“How in the world is it logical–or just–to give Jamaica and Japan equal standing?”

Because technical standards should be evaluated on technical merits, not socio-, geo- or political factors.

Either you believe that we should introduce political weighting into a technical process, or that Jamaica can’t produce a technical evaluation of same worth as Japan.

Either option is despicable.

Things get very problematic very quickly when you start saying that some voters are more equal than others.

One example is that the rich pay more taxes than the poor, but nobody would suggest they deserve more votes.

A more concrete example is that American elections give more weight to votes from members of less populous states. When a president is elected based on a minority of the vote (such as in the current president’s first term), it can be terribly divisive.

Finally, the idea of weighting votes only makes sense if people come to the ISO looking to defend their national interests, rather than trying to find the right technical solution to a problem.
As Martin Bryan recently commented, encouraging people to look at the ISO that way would reduce the quality of its work.

– Andrew

You’re going to trust Microsoft’s own search engine? Their old search engine was demonstratively proven to provide Microsoft-biased results, so it wouldn’t be surprising if Live Search does so as well.

Of course, there is nothing stopping someone from creating another standards organization with different voting rules. Rich countries, and rich companies, will make out well in either situation.

How in the world is it logical–or just–to give Jamaica and Japan equal standing?

Japan’s population is MUCH larger than Jamaica’s. Its use of document technology is likely disproportionately larger (than population alone would suggest.) And its technical acumen is almost certainly orders of magnitude greater than Jamaica’s.

It seems to me that the people who use standards the most and understand them the best should have a correspondingly larger say in what those standards consist of.

Otherwise you’re setting yourself for all kinds of behind-the-scenes hijinks, with market leaders and wealthier nations buying off poorer ones–which is precisely what happened!

I’d note that applying this same Live Search technique to ODF files results in increasing ODF numbers around 10-fold as well. So there is no support for the claim that Google is somehow depressing the OOXML numbers.

In any case, it is good, from the trend perspective, to have multiple independent data sources, so I’ll start tracking and reporting the Live Search numbers as well. But I don’t have historical data there, so it will take a couple of months before we can see what trend is indicated there.

Are there any other search engines that allow queries based on document type?

What may be possible is to estimate what percentage of PDF pages are actually created by OOo or Word 2007 rather than by acrobat or pdfcreator. You’d take a sample of the PDFs and look inside to see what tool built them. If you can create a query that includes dates (all PDFs from oct 2007) then take a sample of those, you could see how the percentage changed.

It would be hard to do this, except for a search engine company tthat already indexed PDFs, such as yahoo, google, and, um, microsoft.

Using Live search I find much higher numbers:
64100 DOCX files
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=contains%3Adocx&go=Zoeken&mkt=us-us
253000 ODT files
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=contains%3Aodt&go=Zoeken&mkt=us-us

This however is not entrily acurate as a lot of the exisiting .DOCX files are served via ASP pages which do not accuratly list in this kind of searches.

Given that Google doesn’t index .docx files yet, how sure are you that they’re bothering to list all the .docx files they find in their index?

I don’t particularly doubt that .docx files are less common, particularly since there is much less reason to post Office files in the new format, but I do wonder how accurate your figures are. In particular, there’s no sense of what the margin of error is – maybe you could ask someone at Google to comment on that?

It’s happened a few times before in related fields.

Punch-card readers got better and better, but then got rapidly obsoleted by paper-tape readers.

Magnetic core memory got better and better; but nowadays no-one makes it, and the price is very different depending on whether you’re trying to sell some surplus, or buy some to maintain an old-but-vital chemical plant process control computer.

Typewriters got better and better, but then got rapidly obsoleted by Personal Computers.

ATT rental telephone handsets got better and better, but who rents a fixed-line telephone handset from ATT now ?

VHS videotapes and tape decks got better and better, but all the movies come out on DVD now. Does anyone buy VHS ?

Are Microsoft’s formats getting better and better, but going into obsolescence because of open formats centred around ISO26300 and OpenOffice.org ?

Is is time to segment the market ? For all who can jump off the One Microsoft Way to do just that ?

@Andrew, if the Office 2007 numbers were better, we would have heard. Microsoft hypes things so much that no good news would go unreported. But the 400 million overall numbers seems to be something they back for an estimate of overall adoption. That is probably why vdBeld used it, though mistakenly implied it applied to OOXML.

There is one way to figure this out, but it would require some work. Spider the web, download a random sample of 100,000 or so Office documents, parse them using Apache POI or something like that. Figure out the last save date as well as what application version saved the file (Office 2000 versus Office XP, etc.) From that you could figure out, for that collection of documents, what the mix of Office versions were over time.

@Anonymous, as for binary/legacy documents, the numbers are quite high. Even greater for PDF. So PDF is 5x more popular than the legacy office formats, and the legacy formats are 400x more popular than ODF, and ODF is around 100x more popular than OOXML.

Of course, the legacy formats and PDF have been around a lot longer than ODF or OOXML. What you would really want for a fair comparison is to know the numbers for documents created since, say January 1st, 2007, what is the breakdown. What % of new documents in are XML formats versus legacy binaries. To answer this would require a bit more work.

The correlation between downloads and use is vague at best – for example, a single download might go to a disk image that’s replicated across a company. Or, like Firefox, most downloads mightn’t translate to any users at all.

Similarly, a figure of ‘70 million sales’ that comes filtered through two journalists that don’t speak the same language, not to mention the internal Microsoft grapevine, could originally have had any number of caveats. For example, the number might refer to Europe alone. Also, the number of legal sales completely ignores the substantial number of people who pirate Microsoft software.

Incidentally, these criticisms make your chart all the more important to keep maintaining. While there are plenty of criticisms that could be levelled at it, at least it’s a direct measure of file format use (rather than application sales), with roughly comparable measures for both formats.

– Andrew

x < - c(seq(100, by=10, length=20), seq(700, by=15, length=20))

y < - c(rnorm(20, 1000, 100), rnorm(20, 150000, 10000))

f < - as.factor(c(rep("ooxml", 20), rep("odf", 20)))

plot(y ~ x, pch=as.numeric(f))

legend(800, 50000, c(“OOXML”, “ODF”), pch=1:2)

When it comes to market share, I think it’s important to be reminded that no matter how Microsoft made sure the transition to new the file format would be as seamless as possible (for that, they pushed a Windows Update, and released an update in Excel 2003 service pack 2 with dialog boxes dedicated to such scenarios, self-serving again), Office 2007 uses a new user interface which requires full retraining. Hard not to understate how big a deal it is. The ribbon is just the worst user interface ever, so I’m not surprised of the slow adoption.

When it comes to file formats, it’s also interesting to note that regular Office developers, who were using VBA macros so far, still have no reason to make a change, and therefore have no reason to upgrade to Excel 2007 VBA macros, which is one of the things which hasn’t changed at all (for more than ten years now. Note that the maintenance of VBA is not even done in Redmond for a number of years, it’s a consulting firm called SummSoft). If Office developers were to directly access the file format, they would automatically lose the application’s runtime updates whenever changes are made to cells and other objects, without which the spreadsheet becomes corrupt and/or inconsistent (examples of that was in my article: OOXML is defective by design). And that too is a big deal.
Custom XML? This is positioned to be an important feature from the marketing people at Microsoft (you can read their blogs and marketing brochures) : unfortunately, there is no way to bind a Custom XML part to an Excel table or list. Unlike Word 2007, there is no such thing as “content controls”. So the claimed features don’t even exist.

Even though Microsoft wants you to store XML inside files, because that obviously increased the lock-in and it’s $good$ for them, the inability to do anything with it in Excel 2007 is just the result of the mediocrity of their engineers.

Last but not least, the OOXML community. If you head over to openxmldeveloper.org (owned by Microsoft, self-serving here), you’ll quickly realize there is no such thing as a community there. Traffic is extremely low, and in fact the only person answering trivial questions is a consultant paid by Microsoft (Sonata software). Once again, we have Microsoft paying non-Microsoft people to create a false sense of enticement. It’s particularly ironic when you know that Microsoft often boasts the “more than 300,000 Office developers out there”. Indeed the usenet newsgroups are trafficked, but they are not in the one and only OOXML related website. That leaves the question open, where are they then? If OOXML is so good, how come no one seems to use it?

-Stephane Rodriguez