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From the Editors: Microsoft’s Setback Is Good News

By SD Times News Team

October 1, 2007 — (Page 1 of 2)
Microsoft’s failure to gain fast-track ISO approval for Office Open XML, the proprietary file formats used by Office 2007, is good news. We’re encouraged that the international members of ISO resisted the company’s attempt to ram an impossible specification through the standards process. We hope that those members remain strong and reject OOXML in its next bid for approval, in April 2008.

At issue, frankly, is what a standard means. In theory, a standard should be clear and relatively unambiguous. It should serve the public interest by allowing different entities to create interoperable or compatible implementations. A standard should also provide an agreed-upon platform for future implementation.

Microsoft’s OOXML is none of those. It’s a specification that’s so incredibly convoluted that nobody outside of Microsoft will ever be able to implement it fully. That’s what Microsoft wants, of course. If OOXML is approved by the ISO, the company can then sell its “standards-based” Office solutions to government entities. However, once those entities start creating documents in OOXML formats, they’ll be locked into Microsoft’s software to read and manipulate those documents. Also, businesses and the general public will also need to buy Microsoft’s software to read and manipulate those documents. Ka-ching!

There is another document specification, approved by the ISO and widely accepted by the industry: Open Document Format. Microsoft, as far as we can tell, has never explained why OOXML offers any public benefit over the already-approved (and far simpler) ODF specification. That’s because, we believe, there isn’t one. All OOXML offers is obfuscation and proprietary lock-in. ISO did its job by sending it back to Microsoft for revision.

BEA Stays a Step Ahead
This year’s BEAWorld conference took place in the shadow of VMware’s VMworld 2007, but BEA Systems still managed to catch a glimmer of the spotlight when it announced its latest vision for SOA. Its vision is about visibility and collaboration, not about plumbing: BEA wants developers to stay in step with one another.

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