I hate to do this, but I’ve been getting a lot of blog spam, so I’ve changed my blog to only allow comments from users authenticated by Six Apart’s TypeKey system. I apologize for the hassle factor for those who wish to comment. Please keep in mind that this doesn’t prevent you from posting without anyone really knowing who you are, in the sense that its pretty easy to set up a TypeKey account that points to a free email account.
ZDNet Plays Hardball: An Update on “Office XML as a One-way Standard”
•15Dec06 • 4 CommentsOK, I just have to post an update to my blog posting on Office XML, because my post causes some reactions from Microsoft and its friends that amuse me no end:
- First. Rick Schaut published an update to his original blog posting where he responded to my blog posting, producing a new estimate of how much work it would be to add Office Open XML support to the Mac versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. I somehow missed this update when it happened, or I would have responded sooner.
- Next, David Berlind of ZDNet published an article on the “he said, she said” nature of our posts, using a baseball metaphor. His premise is that a two year old could have hit Rick’s ball (his original post) out of the park, but in the end says that not only did my ball (my post) get caught at the warning track, but that the runner got caught tagging for home. I’m not really sure who or what the runner is supposed to be in this particular metaphor, but we’ll let that slide… No hard feelings, though, David – I got a good laugh out of it, and I certainly don’t mind getting my name mentioned in a column from a much more well-known blogger, even when he calls me vicious. I do want to point out that I did warn everyone in my first blog post that I was known for having a bit of an acid tongue. Guess I haven’t mellowed quite as much as I thought.
Now, I’ll be the first to say that I was having a little bit of fun with Rick’s original post. I didn’t really believe it would take a team of good developers 150 person-years to do the work. Rick’s original estimate was ridiculously overinflated, and I used that to my own rhetorical ends. That doesn’t mean my original point wasn’t valid, though.
Fortunately, Rick has now published a more realistic estimate, one that I believe is more accurate. Here’s what Rick now has to say:
If we had to add support for Open XML to Mac Word 12 without being able to port code from Win Word, the read/write estimates shrinks down to about 8.5 man/years (44 weeks x 5 devs x 2 for read+write). As I recall, this about half of what it took to add HTML support to Word: 10 or so devs over a release cycle of 2 years. Doing the work for PPT and Excel isn’t strictly a multiple of Word, because about 30% of the XML elements are shared between the three apps. So, for all of Mac Office, I’d estimate it would take a total of about 5 devs over the release cycle to add full Open XML support starting from scratch, as part of the larger project.
David Berlind says this update refutes my argument, so much so that in his baseball metaphor the response is good for two outs instead of one. But is that really the case?
The fact is that Rick is now spinning things a bit, and his new numbers don’t really disprove my point at all. First, notice that he split the figures for Word from those for Excel and PowerPoint, and that the former figure was expressed in person-years while the latter is a count of developers. This is a common form of numerical misdirection. Since the release cycle is two years, the total effort is actually 18.5 man years [8.5 man-years + (2 years * 5 people)]. That is actually slightly less effort for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint together than he originally claimed for Word alone. (I’ll leave it to someone else to point out what this does to Rick’s original argument about why the Office Open XML converters for the Mac aren’t coming anytime soon.)
But there’s another thing missing from Rick’s estimate that I included in mine: additional resources for testing, localization, documentation, etc. As I said previously, that would easily double the amount of resources required, and that is a very conservative estimate. So now we’re back up to 37 person years.
Now in my previous estimate, I also estimated that it would be more difficult for someone else to create Office Open XML converters, because their internal document formats would be very different than those of Office. So adding that same fudge factor gets us to 46 person-years, rounded down.
That’s a bit less than a third of my previous estimate, but its still a heck of a lot of resources. Even if you choose to use the unfudged 37 person-year figure, my point about the investment required still stands: how many competitors can afford the investment of 18-23 people over a two year period to implement a check-list feature?
David, bottom line is that you scored the play wrong. Here’s how it really went down: Rick lobbed one over the fat part of the plate, I hit a fly ball to the warning track. Should have been an easy out (or two), but Rick committed an error fielding the ball. So I’m on second base, nobody’s out, and the runner scored. Still wish I knew who or what that runner was supposed to be.
(And, in case anyone missed it, I’m still having a bit of fun with this.)
Mission to Mars
•11Dec06 • 3 CommentsAdobe published a prerelease version of Mars on Adobe Labs last week, and blog posts are starting to show up. I’m very happy with the response so far – most everyone who looks at it has good things to say about it. However, one of the more common memes around the Mars release is that it is nothing more than a ‘me-too’ response to XPS. That isn’t the case: Mars has been in the works since before XPS was even a twinkle in Microsoft’s eye.
The origins of Mars began way back in 1999 when Jim King and Chip Brown experimented with a PDF representation that used ZIP-based packaging of SVG page content built on Acrobat 4.0. At the time, it was known internally as PDML (for Page Description Markup Language) and later became known as XDF (XML Document Format, I presume).
In 2003, Phil Levy began work on a new implementation of the idea, with the intention of productizing the technology as part of Acrobat 7.0. Unfortunately, the feature didn’t make it in time for Acrobat 7.0, but it was present in at least one public Acrobat 7 beta release. In retrospect, getting cut from Acrobat 7 was a good thing, as the feature wasn’t quite ready for the Acrobat 8.0 release in November 2006 either 🙂 Seriously, though, the design did get refined quite a bit over the last year and a half. The early version of Mars used an Adobe-defined packaging mechanism, while the current version uses the packaging mechanism defined in the OEBPS Container Format, which in turn is built on top of ODF. The early version supported only a subset of PDF, while the current version supports virtually all PDF features with only a few legacy edge cases unsupported. Maintaining backward compatibility with PDF was a critical feature for Mars.
Bottom line on all this history, though, is that the Mars technology has a long history here at Adobe and is not something we just threw together as a response to Microsoft. It is, in fact, a much richer and more standards-based technology than anything Microsoft is attempting. Eliot Kimber said it better than I ever could:
After seeing Adobe’s presentation and talking to the guys from Adobe it’s clear that what they’ve done is a sincere and well-thought-out attempt to Do The Right Thing rather than a cynical recasting of proprietary stuff into markup so it’s “open.”
MARS tries to use standards as much as it can and it seems to do so to a remarkable level of completeness. It uses SVG for representing each page, supports the usual standards for media objects (bitmaps, videos, etc.). Uses Zip for packaging, and so on.
I’ll talk more about why Mars and standards in a future blog post.
New blog style
•07Dec06 • 1 CommentI’ve updated my blog to use a new template, “Fleur”:http://www.thestylearchive.com/designs/fleur which I downloaded from the MovableType Style Archive. The actual design is by Jennifer Maloney of “freshwear.ca”:http://www.freshwear.ca. Thanks for making this cool style available to MovableType users!
Of course, I’m a newbie at this whole MovableType thing, so if things don’t work right, don’t blame Jennifer…
Shebanator 