There can be no doubt that OOXML, as a standard, has severe flaws.   It is incomplete, platform specific, application specific, full of contradictions, fails to adhere to existing standards, untestable, and presents a moving target for any IT worker.  There is not an organization in existence, including Microsoft, that promises to actually implement the full standard.  Much of this is due to the fact the final version doesn't actually exist on paper yet, but a large fraction is also do to the patchwork nature of the product.

The reason governments and companies wanted a 'office apps' standard in the first place was to release an avalanche of data from aging applications.  OOXML shows every appearance of being created to prevent this escape, not enable it.   The immaturity of the standard means that it remains a gamble to see if older documents will remain readable or not.  The lack of testing means there is no way to determine what docs actually adhere to it or not.  The ignoring of existing standards guarantees compatibility problems.  All of these factors are handy for the owner of the biggest share of existing documents, as it forces users to continue to use only _their_ application or risk danger from every other quarter.

OM MALIK: You outlined Microsoft’s software-plus-services strategy, but what I want to know about is the changing role of the desktop in this service’s future.

RAY OZZIE: I think the real question is (that) if you were going to design an OS today, what would it look like? The OS that we’re using today is kind of in the model of a ’70s or ’80s vintage workstation. It was designed for a LAN, it’s got this great display, and a mouse, and all this stuff, but it’s not inherently designed for the Internet. The Internet is this resource in the back end that you can design things to take advantage of. You can use it to synchronize stuff, and communicate stuff amongst these devices at the edge.

A student today or a web startup, they don’t actually start at the desktop. They start at the web, they start building web solutions, and immediately deploy that to a browser. So from that perspective, what programming models can I give these folks that they can extend that functionality out to the edge? In the cases where they want mobility, where they want a rich dynamic experience as a piece of their solution, how can I make it incremental for them to extend those things, as opposed to learning the desktop world from scratch?

What is to be done?

ISO has in a sense put itself in an awkward position here by
already approving the rival OpenDocument
format as an ISO standard. This makes it harder to reject OOXML, and
at the same time makes it difficult to approve OOXML, since it
competes with an existing ISO standard. Generally, I'm unhappy with
how closely these two standards are tied to existing software. What I
would really have liked to see was for OpenDocument and OOXML both to
be dropped, and the two communities to sit down and work out a common
agreed format that is not tied to any existing software. The Chinese
UOF
format, for example, might have served as the starting point for
this. ODA has
also been suggested. Unfortunately, this requires a political will
that does not seem to be present, and so this seems unlikely for now.

garyedwards's Discussions

Lebech said Denmark considers OOXML an open standard, regardless whether it is approved by the ISO. "It would be impossible
for us to use only ISO standards if we want to fulfill the goal of creating interoperability in the government sector," he
said.

The Danish Parliament also mandated that public agencies consider the cost of using open formats. One of the main reasons
OOXML was included is because Denmark is heavily dependent on document management systems that are integrated with Microsoft's
Office products, Lebech said.

Denmark also found that requiring agencies to only use ODF would have been too expensive, mostly because of the cost of converting
documents into ODF, Lebech said.

"We wouldn't have been able to only support ODF," Lebech said. "It wouldn't have been cost neutral."

3.2.2.2. A pox on both your houses!

Hi Robert,

What you've posted are examples of MSOffice ”compatibility settings” used to establish backwards compatibility with older documents, and, for the conversion of alien file formats (such as various versions of WordPerfect .wpd). These compatibility settings are unspecified in that we know the syntax but have no idea of the semantics. And without the semantic description there is no way other developers can understand implementation. This of course guarantees an unacceptable breakdown of interoperability.

But i would be hesitant to make my stand of rejecting OOXML based on this issue. It turns out that there are upwards of 150 unspecified compatibility settings used by OpenOffice/StarOffice. These settings are not specified in ODF, but will nevertheless show up in OpenOffice ODF documents – similarly defying interoperability efforts!

Since the compatibility settings are not specified or even mentioned in the ODF 1.0 – ISO 26300 specification, we have to go to the OOo source code to discover where this stuff comes from. Check out lines 169-211. Here you will find interesting settings such as, “UseFormerLineSpacing, UseFormerObjectPositioning, and UseFormerTextWrapping”.

So what's going on here?

How should an IT team start thinking about an Enterprise 2.0 strategy? One way is to carve it into two main areas. The first is Web-based information sharing--think business versions of Wikipedia, MySpace, and Flickr. A sizable minority of companies are finding effective business uses for blogs, wikis, syndicated feeds, pervasive search, social networking, collaborative content portals like SharePoint, and mashups that use easier-to-integrate APIs and fast-response development techniques such as Ajax. One example: Wikis, which let multiple people access and edit a document online, are widely used at 6% of companies in our survey and used effectively by a few employees at 25% of companies.

The second area is voice and messaging, where voice over IP, instant messaging, presence, videoconferencing, and unified communications can make it possible to connect people in more relevant ways. Unified communications entails the blending of voice calls, video, and messages, coupled with functionality like embedded click-to-call links in documents and contact lists and the ability to see if colleagues and partners are available to chat. It's widely used at 13% of companies surveyed and effectively by a few at 24%.

Opponents to OOXML, which include IBM (Quote<!--, <A HREF="http://www.internetnews.com/stocks/quotes/chart.php/IBM/chart">Chart</A>-->) and the Open
Document Foundation, have argued that Microsoft's specifications are
unwieldy and that the standard application is redundant with the Open Document Format (ODF), which already exists.

Microsoft has countered that the OOXML format is valuable because it is
closer to Office 2007 and is backwards-compatible with older versions of
Office. "Although both ODF and Open XML are document formats, they are
designed to address different needs in the marketplace," the company wrote
in an open letter published earlier this month.