Would MS even care?

In a post, Stéphane Rodriguez enumerates a series of points on why he asserts that OOXML is defective by design. Naturally, I have to agree with it (or as some MS people would say, I am biased that way), but in fairness to MS, MS is a big organization that has lost it’s focus and continues to think that it can do anything it pleases, no matter how defective.

2 comments


  1. 64 bit?
    Stephane has some incorrect ideas when it comes to how WOW64 (32-bit applications on 64-bit windows) works. It does not emulate the code and slowdowns of the pointer marshalling steps needed to call into the kernel are lost in the general noise of a benchmark comparision (they’re small relative to the general overhead of a syscall).
    Stephane’s general point about Excel and 64-bit computing is also fairly wrong-headed. If you’re processing enough data that you need more than 1 GB of address space, then Excel is simply not the proper tool for your job. Excel has a certain target problem domain and large scale (multi-GB) data processing is not within it. Of course, someone could write a 64-bit program that could distill data into a form more suitable for excel analysis, and OOXML provides a workable way to even create the necessary excel sheet on some compute node running 64-bit Linux.
    But all of the limitations of Excel aside, OOXML is a file format and has nothing to do with 64-bit computing. The performance or non-performance of VBA, Excel, or Office 2007 on 64-bit hardware has little to do with the OOXML format itself.
    -nksingh


    • Re: 64 bit?
      Thanks, nksingh (posting from Seattle). I agree that 32 and 64 bit issues are tangential and largely unrelated to ooxml. And, since I don’t use windows and haven’t since 1998, some of the reasons cited by Stéphane might be valid – though I can’t test (nor really care to).
      Nonetheless, it still remains, ooxml is really not worth the effort.

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