Posted on 10/05/2005 7:42:38 AM PDT by N3WBI3
Opinion: It's not coincidence that after Massachusetts made it clear that it would support open formats, Microsoft is now going to include PDF in the next version of Office.
What is Microsoft up to, anyway, with its sudden plan to finally support PDF?
It wasn't announced by Bill Gates loudly to the world at the Professional Developer Conference a few weeks ago. It also wasn't proclaimed to the Microsoft faithful at its recent Most Valuable Professional Global Summit.
No, instead, Microsoft quietly squeaked out the news on a Saturday afternoon in Microsoft Office Program Manager Brian Jones' Weblog.
Could it be that it's because Microsoft is backing its way into ever so reluctantly supporting an open format after Massachusetts decided that it would only use office suites that supported open formats like PDF and OpenDocument?
It certainly looks that way to me.
For all of its talk about being an innovator, Microsoft is really just a follower.
PointerClick here to read more about Microsoft's decision to build PDF support into Office 12.
Sometimes, of course, the company is a very, very reluctant follower. It took Microsoft's leadership forever to live down the fact that they had initially dismissed the Internet. Now, I see Microsoft slowly and painfully embracing open standards.
Mind you, this move is just a beginning. I recently pointed out that it would be trivial for Microsoft to add OpenDocument support to Office.
I don't see that happening anytime soon now though.
With PDF support alone, Microsoft can still try for Massachusetts government contracts without having to add OpenDocument.
Well, until StarOffice, OpenOffice.org and WordPerfect's support for OpenDocument force Microsoft's hand anyway.
After all, PDF is much more of an end-result format than one that most people actually want to edit in. As OpenDocument and the applications that enable it gain more support, Microsoft will find itself forced into supporting it too.
Now, some might say that this is just Microsoft giving the people what they want. Many users have been asking for a PDF option from Microsoft since Adobe Acrobat 4 appeared in 1999.
eWEEK Special Report: Office Politics
But, if that's all there was to it, then why was Microsoft banging the drum for its own PDF substitute, Metro, only a few months ago?
Still others might say that is part and parcel of Microsoft's recent efforts to compete against Adobe in other ways: Sparkle vs. Flash, Acrylic vs. Photoshop and so on.
To which, I say, "Why now? Why announce it in such a subdued way?"
No, all those other things play a role, but at the end of the day, Microsoft felt that it must make at least a concession to open standards by adopting PDF.
After all, it's not like Massachusetts is the only entity that is seriously considering making supporting open standards a requirement for its software purchases. Massachusetts was just the first to make it official.
Microsoft would love it if it could make everyone stick to its proprietary formats. That forces customers to keep buying its products. But it can't. And, much as Microsoft may hate it, its executives know it. So it is that as quietly as the company could, Microsoft is, once more, making concessions to open standards.
eWEEK.com Senior Editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has been using and writing about operating systems since the late '80s and thinks he may just have learned something about them along the way. He can be reached at sjvn@ziffdavis.com.
I gave you Nielson Netratings instead. Where were you, out looking for holes in open source code?
Oh ye of little web browsing skills.
I know it was hard to find. It was only in Google's press release section.
the Google Toolbar (which is already on practically every computer out there) will be optionally available when people download the Java Runtime Environment?
If you'd care to read Google's press release (sorry, I forgot, they didn't release one), there's a bit more to it than that.
The agreement aims to make it easier for users to freely obtain Sun's Java™ Runtime Environment (JRE), the Google Toolbar and the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, helping millions of users worldwide to participate in the next wave of Internet growth.
Dude, you got spanked hard by GE. But keep trying. Ordinarily, I don't like clowns. But watching you flail is pretty damned funny...
It wasn't yesterday. As far this major announcement that was going to shake the world, it freaking fizzled like 6 month old two liter coke. When google ever changes their mime of a front page to something worthwhile, give me a ping. Till then, you're nothing but mindless worshiper of vaporware.
Ain't this place hilarious? These guys think they're actually making some points when really it's like watching ants run around all over each other after you kicked their bed over.
Naw... ya think?
In the case of PDF though, it was a really simple straightforward problem. Currently, on our OfficeOnline site, we are seeing over 30,000 searches per week for PDF support. That makes a pretty easy decision :-)
Who does Brian Jones think he's kidding? That 30K hits per week didn't just start this week, did it? And yet nobody said anything about this at PDC or MVP. I'm sure that PDF has been a customer requirement for some time. Obviously, many people wanted this. And Brian makes the announcement on his blog?
Only now, when Microsoft really wants back on that approved vendor list, does it finally add the support. Maybe it'll work. Maybe they'll be off the hook for ODF support by tossing out the PDF bone.
Really innovative.
IIRC, SHA is looking vulnerable to come reduced round implementations. Granted, they are entirely academic attacks, as they are not close to full-strength implementations, but the attacks can only get better. As computational speed and storage continue to increase, it can only get worse. The recent reports of progress made on generating MD5 collisions is really a shame in many ways, as it has been deployed pretty widely.
The entire field has gotten really interesting in the past decade as the needs of the public for good crypto has increased. Thank G-d we no longer have to depend on dubious black-box implementations of "export approved" crypto.
GE, I don't have any idea why I'm bothing to respond to you, but here goes anyway. "Obscurity" and "security" are two completely different things. They cover different areas, and are in fact, in many ways are incompatible. A better term for the useful kind of "obscurity" is "secrecy". When speaking about crypto, which is the subject of the post you responded to, if you want to protect your secrets from eavesdroppers, your key must be a secret. This is just basic mathematics. Even though your private key (speaking here specifically about PGP and similar implementations) is, itself encrypted with a passphrase, the difficulty of brute forcing a passphrase of any reasonable length and complexity is massive orders of magnitude less than decrypting an encrypted message.
Obscurity of algorithms, which is how I read the tone of your post to mean is idiocy of monumental proportions. You do crypto with mathematics. A strong algorithm is not kept secret because its strength does not lie in its being unknown. The strength of good crypto lies in the very nature of the universe itself. If someone tries to sell you code in a black box, you're either crazy or stupid to accept their assurances on face value. Anyone can create a cypher that he can't break himself. Making one that other people can't break is somewhat more difficult.
Indeed, FedGov recently mandated replacement of the venerable DES standard, and had a public competition to vet the algorithms proposed to take its place. Unlike in the past, when the NSA could suggest to IBM (who created DES) that the addition of a certain matrix of values called the "S-Register" would make it stronger (we discovered later that it made DES more resistant to differential cryptanalyisis-which was unknown to acedemia at the time), and it would just be accepted at face value. These days the state of the art of cryptography in government isn't that much different from the best folks in business or acedemia, because there is a demand for it.
GE, if you actually knew anything about cryptography, (or anything else for that matter) you might actually be dangerous.
What is Microsoft up to, anyway, with its sudden plan to finally support PDF?
Actually, I'd like to know what Adobe is up to.
MS tried to get Adobe to allow Office to read PDFs in Office 97 and Adobe refused so, who's "finally" allowing who to do what?
Get a room you two.
Exactly. This doesn't sound like a big deal to me.
I think I read somewhere that MS is moving its Word format to XML. If true, that is a big deal.
MS has always had the right according the the license for PDF, MS probabally wanted to 'extend' PDF..
Wow, did you say "must"? I don't believe it, somebody understands that obscurity is the essential element of effective encryption, not openness, which may be helpful in testing, but isn't an actual requirement. Now go set all the brainwashed idiots straight that insist openess created the sun and the earth.
This coming from a Microsoft worshipper. "Vista" was nothing but hype for how long?
Yeah, like you looked. Or knew to look for a press release dated yesterday, saying the event happened on that day. It wouldn't have been hard for a person of sub-normal intelligence to check before posting something so idiotic.
You lose, like apparently always.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fastforward/0,15704,1114200,00.html?promoid=yahoo
" It is telling that the press release didn’t even appear on Google’s website, only on Sun’s. "
I don't worship vaporware, never have never will. I don't know that I've ever even mentioned the word "Vista" on this site, much less touted it. Meanwhile, you bozos run around saying "THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT WILL CHANGE IN ONE WEEK THANKS TO THE VAPORWARE FROM GOOGLE"
GE: Wow, did you say "must"? I don't believe it, somebody understands that obscurity is the essential element of effective encryption, not openness, which may be helpful in testing, but isn't an actual requirement. Now go set all the brainwashed idiots straight that insist openess created the sun and the earth.
O.K. folks, what we have here is one of either two things. Either it is absolutely classic textbook trolling behavior, or GE is quite possibly the stupidest person I have ever had the extreme displeasure to post to on a forum such as this.
I just have to think that it is the former because no one could be that dumb and still remember to breathe.
GE, you go right on using any black box crypto that it passes your fancy to use. Those of us in the real world will sick with stuff that actually works as advertised.
I can't believe that anyone would be so incredibly ignorant as to believe that because keys are kept secret, it is some kind of argument for or against public disclosure of encryption algorithms.
Un-fracken believable.
Pinging those who might need a laugh.
But to answer your query, I was questioning Microsoft's motivation and timing about announcing this change now. Brian didn't say how long they've been working on it, he just said "a lot of effort and time".
To me, it wasn't significant. ETRM was approved nearly a month ago. MS could have added the support within that timeframe; I'm sure the programmers understood the format.
If MS had it done earlier, they could have announced it on 9/23 and stolen MA's thunder. MS didn't. That tells me that this was a reaction.
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