Somehow i got involved in this discussion and ended up posting a number of comments explaining the how and why behind Microsoft's push for ISO approval of MS-OOXML.

I have been working on a paper titled, "Breaking the Web to Ride the Great Wave".

Breaking the Web is what will happen once ISO approves MS-OOXML. The MIcrosoft Stack of Web Servers (Exchange, SharePoint, MS-SQL Server) are integrated into the MSOffice-Outlook desktop. The MS desktop dominates much of the document workflows and business processes of the commercial world. ISO approval of the MSOffice specific MS-OOXML will legitamize MSOffice as an editor of standardized web ready docuemnts.

But how MS-OOXML docuemnts become "Web REady" is tricky. In the December 2007 MSOffice SDK beta, we see how this is done. The SDK provides a conversion component for the quick high fidelity conversion of MS-OOXML documents to XAML. XAML is a proprietary part of the WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) layer of the .NET framework, and is easily paried with Silverlight. Sometimes XAML is referred to as "fixed/flow".

XAML is an MS proprietary replacement for the W3C's (X)HTML. Billions of MSOffice docuemnts will make their way to the Web using this SDK converter. The path for transitioning the monopolist hold on desktop business processes to the monopolist stack of web servers is set with this converter.

ISO approval of MS-OOXML will enable Microsoft to dodge brining their desktop editor into compliance with advancing W3C standards such as (X)HTML, CSS 3, XForms, SVG and RDF. Instead of these open standards, transitioning business processes will be locked into MS only dependencies; XAML, Silverlight, WinForms, and Smart Tags.

The breaking of the web results in a consumer/business cloud dependent on MS proprietary technologies that are out of the reach of Firefox, Apache, Java, and Adobe technologies.

Google won't be able to penetrate the business stack, and will be kept very busy trying to defend the consumer side of the Microsoft web world if Microsoft aquires Yahoo!

The "Wave" part of my title comes from a 1998 Economist Magazine study called, "The Fourth Wave". The study tracked the four great waves of computing; mainframe, pc, network (client/server), and consumer (web 1.0).

What i am suggesting is that we are now entering "The Fifth Wave" of computing, otherwise known as "cloud computing". This is where large data centers provide hosted services and applications to both business and consumer uses.

The success of the Microsoft Cloud very much depends on establishing MSOffice as the dominant cloud "editor". ISO approval of MS-OOXML will make that a reality. From there, the transition to a proprietary XAML is easy.

One last note. IE-8 does not support the (X)HTML mime type, XForms, SVG or RDF. It does support bits of HTML-5 and CSS 2.1. But not CSS 3.0.

And there you have it! The comments in this discussion pretty much track my thinking on this issue with the exception of a pointer to John Resig's blog where the issues of IE-8 were first discussed.

~ge~