Microsoft Open XML standards vote foments politics, dismay
This Sunday is the deadline for an important standards vote on Microsoft's Open XML file formats, with early reports pointing to an inconclusive result--and a hefty dose of disillusionment with the standards process.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is due to receive votes by Sunday on whether Open XML will be certified as an ISO standard through its fast-track process.
The completion of the vote is a milestone in a process Microsoft began nearly two years ago to make Open XML--the native file formats in Office 2007--international standards. ISO standardization is particularly important with government customers with long-term archival needs.
Local news reports and participants' blogs have reported on some countries' votes before the final tally. In those reported cases, the votes have conditions attached to them that should prevent immediate ISO ratification.
For example, Germany voted "yes with comments" as did the United States. Meanwhile, India, Brazil, and China have voted "no with comments," according to reports.
Because these are conditional votes, the technical committee in charge of Open XML will have to address several technical comments on the 6,000-page specification--a process that is expected to go until at least February of next year.
"It's clear that whatever the vote, OOXML will not be a JTC1 standard for a long, long time, no matter what people say next week. It's also clear that unless the process is quickly terminated with OOXML being rejected as unsuitable with comments unresolvable, it will churn on and on and on, no matter what you feel about it or the OOXML spec," Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of open source and standards and a vocal Microsoft critic, wrote this week in his blog.
Politics of standards
The run-up to the vote has been marked by intense lobbying and accusations of ballot stuffing.
Critics of Microsoft said that it has recruited its partners to vote for Open XML without sufficient regard for technical issues.
Microsoft executives and its allies, meanwhile, had accused IBM of influencing the standards vote inappropriately because IBM employees are representatives on national standards bodies.
IBM has been a fierce supporter of OpenDocument Format (ODF) and its executives have criticized Microsoft's Open XML for being technically flawed, redundant with OpenDocument, and not sufficiently open. IBM supports OpenDocument, a rival document standard, in its Lotus products.
Up to 140 countries can vote in the ISO standards process and in the last several weeks, a number of countries who have not participated in the process until now, including Malta and Lebanon, are now expected to vote, according to Marino Marcich, the executive director of the lobbying group ODF Alliance.
Microsoft's director of corporate standards, Jason Matusow, acknowledged improper activity in the case of Sweden's vote, where a Microsoft employee sent an e-mail to two Swedish voters and enticed them to vote for Open XML in exchange for marketing support.
Matusow said that the situation was identified as inappropriate and addressed by Microsoft Sweden managers. Sweden's vote has now been changed to "abstain." He noted that people from both sides of the debate have joined the process late in the game.
"The issue with the e-mail is extremely unfortunate as it casts a pall over the hard work of so many and the process as a whole," Matusow wrote in his blog this week.
Indeed, regardless of the outcome of Sunday's vote, many people have expressed dismay over the conflict, saying that competition among IT vendors is giving the standards process a black eye.
"As someone who has spent a great part of my life working to support open standards over the past 20 years, I have to say that this is the most egregious, and far-reaching, example of playing the system to the advantage of a single company that I have ever seen. Breath-taking, in fact. That's assuming, of course, that I am right in supposing that all of these newbie countries vote 'yes,'" attorney Andy Updegrove, an OpenDocument advocate, wrote this week in his blog.
It's the principle
Regardless of technical and process issues, the vote brings to light longstanding and seemingly intractable differences regarding the role of standards.
Microsoft executives argue that the world is best served with multiple standards that have different purposes. Open XML was designed to be backward compatible with billions of existing Office documents, whereas ODF started with a different design.
The company whose strategy has long been rooted in proprietary software has opened up access to an important product, yet company foes are seeking to thwart its standardization. Meanwhile, OpenDocument--backed by Sun Microsystems and IBM--sailed through the ISO standardization process without the same scrutiny, Matusow wrote earlier this week.
Although Open XML critics paint it as proprietary to Microsoft, a number of other companies, including Apple, sit on the technical committee and are implementing the specification in their products.
The ODF Alliance's Marcich said that many of the national standards bodies' comments indicated not only technical issues but also concerns over intellectual property rights and proprietary product dependencies.
"What we need are multiple competing products, not competing standards," Marcich said.
A date to resolve technical comments on Open XML, called a Ballot Resolution Meeting, has been scheduled for February 25 to 29, according to a participant.
That resolution meeting could be canceled, however, noted IBM's Rob Weir, if the "no" votes prevail on Sunday.
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin. 
It is bloated
It is very poorly written
No one besides MS would be able to implement it without paying a lot of money, and even then it is likely it wouldn't be 100% implemented.
MS will retain control of it.
MS will change it in a whim to keep others out.
It is redundant
There is no reason for this to even be considered.
This is just MS trying to pervert the standards process to its own gain and its competitors loss.
It is bloated
It is very poorly written
No one besides Sun would be able to implement it without paying a lot of money, and even then it is likely it wouldn't be 100% implemented.
Sun will retain control of it.
Sun will change it in a whim to keep others out.
It is redundant
There is no reason for this to even be considered.
This is just Sun trying to pervert the standards process to its own gain and its competitors loss.
Sun and other ODF supporters are trying to knife the baby that is OOXML.
It plays well to accuse Microsoft of skullduggery but there is so much junk information published now that few companies with valuable intellectual property will want to submit it or their professional resources to this. As a result, the days of a web designed by consensus may be coming to a close for some period of time. The governments who set procurements based on standards will be revisiting those policies because if the result of this is to only be able to procure ODF, as Massachusetts showed, that won't be sufficient. The switching costs are high and are borne by the customers.
Who did this? IBM, Sun, Apple, Microsoft, the various open source foundations and all of those bloggers who think a pile on is a legitimate way to achieve a dubious end.
Who's losing? Customers, taxpayers, and those organizations that do need standards but not at the cost of having to use inferior products or to translate all documents immediately.
This is a fiasco for them. And they be us.
Such a converter already exists for MS-Office:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter
It is open sourced and free. Which removes all credibility to those who say OOXML is bloated, Microsoft will charge a huge fee to use it, and you cannot convert between the formats. The ODF Converter is real, it exists, it is free, and it is open sourced and hopefully will spawn more ODF<->OOXML converters.
Since Microsoft has a majority marketshare and OOXML converters for all versions of Office:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466
Chances are no matter what the ISO votes, DOCX aka OOXML formats will become standard in every business, college, bank, home, and cybercafe that uses MS-Office with the DOCX converter pack.
I of course see ODF as the next PDF standard, being used for the Internet Documents, and being adopted by Spammers to email ODF format documents to your email after they drop the PDF format they are using now.
"Re: Concerning the issues with 1-2-3 that are talked about in the documentation you gave me, most of the issues are related to converting files between older and newer versions of product and converting documents between Lotus and Microsoft. Anytime a file is saved backwards or saved with an older file format than the format the file was created under, such as saving a 1-2-3 , 97 file for Windows 95 into a WK1 format for DOS, then naturally we are expected to loose certain features due to technology and features that are present now that were not present 8 - 10 years ago. Similarly, if we try to convert a file from Lotus into Excel or Excel into Lotus, due to differences in the products not every feature will be converted perfectly with the file filters that are available. Both Lotus and Microsoft create similar spreadsheet programs; however, there are several differences in both programs and these differences will remain to distinguish the products apart. We do try to design conversion filters that will allow as much of the file formats as possible to be exchanged and converted without disrupting the actual file design and format.
In one of your letters you made mention of the @IRR and @ERR functions in the 1-2-3 product. By design the @IRR (notably "absent" in Open Office) will calculate the Internal Rate of Return; where the @ERR is used in conjunction with other formulas, posted was an "ERR" showing an error was received in the calculations. As far as I can see in the program I cannot find an @ERR function that will allow us to calculate an Economic Rate of Return"
Why should SpreadSheet savvy folks "who really know what they are about" as far as the banking and other industries vote in favour of an Code-Base Lotus SmartSuite (still a work-in-progress) Microsoft Open XML Standards Format!
"RUSAL to mull hydropower
-refinery, smelter studies also on the cards"
http://www.stabroeknews.com/index.pl/article?id=56513627
They too must not know of Lotus Notes 8.0 (with its ISO Standardised Productivity Suite), Lotus SameTime 7.5.X.... Whooaaahhh!
So, what about the anticipation of an BRIC HOUSE ( Brazil, Russia, India and China) "No" Vote With "Comments" resulting in what is stated in the subject line!
Hold on to your U.S. "IT Jobs" (skills set) for dear life folks and don't allow Microsoft dumb down OOXML cause you to loose them!
What a majority of the systems (80%) out there, use Windows and MS-Office and support the OOXML standard? OpenOffice.Org and IBM Lotus SmartSuite only have 5% of the market total?
Gee, I wonder which one, OOXML or ODF, a majority of the market will adopt and use as the standard that they exchange information with?
Think really hard, there will be a quiz on this at the end of this post.
As we notice that MS-Word and MS-Excel have 80% marketshare, we notice that most documents are in the MS-Word format, and most spreadsheets are in the MS-Excel spreadsheet in businesses, colleges, banks, homes, public schools, organizations, etc.
Microsoft has released the OOXML converter for older versions of MS-Office, so that every version of Office can use the OOXML standard.
Now for the quiz:
Q1: What office suite has 80% marketshare?
Q2: The office suite that has 80% marketshare will define which standard a majority of the people on the Internet will use, what standard is that?
If you answered Q1 as MS-Office, you are right. If you answered it as Lotus SmartSuite you are Commander Spock and you are wrong.
If you answered Q1 as OOXML, you are right. If you answered it as ODF, you are Commander Spock and you are wrong.
Take a clue/hint from what transpired in Sweden!
"The Swedish OOXML vote has been declared invalid!"
http://www.os2world.com/content/view/14874/1/
I wrote additional comments on this issue (and linked to this story) from my own BLOG:
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/4158
- Yawn.
- by jr_tyrrell September 3, 2007 9:23 AM PDT
- I understand the need for everyone to be agitated about this. I also understand why people are venting at each other. I think some people here fail to realise why OOXML shouldn't be an ISO and it's not a company, ideology or even a market share issue.
- Reply to this comment
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(16 Comments)The whole point of the ISO stamp is that anyone can implement the whole OOXML format (even the defaults) without requiring anything other than the specification. OOXML just doesn't fulfil that requirement, if it did there wouldn't be such a fuss.
I don't care if Microsoft do introduce a standard alongside ODF, I do care if they force it out when companies cannot actually implement parts of it. Either way, in the long run the better format will win out due to the fact that it "is" better so I'm content to wait on this.
Until then let's try and play nice and not feed trolls eh :).