ooxml

Microsoft buys and sells its version of the "facts" on Sharepoint, OOXML

Wow. I guess when you have more cash than taste you can afford to buy research reports that say all sorts of nice things about you. Open-source companies have to rely on things like products that please customers; Microsoft can afford to ramrod research down customers' throats.

A great example, as Mary Jo notes on ZDNet, is two new Microsoft-commissioned research reports that (gasp!) find Microsoft Sharepoint is a better investment for systems integrators and that "Office Open XML (is) the format showing the most progressive adoption rates in the marketplace over the next 12 months."

The research is of dubious value given that it's bought and paid for, but what is fascinating is the target of the research: open source.… Read more

Microsoft Open Office XML: Worse than you thought

Arst Design has a probing article on Microsoft's Open Office XML 'standard.' Yeesh. OOXML is even worse than I thought. And to think I wanted to give Microsoft the benefit of a doubt. Fool me once....

Microsoft is trying to push new file formats that are using ZIP and XML. Are those new file formats any good for Office developers ? In other words, should anyone feel safe to make direct access to file parts, and start getting free of running instances of Microsoft Office and its COM object model, usually through VBA?

They insist on the fact that, provided … Read more

The world's fastest-growing economies reject Microsoft

First it was China. Now India and Brazil. The rout of Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) standardization efforts is now essentially complete. When the world's fastest growing economies reject Microsoft, Microsoft has a problem.

What am I talking about? I'm talking about India's and Brazil's separate rejections of Microsoft's attempts to standardize its Open Office XML. Microsoft is holding out hope that if it resolves all 200 of India's complaints with its submission, it will have OOXML approved.

Yes, but this largely misses the point.… Read more

NIST conditionally endorses Microsoft's Open XML in upcoming vote

Update: comments on NIST's voting as well as the other members of the INCITS committee are now public. This post has been expanded below.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is backing Microsoft's effort to certify Office Open XML as an international standard.

The U.S. standards body said on Friday that it has voted to conditionally approve Office Open XML (OOXML) pending some technical concerns in an upcoming standards approval vote.

NIST is part of the committee that will establish the United States' position in a September 3 vote at the International Organization for Standardization (… Read more

Conspiracy theory: A tricky standards game for Microsoft? (Rik van Riel)

Rik has some interesting speculation as to what Microsoft's patent/interoperability agreements might be designed for:

The game goes like this: On the one hand, suggest that Linux might infringe on some of [Microsoft's] patents. On the other hand, pay a few Linux distributions [SUSE, Linspire, Xandros] to integrate a technology (OOXML) that people think actually infringes on Microsoft's patents. That makes it easier to convince other people to pay up. Vendors that do not sign agreements will not be compatible with Microsoft documents - which is the one thing that actually impacts end users.

I had … Read more