The Industry Standard - Red Hat Summit panel: Who 'won' OOXML battle? - Comments

Notice that Microsoft will

David B — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 06:05:46 -0700

Notice that Microsoft will implement an older version of ODF. I can only presume they don't want their customers to have a real choice between MSOffice and OpenOffice. If they were fully compatible using the latest version of ODF then purchasing/using MSOffice would become largely unnecessary.

So once again we see MS trying to lock customers into their products by having ODF documents created by MSOffice look just that little bit different if you open it with OpenOffice (or some other application using a more up-to-date version of this open standard).

It's worked for them in the past with proprietary formats, it'll be interesting to see if they can pull it off with open formats.

> Microsoft's [...] Open

foobar — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 11:21:43 -0700

> Microsoft's [...] Open Office XML (OOXML) standard,
> which is native to its Office 2007 suite

OOXML is NOT native to Microsoft's Office 2007 suite. The specification currently on hold at ISO/IEC (DIS 29500) differs considerably from the format Office 2007 uses (keep in mind the hundreds of patches added during the "standardization" process). And Microsoft will not add OOXML (DIS 29500) support to its office suite anywhere soon.

If OOXML is "native" to

Christopher Swanson — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:52:50 -0700

If OOXML is "native" to Office 2007, is Microsoft guaranteeing that if I write code that conforms to that specification, I will be able to correctly parse, create, and modify Office 2007 documents? Given that the spec is not internally consistent, I think that might be a little difficult. However, maybe that's the key, given Microsoft software is never internally consistent, either. An 'E' for effort on the spin job, sir.

Christopher Swanson

"We sell software ....

Pandu — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 10:16:00 -0700

"We sell software .... translators".
Nice try, Stuart, that might work with people who do not know better.
1. Microsoft sat on the OASIS board and did not join the ODF committee.
2. If Microsoft could not commit to ODF due to the ship cycle, it could very well have made a formal announcement that the upcoming service pack will include native support and the ability to make ODF the default format.

To paraphrase Churchill, "Microsoft invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative".

Here is my opinion on Microsoft and "Interoperability":
http://ergo.rydlr.net/?p=60

-Pandu

Red Hat Summit panel: Who 'won' OOXML battle?

IDG News Service — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:39:15 -0700

The Open Document Format (ODF) has benefited from the two-year battle over the ratification of Microsoft's rival Open Office XML (OOXML) standard, which is native to its Office 2007 suite, Microsoft's national technology officer said Thursday during a panel discussion at the Red Hat Summit in Boston.

"ODF has clearly won," said Stuart McKee, referring to Microsoft's recent announcement that it would begin natively supporting ODF in Office next year and join the technical committee overseeing the next version of the format.

"We sell software for a living. The ability to implement ODF in the middle of our ship cycle was just not possible," he said. "We couldn't do that during the release of Office 2007. We're looking forward and committed to doing more than [ODF-to-OOXML] translators."

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) ratified OOXML in April. ODF backers, including major vendors like IBM and Sun, long decried it as too proprietary to be declared a standard.

The heated drama could have played out differently had Microsoft been more involved in standards bodies in the past, McKee said. "Microsoft was really, really late to this game. It was very difficult to enter in conversations around the world where the debate had already been framed."

Panelist Douglas Johnson, an official involved with corporate standards at Sun Microsystems, said the attention caused by the debate has enabled other office-suite products to be competitive.

"The office-suite market has been ruled by one dominant player after another, but those markets were never governed by good open standards practices," he said. "What has happened is that this dominant-player market has actually been upset and opened to competition that didn't exist before." Sun's StarOffice product uses ODF.

Microsoft's decision to support ODF benefits the company as well as supporters of the standard, Johnson added.

"I'm a huge fan of Microsoft's ability to create these very huge markets, but they do have a problem: growing your market when you're the dominant player. They are starting to move to a business model that doesn't rely on keeping their document formats as a lock-in vector," he said.

Venky Hariharan, director of corporate affairs for Red Hat-India, said the OOXML battle has raised the profile of the standards community in general: "People are now seriously concerned about the governance of the standards process."

Microsoft will work to help evolve ODF, but it is doubtful that it and OOXML will ever merge, according to McKee. "I don't think we're going to see a situation where we have single unifying standards," he said.

That's because formats for one general purpose can have variations for different needs, such as the JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) standard, commonly used for lighter-weight images, and the TIFF (Tag Image File Format) specification, often employed for high-resolution files, he said.

But Hariharan disagreed in principle: "To have two standards for the same purpose defeats the idea. Multiple standards for the same application, in my opinion, is a bad thing. ... We should collaborate on developing standards and compete on their implementation."

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