Whatever Happened to OOXML? (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 2, 2009 17:40 UTC (Sat) by gdt (subscriber, #6284)
In reply to: Whatever Happened to OOXML? (ComputerWorld) by ncm
Parent article: Whatever Happened to OOXML? (ComputerWorld)

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] (1 responses)

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] (1 responses)

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 (guest, #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 (guest, #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.