Weekly Edition
Return to the Press page
| |||||||||||||
Whatever Happened to OOXML? (ComputerWorld)
Glyn Moody observes that OOXML has not been as big a problem as many had thought. "All-in-all, I think things have gone much better in the office sector than I or many others feared when OOXML gained its 'approval' from ISO. OOXML has not caught on, and there is every chance that ODF will become a widely-used national and international standard."
(Log in to post comments)
Whatever Happened to OOXML? (ComputerWorld) Posted May 1, 2009 19:22 UTC (Fri) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
Yes, that's why MS is hard at work sabotaging ODF from within.
Apparently their efforts to pass OOXML were not motivated, particularly, by a desire to have an OOXML standard to use, but just to have it exist and to damage ISO as an organization. They succeeded in a big way; it's hard to respect standards from an organization so easily subverted, and disrespect for public standards benefits a monopolist.
Whatever Happened to OOXML? (ComputerWorld) Posted May 2, 2009 17:40 UTC (Sat) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] I suspect Microsoft's initial motivations were more straightforward. Pro-forma tenders of governments and large corporates preference "international standards" over "industry specifications". That is, application using the ISO 26300 file formats would be preferred to products using the Microsoft Office file formats. This doesn't only include Office, but Sharepoint and future "business process" products too. If Microsoft wanted to retain its current advantageous position of poor and expensive-to-develop interoperability between Microsoft's products and its competitors then Microsoft needed its file format to be acknowledged as an international standard rather than to implement ODF in Office. As for damaging ISO, I don't believe that was Microsoft's aim. I just don't think they cared. They were hardly the first computing company to use the JTC1 fast track (all those competing "ISO standard" DVD formats used it too). They were the most egregious misuse. ISO needs to examine itself to ask why it didn't act when faced with the earlier poor outcomes. Also ISO has a lack of policy and procedure: this may be suitable for a collegiate organisation, but the policies and procedures failed when faced with competing commercial and public interests. The IEEE and IETF have long had procedures in place to handle such conflicts and ISO should question why it did not consider that similar procedures were needed when it saw the actions of its sister organisations. When faced with a failure of these procedures ISO acted poorly. It's response to appeals concerning OOXML and its BRM show that ISO are unwilling to acknowledge and learn from its failures. Failures have happened before in ISO in the computing arena -- when the networking protocol OSI ran off the rails. As a result ISO's reputation was so devalued that it vacated that field to IEEE and IETF. ISO runs the risk of the same thing occurring with office documents file formats (which are nothing more than a protocol using disk as the media, suggesting the lessons of OSI weren't entirely learned).
Lack of policy and procedure? Hardly. Posted May 3, 2009 10:49 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Also ISO has a lack of policy and procedure: this may be suitable for a collegiate organisation, but the policies and procedures failed when faced with competing commercial and public interests. Sorry, but it's the other way around. ISO does have a lot of policies and procedures. And this made it ripe for abuse. Where there are bureaucracy there are potential for abuse. The IEEE and IETF have long had procedures in place to handle such conflicts and ISO should question why it did not consider that similar procedures were needed when it saw the actions of its sister organisations. Not sure about IEEE, but IETF does not have lots of rules. Actually it only has one rule: if there are no consensus there are no standard. That's all. Remember fate of MARID? Microsoft was sure that lack of procedures will make IETF "easy". And yes, it was easy to break - but the end result is lack of standard and disbanded group, not useless standard. This is PERFECT outcome: since ISO, IETF, IEEE and other standards organizations don't have a way to force the standard lack of consensus means standard will be useless: market or goverments will decide, not ISO, IETF or IEEE, so why waste resources producing useless papers? ISO runs the risk of the same thing occurring with office documents file formats (which are nothing more than a protocol using disk as the media, suggesting the lessons of OSI weren't entirely learned). OASIS is at risk, not ISO. ISO is dead and useless in this area already.
Lack of policy and procedure? Hardly. Posted May 3, 2009 18:58 UTC (Sun) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link]
I took ncm's point to be that the IETF and IEEE chose procedures carefully to avoid opportunities for abuse, while the ISO chose procedures (like Fast Track) which are ripe for abuse. It's not a question of how complicated the procedures are, but if they were designed under an incorrect assumption of Good Faith on the part of members.
Is OOXML supported by any Microsoft software? Posted May 4, 2009 9:31 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
But I thought that the OOXML standard as ratified by ISO is not in fact supported by Microsoft Office? So surely Microsoft is still unable to play the 'international standards' card... unless their customers are unaware of the difference?
Is OOXML supported by any Microsoft software? Posted May 7, 2009 9:52 UTC (Thu) by dunlapg (subscriber, #57764) [Link]
That's probably why they're taking a different tack now. They made an ODF plugin for MS Word 2007 that (apparently) strictly adheres to the standard, but does not interoperate with any other ODF implementation. (There's a link to a blog on ODF compatibility from LWN.)
The author of that article complained about it, saying, "The point of conformance to the standard is compatibility, not conformance." Sorry, that's not Microsoft's point. Microsoft's goal is to maintain old monopolies and establish new ones. It's been playing this "establish a standard to undermine any non-MS standards" game for years now. (Look up WordPerfect and Rich Text Format.) The sad part is it's still working: people take their word at face value, even though there are hundreds of examples of them breaking their word, sometimes in the exact same way and for the exact same reasons.
Whatever Happened to OOXML? (ComputerWorld) Posted May 4, 2009 11:21 UTC (Mon) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link]
IEEE 802.11n is proof that the conflict handling process of IEEE is far from working, but as you said, at least there isn't a useless «standard in name only» situation. There is no formalized standard, period.
Whatever Happened to OOXML? (ComputerWorld) Posted May 2, 2009 22:53 UTC (Sat) by alecs1 (guest, #46699) [Link]
Any statistics here? I did receive a few .docx files from university and other institutions, but never a .odf.
These are not ISO OOXML, sorry. Posted May 3, 2009 10:52 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Any statistics here? I did receive a few .docx files from university and other institutions, but never a .odf. .docx files are in proprietary Microsoft's format. Microsoft Office 2007 does not support ISO OOXML and there are no plans to introduce such support. On the other hand there are enough ODF-compliant documents and office suites in the wild. In the end Microsoft won the battle, lost the war: it got ISO OOXML approved but in the process lost the right to claim that MS Office 2007 conforms to that standard. So now it starts another war inside of OASIS...
These are not ISO OOXML, sorry. Posted May 3, 2009 18:16 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Yep, docx is another XML format that isn't OOXML. It's essentially going to be a orphaned format, only supported by one version of Office correctly.
My company will refuse to accept docx format. Nobody has the software to support it so the general policy is just to tell them to re-send it in a doc. Most people are using a range of Microsoft Office suites from 2000 on up.
These are not ISO OOXML, sorry. Posted May 4, 2009 9:24 UTC (Mon) by fandom (subscriber, #4028) [Link]
On the other hand, Koffice developers sometimes complain about OpenOffice
not following the 'official' odf specs.
Do you consider OpenOffice's documents to be ODF-compliant?
It's matter of perception Posted May 4, 2009 10:58 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Do you consider OpenOffice's documents to be ODF-compliant? Do you consider Firefox or MS IE HTML-compliant? All software with millions of lines of source code have bugs - but when OpenOffice.org does something differently from ODF spec you can file a bug and it'll not be rejected. I did it myself couple of times. It may not be fixed right away (OpenOffice.org don't have unlimited resources, sadly), but it'll not be rejected. Compare with with Microsoft's OOXML position: first we create MS Office 2007, then we get ISO's stamp of approval and then we explicitly refuse to fix discrepancies between ISO OOXML and MS Office 2007 OOXML. Sorry, but it makes all this farce with standards utterly useless: what good the standard does when even it's creator refuses to properly support it? Note: I'm not saying about ISO OOXML compliance in percents. Percents are useless without commitment - and there are NO such commitment on MS side and there ARE such commitment on OpenOffice.org side.
|
|||||||||||||