Found in this story:

By late 2006 all the files created by users of its Office suite of software will be formatted with web-centred XML specifications.

What does ‘formatted with web-centred XML specifications’ mean? It seems obvious that the reporter doesn’t know what XML is, except that it’s perhaps something like HTML, which is something to do with the Web. The phrases ‘web-centred’ and ‘specifications’ probably come from Microsoft’s press conference/release, but they have no business surrounding the word ‘XML’. Perhaps the reporter just thought they looked good there, and hoped that someone would be good enough to write in to set them straight.

And so the BBC has ensured that those who could have gained insight into the technical issues behind the story will instead be left confused, with a couple of buzzwords floating around their head but not one clue about what they mean. Just like the BBC reporter.

The story gets even more fun when the poshly-named marketing drone at Microsoft UK is quoted:

Mr Pryke-Smith said it made it possible to get at web-based information, such as searching the Amazon bookstore, directly from Word.

Of course, he could have said that XML would mow your lawn, read your kids bedtime stories and make you a nice cup of tea. The BBC reporter would still have been overexcited from all this talking-to-people-at-a-big-corporation stuff and pulled out the most vague yet appealing-sounding words for a quote.

A few things the BBC reporter should have done:

  • Not send their editor a reformatted press release, calling it a story.
  • Explain to the reader what XML is. Saying it ‘allows you to explicitly specify the structure of data’ is not an explanation. It’s a dead giveaway that you don’t know what it is yourself.
  • Explain to the reader why it could be significant that Microsoft will be using XML as the basis for the file formats used by future version(s) of Office. Mixed up buzzwords are not an explanation. Again, another dead giveaway that the reporter doesn’t have a clue about the subject matter.
  • Explain to the reader that just because documents will be saved in a format based on XML, this does not mean that rivals will necessarily find it easier to handle the information in such documents. Microsoft have a history of purposefully making it as difficult as possible (to the point where it’s counterproductive) to reverse engineer their file formats.
  • Point out that Microsoft have been found guilty of monopolistic practice by both a US court and the EU, who recently fined Microsoft EUR 497m. Without continued pressure from the EU (the US have forgotten about the whole thing, for some reason), this open-sounding XML-based storage will be closed enough that competitors will still be locked out.
  • Mention that there is already an XML-based office file format specification in existence and ask Microsoft whether they are intending to use the standard (no) and if not, why not.
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