The OOXML War
Published by: Codrut Nistor, in News
April2nd2008
One of the most interesting facts in the IT industry is that it happens too often to see companies or various technologies winning a war against everyone, but losing in front of their own problems. It happened with 3dfx, it may happen with the Blu-Ray format, but now I want to tell you a few things about Microsoft's last battle. It's not about Yahoo, because that one is still undecided; it's about OOXML and what may follow after Microsoft's victory in that battle...
A few years ago, Microsoft was feeling the need to change the file format used by the applications in the Office suite, and now, after a year-long journey, Office Open XML, or shortly OOXML, has become an ISO-recognized international standard. As far as we know at this time, this should help OpenOffice 3 to integrate perfectly with Microsoft Office in a work environment, and even the current OpenOffice version seems to handle the OOXML format pretty well, but...
...claims of foul play in the voting process may came back, haunting Microsoft. The problem is that the European Comission sent out a confidential request for information to the ISO in Europe, saying "In your opinion, have there been any irregularities or attempts to influence the debate or vote on the ECMA 376 proposal as regards your organization? If so please provide details and any relevant facts," so now Microsoft should wait an see what national ISO bodies have to say about the whole deal.
For example, Norway voted against granting OOXML the ISO-standard status, but changed its decision later. Unfortunately, the standard is not yet fully implemented in competing platforms, and the worst part of it all is that, according to Thomas Vinje, legal counsel for the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, the ISO-certified OOXML format "is not what Microsoft implements in the Office suite," so...where is this going?
...yet another document format war, another chain of lawsuits against Microsoft, and a bunch of new problems for end users!
A few years ago, Microsoft was feeling the need to change the file format used by the applications in the Office suite, and now, after a year-long journey, Office Open XML, or shortly OOXML, has become an ISO-recognized international standard. As far as we know at this time, this should help OpenOffice 3 to integrate perfectly with Microsoft Office in a work environment, and even the current OpenOffice version seems to handle the OOXML format pretty well, but...
...claims of foul play in the voting process may came back, haunting Microsoft. The problem is that the European Comission sent out a confidential request for information to the ISO in Europe, saying "In your opinion, have there been any irregularities or attempts to influence the debate or vote on the ECMA 376 proposal as regards your organization? If so please provide details and any relevant facts," so now Microsoft should wait an see what national ISO bodies have to say about the whole deal.
For example, Norway voted against granting OOXML the ISO-standard status, but changed its decision later. Unfortunately, the standard is not yet fully implemented in competing platforms, and the worst part of it all is that, according to Thomas Vinje, legal counsel for the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, the ISO-certified OOXML format "is not what Microsoft implements in the Office suite," so...where is this going?
...yet another document format war, another chain of lawsuits against Microsoft, and a bunch of new problems for end users!
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