Tag Archives: office

microsoft

Keeping track of Microsoft financials

I’m in the habit of drawing up a simple table to summarise Microsoft’s quarterly results.

Quarter ending March 31st 2010 vs quarter ending March 31st 2009, $millions

Segment Revenue Change Profit Change
Client (Windows + Live) 4415 +967 3061 +788
Server and Tools 3575 +84 1255 +31
Online 581 +59 -713 -302
Business (Office) 4243 -265 2622 -134
Entertainment and devices 1665 +36 165 +206

Windows 7 booming, Office a bit slow prior to the release of the 2010 version, Online still draining money. Xbox doing OK. In other words, nothing much of interest.

microsoft, software, xml

Dancing on a pin: Microsoft belatedly answers Open XML critics

Microsoft’s Doug Mahugh has replied to accusations from ISO expert Alex Brown that the company is doing little to implement its own Open XML standard. The issue is that the XML document formats in Office 2007 are, from the ISO perspective, meant to be “Transitional” – a compromised format designed to interoperate with existing binary documents – and that the standard Microsoft is meant to be implementing is “Strict”, an improved standard that can more easily be implemented by others.

Mahugh says:

I’d like to state clearly and unequivocally at this time that we will support reading and writing of ISO/IEC 29500 Strict no later than the next major release of Office, code-named Office “15.”

He doesn’t say whether or not it “Strict” will be the default in Office 15, which we can expect to see in around 2013. This is the real pain-point for users: if the default changes, the result is the frustration of sending or receiving unreadable documents.

Microsoft is dancing on a pin. On the one hand, it wants to convince governments, academics and other standards-sensitive organisations that Microsoft Office does the right thing. On the other hand, the benefit to users of breaking document compatibility for the sake of ISO compliance is rather invisible.

Document compatibility is the thinking behind having read-only support for Strict in Office 2010 (and coming to Office 2007). If Microsoft can get read-only support widely deployed, then in 2013 the Strict documents that start to circulate will not be so problematic.

The approach is not completely unreasonable; these things take time. That said, Microsoft’s communication of its intentions has been poor. Further, Mahugh does not answer the parts of Alex Brown’s post that address quality:

It is also a worrying commentary on the standards-savvyness of the Office developers that the first amateur attempts of part-time outsiders find problems with documents which Redmond’s internal QA processes have missed. I confidently predict that fuller validation of Office document is likely to reveal many problems both with those documents, and with the Standard itself, over the coming years.

My perspective on this as a journalist is that Microsoft did not consider Open XML or standards compliance even worth a mention in its publicity so far and its detailed reviewers’ guide for Office 2010. That suggests it is not much of a priority.

So full support in 2013 or thereabouts. My expectation is that by then saving and editing documents online will be more common than it is today, and that the assumptions the Office team seems to make about the steady progress of its huge desktop suite are likely to prove faulty.

microsoft, xml

Microsoft accused of failure to observe Open XML standards process

2 Comments

XML specialist Alex Brown, who was involved in the ISO standardisation of Microsoft’s Open XML – still perhaps best known as OOXML – says Microsoft has failed to honour the commitments it made when the standard was approved. In particular, it seems little progress has been made between Office 2007 and Office 2010. The key problem is that Microsoft implemented Open XML before it was standardised. There were numerous changes made during the standardisation process, but what to do about the existing implementation? Loosely, the existing unacceptable format was given a “Transitional” status, while the more satisfactory, corrected format was called “Strict”. Microsoft promised to implement the “Strict” variant as soon as it could. Brown adds:

I was convinced at the time, and remain convinced today, that the division of OOXML into Strict and Transitional variants was the innovation which allowed the Standard to pass. Enough National Bodies could then vote in good conscience for OOXML knowing that their preferred, Strict, variant would be under their control into the future while the Transitional variant (which – remember – they had effectively rejected in 2007) would remain purely for the purpose of accurately specifying old documents: a useful aim in itself.

It is now two years since Open XML was approved, and Microsoft is on the brink of releasing a new version of Office. So does Office 2010 implement Open XML Strict? Apparently not – it’s the Transitional version. That is bad enough; worse still, according to Brown, it does not even conform correctly to that:

It is also a worrying commentary on the standards-savvyness of the Office developers that the first amateur attempts of part-time outsiders find problems with documents which Redmond’s internal QA processes have missed. I confidently predict that fuller validation of Office document is likely to reveal many problems both with those documents, and with the Standard itself, over the coming years.

Note that Brown is basing his remarks on the preview of Office 2010; we have not seen the final release yet. I can believe that Microsoft may fix some issues, but it looks vanishingly unlikely that Office 2010 will implement the “Strict” standard which ISO approved.

Brown’s remarks shed light on something I noticed when reviewing the preview:

As for Open XML, it’s notable that Microsoft neglects to mention it at all in its Reviewer’s Guide, even though this is supposedly the release that will fully implement ISO/IEC 29500. It is odd how this has gone from a cause to campaign for, to not-worth-mentioning in just over a year. To be fair, few users ever cared about XML formats themselves: it is only when documents get scrambled or fail to open that such things become important.

No wonder Microsoft said nothing about it, if in reality it has lost interest in conformance.

I think it is a good thing for Microsoft to standardise its Office formats. Selfish manipulation of standards committees on the other hand is not acceptable. One thing is for sure: if Brown is right and

without a change of direction, the entire OOXML project is now surely heading for failure.

then the company will only have itself to blame. Its nightmare will re-emerge: entire governments mandating OpenOffice for the sake of  standards conformance.

That said, and despite the hype, I regard Office 2010 as a minor release. 64-bit Excel, a few tweaks, and a first foray into browser-hosted versions. Microsoft often displays this pattern, following up a release with major changes – Office 2007, for example – with one that is really just a refinement of what went before. It is not impossible that somewhere in the corridors of Redmond a team is working on a new Office that does a much better job with the Open XML standard.

Over to Microsoft – serious about Open XML? Or just doing the minimum necessary to protect a lucrative market dominance – maybe a bit less than the minimum?

Update: Microsoft’s Doug Mahugh has replied to Brown’s comments here. I am writing separately about this.

cloud computing, microsoft, software

What does Ribbon Hero say about Microsoft Office?

Microsoft has released a tutorial game called Ribbon Hero in its Office Labs. This installs an Office add-in for Word and Excel which watches you work. It has several features. When you perform an action such as Copy and Paste for the first time, it awards you points. You get further points by performing “challenges”, where Ribbon Hero generates a document and sets you a task, like removing duplicates from a table. Finally, you can upload your score to Facebook to share with friends.

I gave it a go. It worked, though on the second challenge I got the right result in what the Ribbon Hero clearly considered to be the wrong way, which was annoying. Hint – use the Ribbon. Should have thought of that.

image

Ribbon Hero is easily impressed, and on a quick look the tasks are mostly basic ones, though I guess they could be expanded if the idea proves popular.

Irritating and patronising, or a brilliant training tool? Well, learning by doing is a good principle so I don’t dismiss it, even if my own reaction is more the former one.

The interesting aspect is what the existence of this tool says about Office. Not everyone gets on with the Ribbon; some miss the old menus. Further, Office is so bloated feature-rich that knowing it in depth is a formidable task. I have often been told that the majority of wish-list requests are for features that already exist.

In consequence, a large part of the challenge for Microsoft’s Office team lies in enabling users to operate the product successfully. This is not a new problem; the notorious “it looks like you’re writing a letter” Office Assistant, or Clippy, was another attempt. The Ribbon itself was also meant to address it, though I am convinced that Microsoft also intended to differentiate itself from the competition and to devise a user interface it had some hope of protecting, if necessary, in the courts.

You could argue that the very existence of Ribbon Hero is an admission of failure. The perfect office suite would not need a game to teach it; it would work so much in accord with what the user expected that it would not be necessary.

I use Office all the time and respect it. That said, eventually Microsoft (or a competitor) will need to remove features rather than adding them, or to retire Office and deliver something better in its place, that achieves the same goals but with less complexity – if such a thing is possible. And if it is going to happen, it will happen on the Web; for some, it already has.

azure, cloud computing, hp, internet, microsoft, virtualization, windows

New HP and Microsoft agreement commits $50 million less than similar 2006 deal

1 Comment

I’ve held back comment on the much-hyped HP and Microsoft three-year deal announced on Wednesday mainly because I’ve been uncertain of its significance, if any. It didn’t help that the press release was particularly opaque, full of words with many syllables but little meaning. I received the release minutes before the conference call, during which most of us were asking the same thing: how is this any different from what HP and Microsoft have always done?

It’s fun to compare and contrast with this HP and Microsoft release from December 2006 – three years ago:

We’ve agreed to a three-year, US$300 million investment between our two companies, and a very aggressive go-to-market program on top of that. What you’ll see us do is bring these solutions to the marketplace in a very aggressive way, and go after our customers with something that we think is quite unique in what it can do to change the way people work.

$300 million for three years in 2006; $250 million for three years in 2010. Hmm, not exactly the new breakthrough partnership which has been billed. Look here for what the press release should have said: it’s mainly common-sense cooperation and joint marketing.

Still, I did have a question for CEOs Mark Hurd and Steve Ballmer which was what level of cloud focus was in this new partnership, drawing these remarks from Ballmer:

The fact that our two companies are very directed at the cloud is the driving force behind this deal at this time. The cloud really means a modern architecture for how you build and deploy applications. If you build and deploy them to our service that we operate that’s called Windows Azure. If a customer deploys them inside their own data centre or some other hosted environment, they need a stack on which to build, hardware software and services, that instances the same application model that we’ll have on Windows Azure. I think of it as the private cloud version of Windows Azure.

That thing is going to be an integrated stack from the hardware, the virtualization layer, the management layer and the app model. It’s on that that we are focusing the technical collaboration here … we at Microsoft need to evangelize that same application model whether you choose to host in the the cloud or on your own premises. So in a sense this is entirely cloud motivated.

Hurd added his insistence that this is not just more of the same:

I would not want you to write that it sounds a lot like what Microsoft and HP have been talking about for years. This is the deepest level of collaboration and integration and technical work we’ve done that I’m aware of … it’s a different thing that what you’ve seen before. I guarantee Steve and I would not be on this phone call if this was just another press release from HP and Microsoft.

Well, you be the judge.

I did think Ballmer’s answer was interesting though, in that it shows how much Microsoft (and no doubt HP) are pinning their hopes on the private cloud concept. The term “private cloud” is a dubious one, in that some of the defining characteristics of cloud – exporting your infrastructure, multi-tenancy, shifting the maintenance burden to a third-party – are simply not delivered by a private cloud. That said, in a large organisation they might look similar to most users.

I can’t shake off the thought that since HP wants to carry on selling us servers, and Microsoft wants to carry on selling us licences for Windows and Office, the two are engaged in disguised cloud avoidance. Take Office Web Apps in Office 2010 for example: good enough to claim the online document editing feature; bad enough to keep us using locally installed Office.

That will not work long-term and we will see increasing emphasis on Microsoft’s hosted offerings, which means HP will sell fewer servers. Maybe that’s why the new deal is for a few dollars less than the old one.