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Zeichick's Take: Microsoft's OOXML Setback Is Good News


By Alan Zeichick


 Alan Zeichick
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September 6, 2007 —  Despite rosy spin by its PR department, Microsoft has suffered a setback in its attempt to ram OOXML through the standards process. We should all celebrate that there's still some amount of credibility in organizations such as the ISO.

Microsoft's Office Open XML specification – a 6,039-page document – has been denied fast-track approval from the ISO. OOXML was rubber-stamped by Ecma International, a vendor-influenced body that unfortunately is taken seriously by the ISO. Microsoft has been lobbying hard to get the ISO to approve OOXML, because national governments (and also U.S. state governments such as Massachusetts) are increasingly insisting that official documents must be stored in an open standard format, not a proprietary one.

Some history: Faced with two open standard formats for documents – the Portable Document Format (PDF/A-1) and the Oasis Open Document Format (ODF) – Microsoft created OOXML, which may be XML-based, but is so incredibly complex that nobody but Microsoft could ever implement it in an interoperable way. Heck, even Microsoft hasn't been able to fully implement OOXML into anything except Microsoft Office 2007. That's why you can't write OOXML documents from Office 2004 for Mac or even from the currently supported Office 2003 for Windows.

Microsoft won easy approval of OOXML from Ecma late last year, an approval labeled ECMA-376. Microsoft now needs only a sign-off from ISO to have it declared an open standard. (It is currently designated as draft ISO/IEC DIS 29500.)

In this week's preliminary vote at the ISO, many member countries voted no, despite significant lobbying by Microsoft. Microsoft is spinning this as a victory, predicting success in a later vote, predicted for March 2008.

We should all be happy that the ISO membership has stood firm. Official standards approval should only be given to specifications that are truly open – and for whom passage of the standard is in the public interest. In the case of OOXML, we're at the brink of having a technology standard that is not really open, and which isn't in the public interest.

If OOXML passes in March 2008 (and I'm worried that it will), it sets a precedent for ISO becoming just like Ecma: a puppet organization that helps companies gain competitive advantage by subverting the standards process. I hope that ISO members firmly reject OOXML the next time around. It would be even better if the ISO tightened up its processes to prevent anything like this from happening again. Denying fast-track approval processes to specifications from vendor groups like Ecma is a good place to start.





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