The brainteaser is simply a math problem. Well maybe not simple. No intent for it to continue the analogy. I think you have all the info you need. But feel free to assume a uniform distribution of prices and shop location, or a normal distribution, or any other symmetrical distribution. I think the answer is the same either way.

Actually, I once used this brainteaser to convince an economics friend of mine to stop dating and get married to the women he we currently seeing. So I guess it can be used in some contexts.

First off, assuming an somewhat even distribution of foot sizes, and 1/2 size increments, the average misfit would be 1/8 size, not 1/4 size. In the US, I believe it’s 1/3 inch/size. 1/24 inch is likely (I’m guessing based on my own feet) *well* within the typical size difference between the two feet.

The brainteaser analogy is easily answered if you give enough information to do so at all, and choose criteria for when to make the buy. e.g. an even distribution within a certain range and a probability of getting a lower price.

“So what does this mean for document formats?”

The shoe example means that it’s close enough the vast majority of the time. You “see zero value in having a second standard.” I see value in things like TeX. But just as you could pay somebody to make custom shoes, you’re only going to do that if you really need an exact fit.

The brainteaser’s lesson you seem to ignore. You say sometimes we can only choose once, but then conclude that eventually the dominant players have to give in to standardization.

The lesson I draw from the brainteaser is that if your design (i.e. initial question) is vague and ill-defined, you end with a mess of a format. Good design is important for making future decisions and future maintenance.

If you want a good analogy to illustrate your final point… I’m sorry, I got nuthin’

That is something that should perhaps be mentioned to the Danish bean-counters.

Of course, as far as Microsoft goes, it is historically true to say that Microsoft has agitated for consumer choice for as long as it was the under-dog, and not a moment longer.

1) You could proactively convert them to PDF for archiving.

2) You could convert them to PDF on demand, when requested.

3) You could preserve your legacy applications, perhaps in a virtualized image, so you can run it concurrently with your existing environmnet. This ensures that you will have the truest fidelity, since you can actually run Word 95 on Windows 95, for example.

If fidelity of legacy documents is a big concern, then it makes sense to think of this as preservation task, like an archaeologist or museum curator. The first duty is not to harm the artifact. You are trying to preserve it, not introduce errors or data loss by converting it to the new OOXML. For forensic purposes, even the smallest things like date stamps on the files would be changed by conversion. How can you vouch for something as evidence if it has been converted?

The Copenhagen Post article shows the same confusion we’ve seen in other places: mixing up open standards and open source and confusing formats for applications.

Copenhagen Post

It’s interesting to the the misunderstandings that are shown in the article and show the public confusion about this debate.

Someone had raised the issue at a meeting on OOXML vs ODF that they needed OOXML to get old documents on computers for legal reasons i.e. as expert witnesses. So I wondered what is wrong with OpenOffice.org or any word processeor that has reverse engineered the .doc formats. Or what in fact is wrong with keeping copies of all word processors running on the correct OS in a virtual machine. Or better yet automating that and printing them from their original word processor into PDF which is an ISO standard.

Why I think this legacy thing is bogus is that we’ve created documents for centuries. We can still read many of those. Then in the early 90s vendors lock their formats. So we have about 15 years of proprietary formats. The OOXML spec talks about accesing millions of legacy documents. So I’ve been wondering what exactly is the volume that actually needs to be accessed. And what is the growth rate of document creation. That would certainly help us understand how much more important future interoperability is over legacy. And I’m pretty sure the numbers would show that the 15 wasted years will soon be nothing.

Today I filled in forms in a bank on paper and they’ll get filed. So we still have tonnes of that way of document storage. Things will only grow exponentially.

This is done purely as a cost-saving measure by Microsoft. It is entirely the wrong thing to do technically, but it saves them the expense of writing more code to translate the document into the new format. Of course, at the same time it makes OOXML more expensive for anyone else to work with, since you now need to support both VML and DrawingML.

Someone needs to point out to Microsoft that “legacy document support” doesn’t belong in a standard. Legacy documents should be moved into a new file using the new standard format which then allows the document to be preserved.

If you want the document to look the same as it did before conversion, use appropriate tags and attributes in the new standard. It makes zero sense to have a “xxxAsWordYY” tag. Any such tag should be converted into an existing tag with appropriate attributes.

Maybe it is just too obvious for me.