Microsoft stumbles in Open XML standards vote
Microsoft has failed in its initial effort to standardize its Office document file format.
The company was attempting to standardize its Office Open XML document formats through a "fast track" process at the International Organization for Standardization.
The draft standard "has not achieved the required number of votes" according to a statement issued by the ISO on Tuesday. The voting process ended on Sunday.
A tally indicates that Open XML did not get the two-thirds majority needed from "participating" ISO members.
The closely watched vote has been marked by intense lobbying and politicking among Microsoft supporters and rivals. Microsoft is seeking a standards body's recognition of its document formats in an effort of allay fears among businesses and governments that its products are proprietary.
(Credit:
Microsoft)
Some worry that a document format controlled by Microsoft, as opposed to a standards body, could make it difficult for organizations to exchange data, or to access older data at a later date.
Despite the setback for Microsoft, this is not the end of the line for the Office Open XML standards effort, according to people familiar with the process.
In the next phase of the process, managers of the Office Open XML specification will address technical comments that were attached to the votes. Microsoft can modify and resubmit its proposal. That process is expected to begin in February of next year in Geneva, according to the ISO.
If Microsoft's reworked proposal does not satisfy ISO members on its next submission, "the proposal will have failed and this fast-track procedure will be terminated," according to the ISO.
Microsoft on Tuesday issued a statement saying that 74 percent of participants in the ISO vote "supported" ratification of Open XML.
"This preliminary vote is a milestone for the widespread adoption of the Open XML formats around the world for the benefit of millions of customers. Given how encouraging today's results were, we believe that the final tally in early 2008 will result in the ratification of Open XML as an ISO standard," Tom Robertson, Microsoft's general manager for standards and interoperabilty, said in a statement.
Attorney Andrew Updegrove, a standards expert and supporter of the rival OpenDocument standard, interpreted Microsoft's statement as an "oblique confirmation" that the vote failed to get the necessary votes to be approved.
The lobbying group Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), which supports Open XML ISO ratification, on Tuesday said the ISO vote tally is a setback but not the final word on the Office Open XML standards effort.
"CompTIA remains disappointed but not disheartened with today's news of Sunday's ISO vote tally," said Hugo Lueders, group director of EU public policy for CompTIA.
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. 
embedded in it isn't exactly "open", now is it?
/P
IMO, Microsoft data formats, first and foremost, are designed to lock people into Microsoft software.
If MS really wanted to use an open format they would have participated in the design of the Open Document Format (ODF).
Economic "Power" To American IT Workers! Read between the Economic Rate of Return (ERR) lines!
http://www.amazon.com/Wave-Todd-Strasser/dp/0440993717/ref=pd_bbs_2/105-6493881-5001240?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1188930880&sr=1-2
The Wave is based on a true incident that occurred in a high school history class in Palo Alto, California, in 1969.
I never joined it myself, but it seems like you are a member of it.
Personally I will still tell customers to stay away from it.
http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/officexml/chapter/ch02.pdf
http://blogs.infosupport.com/wouterv/archive/2007/07/22/Questions-on-Open-XML.aspx
http://blogs.balliauw.be/blogs/maarten/archive/2006/12/14/office-2007-spreadsheetml-classes-in-php.aspx
http://blogs.infosupport.com/wouterv/archive/2006/12/10/Package-Explorer-V2.0.aspx
http://www.codeplex.com/ExcelPackage/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter
http://www.docx2doc.com/
http://www.openxml.biz/
http://www.panergy-software.com/buy/download.html
I guess like Commander Spock, you were too busy catching "The Wave" instead of investigating what OOXML is and what tools are available for it, like us IT Workers who haven't joined The Wave did?
http://www.amazon.com/Wave-Todd-Strasser/dp/0440993717/ref=pd_bbs_2/105-6493881-5001240?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1188930880&sr=1-2
"The Wave" now uses the ODF logo for those armbands.
My advice to you, is that you'll do much better reading books, instead of burning them because you don't like their message or contents or who wrote them.
I think it shows that people don't have the same fear in opposing
MS that they used to.
The vote had to go this way, ISO would have lost all credibility otherwise.
1. OOXML just got a VERY thorough review. The comments can be resolved before the next vote with few technical surprises.
2. If rejected, MS can look back at the European Union and justifiably state that they made a good faith effort and given switching costs, and some governmental entities will have to back off the standards mandates for procurements.
3. The open sourcers just shot the wad on bad publicity wounding themselves in the process.
4. Once the comments are resolved, the vote will go forward.
5. ISO will make some changes to their processes. Chairs and organizations will emulate the BSI and begin to shut the doors to non-qualified or atagonistic members (those with a history of non-technical opposition). Most of these can now be identified.
OOXML will make it to standard status. Very little in the market will change. In the end, other than the black eye delivered to international standards as a means to evolve the web by consensus, the real market issue is whether or not customers have a choice. It will be interesting to see IBM and Sun defend their positions on openness vs choice.
Does the term "Pyrrhic Victory" resonate?
The document MS submitted was over 6000 pages. No one read all that crap. I am pretty sure that the ISO C++ standard is less pages and a programming language, especially this one, is infinitely more complex then a document format.
The only reason MS got as many votes as it did was because of heavy politicking and arm-twisting.
There is no way MS can resolve the comments. without actually making OOXML open. Something that is not likely to happen.
I doubt the late joiners reviewed it as thoroughly and since there are lots of those from all sides, the early reviews are likely the better ones. I expect to see better results in February and a resubmission on the normal track if not.
Keep in mind, XML is a subset of ISO 8879 - SGML. Most of the development work had been done long before XML was created. XML started out as SGML On The Web. The original person to get it going was the late Yuri Rubinsky (editor of the SGML Handbook by Dr. Charles Goldfarb) then CEO of SoftQuad. After Yuri's untimely death, the leadership role fell to Jon Bosak who had been working tirelessly with the W3C to that point with HTML.
Microsoft has been an XML developer from day one.
OpenXML is a proposed standard for a family of office document systems that use XML as the format. Like ANY xml ANYWHERE, it is an application of XML so not to be confused with XML as the syntax/structure specification on which it is based.
Several vendors have already signed up to implement OOXML, so yes, you will be able to read, edit and write the OOXML files without MS software.
This article wasn't very indepth about M$ problems to force its standard down the ISO collective throats. But then again, considering this is M$ and for M$ to have a true open standard document format, it would have to relinquish the advantages it's had in over document editing software with its propriety formats.
I doubt M$ will actually do that.
Then, you would actually own your data and any company that wanted to provide you with a migration path could do so without any need for a new roll of red tape (that's what standards really turn out to be) that may hinder faster, smaller data storage techniques.
Let software developers innovate all they want. Don't tie their hands with some obscure "standard" that will no doubt be out of date and restrictive in a couple of years' time. Push for Open Data Format legislation.
After all is said and done - Who Says That "Elephants" Cannot Dance!
Party Like it Is The Mid. 90's Folks, It Is "Back To School" Time!
The only thing before Multiplan was Visicalc, which Lotus stole code from. Microsoft licensed Visicalc to make Multiplan, and later based Excel on Multiplan. Visicalc was the first known spreadsheet.
IBM had a bit of tyranny themselves, they bullied Lotus, accused them of stealing software patents, and then when that failed, bought them out because IBM couldn't program themselves out of a paper bag, that was why OS/2 was such a failure, and why IBM had to give it up for Linux which was a much better and more scalable operating system than OS/2 ever could become. The best parts of OS/2 were written by Microsoft and those 300 third parties that contributed code to it. The same reason why IBM couldn't open source it, because they had to beg, borrow, or steal code to make OS/2 work.
The same reason why IBM sold the Lexmark, Thinkpad, and outsourced the PC making to a Chinese company, because IBM failed at hardware as well.
AMDAL mainframes where even better mainframes than the IBM 370 series, that was how bad IBM was and always shall be.
If IBM didn't screw up so much, they would be the monopoly instead of Microsoft. But then we wouldn't have Apple, Sun, Linux, Microsoft, or a GUI, just a text based CP/M or OS/2 based system. There also would be no Intel, AMD, or VIA, just IBM CPUs running at 100Mhz and only 32 bits, because companies couldn't compete with each other to make it any better.
You can still live in the 1990's in some fantasy world, but the rest of us want to live in the 21st century with the latest and greatest technology.
Lotus ceased to be relevant after IBM bought them out, because then the Lotus Smartsuite started to stink and be bloated, and actually made MS-Office look good. If IBM didn't buy them out, we'd be using Lotus Smartsuite now with 90% marketshare instead of MS-Office. It seems whenever IBM blunders, Microsoft takes advantage of it. It also seems that whenever Commander Spock blunders, Troll Hard takes advantage of it.
When I read of Microsoft's attempt to stack the deck in its favor I was outraged. It didn't help that some spineless US voters (sheep) had changed their votes to what Microsoft wanted them to be.
Lets remember what transpired in Sweden.
Thank heavens for the French.
We must remain vigilant as Microsoft has three more months to try to stack the deck again. A lot is at stake.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if someone somehow mounted a pressure campaign over the Internet directed at the US voters to counter the enormous campaign that Microsoft must be mounting now.
Microsoft understands what is at stake. Let us hope that other people understand it as well as Microsoft does.
1. Open XML appeared because ikt's richer, more efficient, more web friendly and more flexible. If you've looked at a recent rich document from an office program you will see why this matters. office users would have to take a step backward in functionality to use OpenDoc. why should they?
2. If you think the motives for supporting OpenDoc against open XML are pure, you are being naive. In the end most of these things are driven by large IT corporations who have chosen to back one standard against another. That's just reality.
3. Why does it matter if there is choice? Isn't that good? Better two open standards than a bunch of closed ones.
4. If you know how to use a seach engine, you can find all the standards and the specs. Claiming these standards are somehow "hidden" is plain ridiculous.
Personally I think any move to open up anything that has been proprietary should be encouraged, even if the motives may be mixed as they always will be.
I agree with this statement, but how is a document that might become an open standard that references many proprietary documents a "move to open up"?
- It's happening RIGHT NOW with MPEG-4 vs VC-1
- by technewsjunkie September 4, 2007 6:21 PM PDT
- In digital media format wars.
- Reply to this comment
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- MS has it's "own" version of the MPEG-4 "Standard"
- by technewsjunkie September 4, 2007 6:23 PM PDT
- What the X@$Q)(!! are Standards for when MS floods the market
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(40 Comments)Where is the latest coverage (follow up) on digital media format
wars.
through it's Windows OS monopoly with DEFACTO standards?!