There’s been a number of posts recently about the continuing battle between ODF and OpenXML. IBM has been letting fly as to why OpenXML shouldn’t be accepted by ISO. In return Microsoft has been retaliating by claiming its technical superiority and isn’t XML document based formats so wonderful! Apparently they weren’t so wonderful when ODF was the game in town, but that’s a small detail!
So, what’s it all about? I don’t really know which format is better and do I really care? What I care about and what customers care about is that Applications inter-operate especially when it comes to something as fundamental as their documents. So, I’m increasingly just thinking why can’t you just work together on this? Radical? Bill Gates in his keynote at the recent London Pre-launch event said that Microsoft was working with companies such as IBM on standards for webservices, so is this too much to ask?
It’s getting to an absurd point where on Mark Shuttleworth’s blog a commenter says reject OpenXML as a standard to uphold standards! The Register has it spot on that it’s the very people that these organisations are purporting to protect that suffer in the end.
We all know and understand that Microsoft is scared of losing business to organisations across the world who were starting to mandate their documents had to be accessible in an openly documented/standard. Wouldn’t you want that as a customer? Hell, it’s your data and why be tied in to a solution when at some point in the future you might wish to switch solutions. The problem is that Microsoft is just not being honest about this being a major reason they went down the ISO route, when they so bitterly opposed XML document formats in the shape of ODF.
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February 19th, 2008 at 12:40 am
You know me… I’m going to disagree with you.
1) IBM has produced products that rely on ODF, so don’t think them impartial
2) ODF is light weight and not capable of rendering many features of Office. Want embedded graphics, sorry. How about a languague for your spreadsheet formulas.. Sorry, ODF just stores every cell as a string. How about some levels of security and privacy. Nope. There is a long list. This is why ODF is going through so many revisions.
What customers want is the ability to swap documents, nothing more. Be it ODF or Open XML or something else. when something becomes an ECMA or ISO standard (OXML is already a European standard with ECMA) it is nto written in law that people have to use it or abide by it, but it does give them the option to do so. The only reason why people would want to stop something becoming a standard is because they are afraid people will use it. When there has been more than 1 standard before, people implemented the one that worked for them. Sometimes multiple standards ran for years, and sometimes for days. Saying “no” to standardising things is a way of saying that you are afraid to allow something to play on that level playing field. If OXML became a standard and people couldn’t use it, would it’s adoption be greater? Only if it could be used easily and effectively could it offer any potential threat to ODF.
ttfn
David