group Policy integration in education

I'm not sure if it's been mentioned, but the fact that Office integrates with Microsoft Group Policies means that we can lock it down to stop students messing with it in schools.

Although I'm a huge fan of FOSS equivalents (was using Star Office before it became Open Office), i'm not sure if thats available with them?

And although pissing about with settings might get you fired in a corporate setting, or you're mature enough not to mess about, that doesn't apply in schools - you try getting the head to expel a kid because they're causing your IT life a misery.

[Mythical Ham-Lunch]

Re: Group Policy integration in education

>> And although pissing about with settings might get you fired promoted in a corporate setting

FTFY, judging by every manager I've ever met.

[AtomicDog]

Re: Group Policy integration in education

You know that if you do still insist on using Windows, Group Policies allow you to run logon scripts that can be used to reset an application config back to a known good state...?

If little Johnny has fucked up the settings, you tell him to log out and back in again.

[steelpillow]

Data islands

OOXML has always allowed you to stuff your "open standard" doc with proprietary data islands. So yes a F/LOSS tool can read and write OOXML, but it can't read or edit the actual, technically compliant document. I would invite any F/LOSS champion to try opening the things I have to work with, stuffed full of Visio diagrams.

Much like trying to integrate Sendmail with Outlook calendaring. :-(

[Anonymous Coward]

Working out what a software product is doing in order to create software that can interact with it is likely to fall foul of the law - specifically the one that the US insisted we pass years ago as part of a trade deal whereby the US in return would not impose tariffs on our exports to them. Hmm.

[steelpillow]

WINE

[Anonymous Coward]

Monopoly --

-- and M$ has already put hotels on Park Lane and Mayfair.

As someone who used to sit across an office from a former M$ developer, I was told that M$ will do everything in their power not to release the full OOXML specification that they use in Word as it would cost them millions of O365 licenses.

Yes, there is a standard, but M$ will consistently use undocumented features.

As one who occasionally has to transfer between Libre Office ODT and .docx formats I've found that LO does a decent job of converting, and has gotten better over the past few years. Ten years ago it would occasionally lose outline numbering, now it mostly does this without an issue.

I have things like defined headings, outline lists, tables of contents etc. plus various diagrams and photos.

[AtomicDog]

Re: Monopoly --

Lots of these --->

For the first MS Developer brave enough to leak it.

If you're playing silly games pretending something's a standard, good luck actually trying to take action against someone disclosing the one thing that actually lets it work in a truly interoperable manner.

[Sproggit]

Remember the Approval Process for OOXML?

Rupert wrote:

"That means the tooling wrapped around the spec has to account for proprietary dependencies that get smuggled in, such as fonts. It also means actively and continuously tracking the ground truth of Microsoft's evolving products and services."

It's worth noting a little bit of the history around the adoption of OOXML and it's acceptance by ECMA and the more heated battles when it became the ISO/IE 29500 Standard in 2008.

In September 2005, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts announced that it would migrate all documents to an open document standard (specifically declaring the intent to move to ODF). Microsoft had been flat-out refusing requests from large customers to do this - and they reversed course just weeks after the Commonwealth made their policy announcement.

Microsoft responded by writing OOXML as a "Standard" ... and depending on which version you consider, the resultant specification spans between 6,000 and 7,229 pages. By comparison, ODF 1.4 covers a total of 1,057 pages, split across 4 discrete parts:-

Part 1 - Introduction (8 Pages)

Part 2 - Packages (34 Pages)

Part 3 - Schema (802 Pages)

Part 4 - Recalculated Formula (213 Pages)

Within the OOXML Standard itself there are many "BLOB" structures, which Microsoft initially claimed were required to support legacy file formats and structures from older versions of their Office products, but which experience has shown actually build reliance (lock-in) on native Windows-specific API elements, system-level font-metrics and graphic-rendering logic (such as GDI coordinates, for example).

None of this is by accident - Microsoft produced something that was a "standard in name only" and then seemed to have relied upon the creation of a document specification that spanned 7,000 pages in order to bamboozle reviewers and obfuscate that what they had done was create a lock-in dependency on proprietary API's and rendering logic provided by Windows. Microsoft did the exact same thing when governments demanded that Internet Explorer be split from Windows - they simply moved the browser's logic in to OS-level DLLs as API calls and claimed that the browser was thus inseperable from the OS.

However, there's a deeper concern hidden in those 7,000 pages of weeds... and it concerns integrated macro logic. Unless you're doing something very (*very*) simplistic with your office suite, your spreadsheet is going to include more complex structures, including formulae, graphs, macros and charts. These have proven to be a minefield for portability, because Microsoft didn't even pretend to support these outside those proprietary BLOBs - and the relevant Standards Committees turned a blind eye. Translation of VBA, in particular, seems to still be a struggle [if attempted at all] and that might be the reason why there is no real alternative to Access. The closest still seems to be LibreOffice Base, but that product can't handle the forms or macros written in Access.

Only one thing is going to change this - which is for a nation somewhere to have national government agencies standardize on LibreOffice.

Do you remember what happened when Munich, Germany made the declaration that they would move approx 15,000 municipal desktop PCs to Debian and OpenOffice? It started out so well:-

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/07/munich-city-saves-millions-going-open-source

Then Microsoft went on the offensive:-

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/08/munich-city-linux-switching-back-windows

What is less obvious from the historic record about the goings-on with Munich is the way that Microsoft played dirty [because they could afford to]. So, for example, when it became apparent that Munich might be the first domino to fall, they immediately announced plans to relocate their German HQ to Munich - and completed that within 2 years. Just a coincidence, nothing to worry about.

That history is going to rinse-repeat unless or until a much stronger insistence on a 100% open and transparent standard is set and enforced. Which is a tall order, especially given macros and Access and the current lack of equivalence in the open source world.

On the other hand, the sophistication and polish of the FOSS ecosystem has transformed beyond all recognition over the last 10 years. Over the same time period, the only significant change from Microsoft is that their products have become more bloated and slower, making them more expensive to run.

Maybe the time is right for a lean, clean competitor to come in and shake things up - as long as there is a 100% level playing field, that is.

[steelpillow]

Re: Remember the Approval Process for OOXML?

> a lean, clean competitor

You mean, something like ODF?

[I could be a dog really]

Re: Remember the Approval Process for OOXML?

I'd suggest that what's needed is even simpler.

If large customers, i.e. government scale, turned round and insisted that any standard used must not only be "open" (in a way that OOXML is not), but that there needs to be a (documented) validation suite against which any product can be tested. In producing such a validation suite, MS would be forced to admit to it's tricks and expose the "real" OOXML - or it's own products would fail and be locked out.

Just forcing MS to use OOXML in the open way it's claimed would level the playing field. TBH, I'd be happy is OOXML got nuked from orbit and ODF adopted - but I'd take a really open OOXML as second best (even though it is a pile of manure.)

So, the challenge is to get large customers to turn round and tell MS to demonstrate 100% compliance with the published OOXML ...

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Remember the Approval Process for OOXML?

"Only one thing is going to change this - which is for a nation somewhere to have national government agencies standardize on LibreOffice."

There seems to be a chance that that will happen. Non-standard formats get declared legacy.

"That history (assuming you mean Munich) is going to rinse-repeat"

Not even MS can have that many national HQs.

[Sproggit]

Re: Remember the Approval Process for OOXML?

"Not even MS can have that many national HQs."

True, but what Munich's experience teaches us is simply that Microsoft are more than willing to do anything which is not outright illegal in order to get the outcome they want.

Microsoft are a currently valued at $2.84 Trillion, but have been as high as $3.85 Trillion (Yahoo Finance). So they certainly have pockets deep enough.

Would Microsoft also be willing to bend or break the law? Maybe history gets to be the judge...

[I could be a dog really]

Re: Remember the Approval Process for OOXML?

Microsoft are more than willing to do anything which is not outright illegal in order to ...

Would Microsoft also be willing to bend or break the law? Maybe history gets to be the judge...

Err, that's "a few decades" late. They've been found guilty more than once in courts of breaking the law - and the punishments were ... little more than a slap on the wrist and an instruction not to do it again.

Certainly back in the 80s, a common trick was to simply rip off stuff, and rely on the legal process being so expensive that anyone fighting back would just run out of money before MS had run out of legal options to delay. Like the in the current case about licence reselling, the playbook goes: lose in 1st court, appeal then lose in appeals court but you've dragged things out a year or two as well as adding £lots to the costs the plaintiff has to consider they might have to pay, appeal to the next court and drag things out some more, ... until you run out of courts to appeal to.

That can drag things out for a decade or more if they play it right, and no small business can survive with no income (MS have just killed their market remember) and having to pay all their own costs in the hope that they'll get it all back eventually.

[Sproggit]

Re: Remember the Approval Process for OOXML?

Fair...

[Androgynous Cupboard]

Re: Remember the Approval Process for OOXML?

Thank you. I was hoping someone would make this point. OOXML was, first and foremost, an abuse of the standards process. Not the first or the last, but possibly the most egregious.

[Blue Pumpkin]

Re: Remember the Approval Process for OOXML?

But the issue is that OOXML is only half the problem.

Yes OOXML is bloated, underspecified in many places, over-engineered to extreme complexity (numbering and styles I'm looking at you) and inrinisically linked to the platform it runs on - how do you work out the default fonts - well that depends on the OS, the language packs and the current locale - most of the time, except when it doesn't.

So yes there is supposedly a standardised interchange format - but this is not enough for interoperability.

Proper standards also have conformance suites and expected outputs - but there is nothing of that to see here.

But the other very real issue is the rendering - there is no interoperable specification of how to render a Word document - the rules for all of this are embedded in Microsoft's code. Many have tried to emulate what Word does with varying degrees of success. Even the most sophisticated OOXML processing solutions do not produce output 100% compatible with Word.

The number one complaint of anything other than Word is that the pages don't render properly - paragraph content is not exactly the same, page breaks are not in the same places. Again this comes down to specifying a not just an interchange format but a processing specification. Both Microsoft and ECMA knowingly sloped their Teflon shoulders on this.

IMHO the only way forward is to get off OOXML, and PDF for that matter, to formats that are semantically richer and much more independent of layouts produced for dead trees.

Books were a great invention - but now modern day electronic scrolls really need to make a comeback.

[Adair]

What's the bet ...

... that 98% of all documents created in MSWord (of whatever vintage) would be just as effectively written in Markdown, i.e. the 'need' for anything as overblown and under documented as .docx, or even .odf, is entirely psychological and/or a product of FOMO amongst those paid to do something with their nebulous job descriptions.

[steelpillow]

Re: What's the bet ...

Not really. Most documents have corporate logos. markdown does not include such things in the file.

[Sproggit]

Re: What's the bet ...

98% might be a *bit* of a stretch... but I definitely think you're on the right track.

It might be a little closer to the truth to say that the 80/20 rule applies - that 80% of documents written in word use 20% or less of Word's features and functionality.

[Adair]

Re: What's the bet ...

I'd go with 80:20, but regardless of the minutiae of exact proportions I would still argue that the vast majority of documents are little more than prettified plain text, i.e. functionally they would communicate just as will if they were written in ASCII.

And regarding 'logos' as mentioned above, or 'tables' for that matter, there are other more elegant and useful ways of including those, without the need for code monstrosities like Word.

Obviously, we are where we are, but if Word, and its misbegotten file format, happened to disappear overnight, apart from the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth of those who depend on muscle memory for their IT survival, the world and its textual communication needs would tick on quite happily—given a little time for re-adjustment. Even the musclebound would eventually adapt.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: What's the bet ...

Markdown is a late-comer. Why should anyone support yet another document format?

[steelpillow]

Re: What's the bet ...

The great thing about markdown is its stability as a standard. There aren't any pesky variants:

https://gist.github.com/vimtaai/99f8c89e7d3d02a362117284684baa0f

Er, let me rephrase that...

[Androgynous Cupboard]

Re: What's the bet ...

Asciidoc FTW. It’s Markdown that works.

[workrabbit]

Re: What's the bet ...

I tend to agree. Office suites are somewhat a dinosaur at this point. It makes more sense to use content management system like Notion except may be for spreadsheets.

[old lag]

Becoming irrelevant

In the IT world we used to do a lot of specs in Word, but not any more. It's all Confluence now which although is not perfect, is far preferable from a collaboration POV.

[JoeCool]

Re: Becoming irrelevant

Confluence has 1% of the useability of word (and this is from a wordperfect fan).

It's the minimum effort they had to put in to avoid word attachements in their db.

Although the potential to migrate away from word is there, trading off word for another non-portable and functionally crippled embedded doc utility isn't going to cut it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Becoming irrelevant

We used a tiny bit of Confluence at work for it's shared access model. To say we found "rubbish" would be an understatement.

[werdsmith]

Re: Becoming irrelevant

I can’t believe I found someone speaking in favour of confluence!!

We had it here, bosses paid a fortune for licensing it and JIRA. Everyone hated it, refused to use it.

Bosses gave in, money down the drain.

Vomit inducing products.

[Richard 12]

Re: Becoming irrelevant

Confluence is a Markdown flavour underneath, which is how it manages to sort-of support almost collaborative editing - as long as there's never more than one person editing at once, anyway.

You'd think the fact that all the on-prem versions are about to cease to exist would drive migration away, but apparently not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Becoming irrelevant

I wish. In my neck of the woods, we are using exactly the same Word-to-PDF model that we adopted 30 years ago (when networks finally got faster and cheaper than laser printers). But a certain IT supplier does not do document management systems worth the name (quite literally), they just feed in enough lies to keep manglement from revolting. So, over a quarter of the way through the 21st century, we must still make do with a filesystem-style web environment full of PDFs, and manual lifecycle managment. Hint: I am a Civil Servant.

[FIA]

By aggressively pushing Windows-only content and services that only Internet Explorer could consume, the online experience could be kept nicely controlled. If you wanted an online audience, you had to go to Microsoft.

This didn't work. Open source did.

This simply isn't true. Netscape (a commercial piece of software) was the main competitor at that time. The worry was if they were allowed to tie IE to windows they could then start bundling office too, so the precedent shouldn't be set. This is why Netscape sued.

This lead to that entire late 90s anti trust trial that they lost, then basically got let off from too.

It probably deserves at least a passing mention if you're discussing all this.

You wouldn't have OOXML, or any documentations of SMB, without it.

Open source is wonderful, and has brought the world many many things, but revisionism helps no-one.

[Tron]

Different pushbacks.

Browers are used by everybody, including vast numbers of people who never use Microsoft Works or whatever they now call it. So the pushback there was going to be decisive.

Microsoft document formats are overwhelmingly used by corporate bods and those transacting with them. Corporates are institutionally thick, slow and conservative. They will stick with whatever they will never get fired for using. So the pushback will be minimal. You won't get universal pushback as most people simply don't use any of this. At the consumer level, PDFs are the default. And even when Adobe screwed up their own format, breaking Acrobat, browsers and LibreOffice can deal with PDFs quite happily.

So there is unlikely to be any real pushback against MS behaving badly on this issue.

Personally, if I get a MS format document, I open it in LibreOffice. Anything I need to send out goes as a paper invoice or a PDF. Nobody complains.

I always encourage others to use LibreOffice.

[NetMage]

Re: Different pushbacks.

Was there really push back? Is the replacement of the IE monopoly with the Chrome monopoly really an improvement?

[keithpeter]

Excel

No mention of the spreadsheet component of MS Office? A fair chunk of the actual resource management and planning of one of my employers runs on Excel spreadsheets. And no, they don't interoperate with LO or Google docs.

[Roland6]

Re: Excel

Why stop at Excel … I expect many will have installed and used: PowerPoint, Visio, Project, OneNote, Publisher et al and so compounding the lock in…

[TSM]

Re: Excel

Publisher is my current problem. MS have decided to remove it from MS365 completely in a couple of months from now. We have decades of old Publisher files that we'd like to keep accessible, and my wife still uses it regularly.

MS's official guidance is to export all your Publisher files to PDF (with mixed results in my experience - and what if you want to keep editing them? uhhh... no comment), and to create anything new in Word or Powerpoint, despite those programs having only a fraction of the layout flexibility of Publisher.

Based on what I've been able to find online, there are maybe one or two FOSS alternatives that can kind of almost open a Publisher file on a good day, and have the result be recognisable as distantly related to the original. More commonly it gets completely mangled.

You can, apparently, continue to use the standalone version of Publisher. But this refuses to install alongside an MS365 installation. MS's guidance here is that you should dedicate a separate computer to your standalone Publisher instance, or perhaps run it in a VM.

[Expect Great Things]

Microsoft’s Undying Commitment to Fostering Competition

Ever the innovator, Microsoft now includes an advert for its competitors’ products every time you open a document. Ok, well technically it’s just an invitation to use Copilot, but same effect. Especially when combined with a grammar checker that routinely screws up, fully demonstrating the power of AI.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not even Microsoft

can create a competitor. The Web versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc are all absolute crap compared to their desktop equivalents. I found recently that documents made in Word wouldn't display Endnotes when shown in the Web version, and while Excel online can show graphs produced on the Desktop they're missing key functionality in the online versions.

It's been a couple of years since I last used LibreOffice, but it'd have been vaguely competitive with Office web-apps. Miles behind the desktop programs though.

[Adair]

Re: Not even Microsoft

'Miles behind the desktop programs though.' – one suspects your particular needs are very niche.

[Pascal Monett]

"It's not that there is no escape"

Of course not.

It's just that the escape includes manglement's acceptance to not want their precious spreadsheets in that glorious Excel formatting (because you have to admit that Excel does know how to show data).

And that's going to take a while longer.

[Harpist057]

There's no need for revisionism

This didn't work. Open source did. The internet had been born open and its protocols evolved rapidly without the weight of corporate motivation around their ankles. Open source servers and networking worked better and could be deployed at scale without the need to generate revenue. Open source rendering engines and frameworks freed the browser market to out-innovate the lock-in machine of Internet Explorer.

This is just nothing to do with networking, and there were a lot of deployments of IIS out there. The thing that killed Internet Explorer was open source, but it was also a corporation doing it. It was Chrome. I used Firefox, mostly, but the thing that caused millions of people to move off IE, and thus make sure websites weren't IE-only was Google. And those users didn't care about open source. They just wanted a better browser, which Google built.

[Uh, Mike]

Old Geezer Corner

I remember having to beg for the TN print chain so I could have lower-case characters on the line printer.

[Vincent Manis]

Re: Old Geezer Corner

I remember the TN print chain, I also remember a lengthy article in my local Computing Centre's newsletter, “The Computing Centre is Not A Print Shop”. I was teaching an introductory CS course that term, so the first assignment I set was to type in a brief resume and print it out. (I did tell the Centre first.)

[JimC]

Open source beat Microsoft to the web because the products were better, and it was a new environment. I don't think that will happen again. As Munich found, AIUI, you can replace the MS environment and get a very substantial percentage of the functionality.

But what that means to the end user is that you are taking away from them, unilaterally, what works and is familiar, never mind how flawed it may be, and replacing it with something that is unfamiliar and isn't quite as good. That is never going to work.

[Adair]

'...isn't quite as good...' - for a very arbitrary and subjective definition of 'good'. Remember, we're talking about software here and, worse than that, file formats!

Plus, I think Munich, and near neighbours, are thinking having revised and longer term views about what constitutes 'good'.

[Graham 32]

Exponential. Ugghh

> That year, the Internet was in its early stages of exponential growth

Is that the journalist's definition of exponential - ie "big" - or the actual definition of exponential. Just tell me the exponent. You will know it if you did the calculation. Thanks in advance.

[jake]

Re: Exponential. Ugghh

For some facts & figures, see Hobbes Internet Timeline.

If you want graphs, scroll towards the bottom.

HIT was considered canonical for quite a number of years, at least for the time period(s) listed. Probably still is.

[Blackjack]

If the price of free has no made companies move to open source I don't know what it will take.

[PhilipN]

"move any non-trivial Word document .."

Troublesome enough just between different versions of Word - and don't get me started on different OS versions....

[pitrh]

A historical note: Anybody here remember RTF?

This brings back memories, for sure.

To the extent that I would think it appropriate to reprise a piece I wrote in 2007-2008, Does anybody here remember Artie Eff?, which has a thing or two about Microsoft vs standards.

For the subthread about email, I offer a similarly old (2011 vintage) piece about the other problem that has not gone away, The Problem Isn't Email, It's Microsoft Exchange.

It is sort of amazing that both of these problems persist, all those years later.

[Anonymous Coward]

Eponymization

I had to look up the word.

But effectively MS has managed to Eponymise the word processor.

All word processors are now 'Word'. Many users will not consider anything that isn't called 'Word'.

The effort required to get users to accept a different word processor even if there was next to no functional difference is often just too much work.

MS has also deftly integrated most of its tools so they are codependent on each other. It might be done badly but its enough again to make change too much work.

With the culling of pretty much every internal IT training program to save costs (and saying people are now 'digital natives' is a bullshit way to excuse not doing training) the changes of getting the mob off Word onto something like Libra Office is next to negligable.

Which is sad as MS products are remarkably half-arsed at the moment and FOSS options will do 99% of all tasks for 99% of people.

[_wojtek]

Force using ODF...

Without regulations forcing (at least public institutions) to use open ODF nothing will change simply by inertia... And if public sector has to use ODF then MS will be forced to support it (well) and then there issue of sharing ODF with anyone will be gone becase excuse "hace to use ms format becase office" will be rendered irrelevant.

Internet changed because if Google fighting Microsoft - google wanted multiplatform internet and not "best viewed in IE" so they pushed hard...

Right now they are same as MS pushing to stick to their ecosystem and for anyone using Google docs the actual format is irrelevant...

[Joe Burmeister]

Relevant LibreOffice post on OOXML

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/02/06/why-ooxml-is-not-a-standard-format-for-office-documents/

[Anonymous Coward]

The solution is not to try to brute-force the transitional format, any more than the solution was to brute force IE and Activex quirks.

The solution is to mandate ODF (the clean format anyone can implement) like web sites insisted on W3C HTML (not IE quirks).

Sure it will be some painful just like insisting on real W3C HTML was painful. In the end MS had to support real W3C HTML not the pile of deliberately incompatible and impossible to duplicate quirks. And that broke IE’s lock when trying to out-quirk IE went nowhere.