The ISO has voted to reject Microsoft’s OOXML as a standard. The blogosphere is having a conversation about it currently and I’m hoping that the primary reason for this is to give Microsoft a good incentive to address any legitimate concerns.
I can’t think of a better supporting example of why Microsoft should be able to have its own open documents format standardized than to use Macromedia’s SWF format as an example. I can write a tool that publishes to SWF, but I can’t integrate features into the formats upcoming revisions until those specifications are released. Being a huge lover of opensource and Linux I feel very alone on this issue. All companies should be required to make their documents open so that others can read and write to them, but none should be required to lose control of the format in which the tool is forced to write.
It is not fair of a government that both forces Microsoft to publish to an open ISO standard + forces the company to use another company’s standard. Microsoft wrote the book on office publishing and it clearly deserves to be able to produce its own paper.
Macromedia opened up its SWF format so that others could write programs which could output to it but there was not a single company on earth better able to utilize it than Macromedia (now Adobe) itself. There have been many tools which ended up complementing the Macromedia (Adobe) suite.
The same people, who have rallied against Microsoft to make its websites work in Firefox, are now being a bit of hypocrite when they try to say that OOXML is evil. What we users want is choice, and just because you don’t like Microsoft gives you no right to try and say Microsoft wanting its own standard is unethical or an attempt to undermine any other companies’ ability to compete.
Governments who require an ISO approved document format will now suffer because Microsoft will not take advantage of any of the advanced features of ODF in its office format which will be in use in the majority of scenarios. Microsoft will continue to improve and work with countries but everyone is upset and spreading FUD about the whole affair. I am a huge OSS advocate and I’ve never seen the community spread as much FUD as it is right now. There should be more than one format; opportunities will be created by those who seek to implement unique tools which help both Microsoft Office, and Open Office.
The bottom line, I always loose respect for companies and organization that drop the lowest common denominator of what’s acceptable in ethics, and I don’t like seeing the vast majority of the blogosphere completely and utterly confused about an issue completely because they’ve heard so much nonsense about the real issues. Microsoft is being flamed at the stake for getting talking folks into supporting its open standard. The truth of the matter is, Microsoft is making and improving OOXML so that other document programs can read and write to it, if you want to put Microsoft out of business in the Office arena write a better damn program and don’t whine to international bodies and tech enthusiasts, because some of us are smarter than that. Let’s face it, if the supporters of ODF were interested in true interoperable document solutions, they would urge Microsoft to join ODF by giving them a fair amount of control over it so that their future office revisions could take advantage of the format as much as Google, Sun, Linux, and IBM’s suites could. Instead, they are using government policy to spread FUD in order to somehow give them the upper hand but I think the entire thing will backfire, considering Microsoft will not be under as much government scrutiny soon. Microsoft has been trying to be a corporate citizen much more than a lot of other companies lately. I don’t want to argue so I’ll just say that no one company is perfect, and you can’t hold Microsoft accountable for the actions of one employee in all situations.
Update: I’ve been reading a blog called No OOXML(tiny bit biased on the subject) and they feel there is some evil in Microsoft’s format. I’ll read up on it and then I’ll re assess the situation. I don’t understand why ODF cares as long as there are ODF to OOXML converters? What I’ve heard up until now is that there is too much documentation, and also that there is not enough documentation, for instance how to save to Word 95 format? Who cares again? These machines are all running Linux now anyway!
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