Will ISO follow either the AFNOR or Brittish proposals to merge ODF and OOXML? I think so. If they continue on their current path of big vendor sponsored document wars, ISO will beocme irrelevant. Sooner or later the ISO National Bodies must take back the standards process from corporate corruption and influence.

One thing is clear. Neither Microsoft or IBM is about to compromise. IBM has had many chances to improve ODF's interoperability with Microsoft Office and the Office documents, but has been steadfast in their stubborn refusal to concede an inch.

Microsoft hides behind their legacy installed base of over 550 million MSOffice desktops. There simply isn't a pragmatic or cost effective way of transitioning the installed base to ODF without either seriously re writing and replacing those applications, or, changing ODF to be compatible.

The marketplace is clear on what they intend on doing. Pragmatism will rule. Productivity trumps standards initiatives whenever they are out of sink.

In the face of this clear marketplace intent, one would think IBM might compromise on ODF. No way! They are intent on using ODF to force a market wide rip out and replace of MSOffice.

Most people assume that there are two opposing groups at war here; the Microsoft OOXML group vs. the IBM ODF group. This isn't an accurate view at all. There is a third, middle group of developers working the treacherous space of conversion - the no man'sland between OOXML MSOffice and ODF OpenOffice.

The conversion group know the problems involved, and are actually trying to dliver marketplace facing solutions. The vendors of course are in this war to the bitter end, and could care less about the damage they cause to end users.

It's also true that the conversion group seeks to bridge desktop productivity into the larger, highly interoeprable web platform.

It's also possible that ISO will chose to merge ODF and OOXML, as proposed by the French AFNOR plan as well as by the British. To do this they must first remove entirely the coproarate vendor influence of Ecma and OASIS, and perfect the merger entirely at ISO. The big vendors will of course fully oppose this approach.

My post just happened to coincide with ISO Governor Mark Bryan's "Standardization by Corporations" letter where he expresses a derpressing but nevertheless very true concern.

In fact, the OpenDocument Foundation was created specifically to address our concerns about the undue influence big application vendors were exerting on ODF following the April 30th, 2005 approval of ODF 1.0 (which went on to become ISO 26300).

~ge~