A "touch limited in scope"? Youv'e got to be kidding. ODF was not defined to be compatible with the billions of MSOffice binary (BIN) documents. Nor was it designed to further interoperability with MSOffice.
Given that there are over 550 million MSOffice desktops, representing upwards of 95% of all desktop productivity environments, this discrepancy of design would seem to be a bit more than a touch limited in scope!
Many would claim that this limitation was due to to factors: first that Microsoft refused to join the OASIS ODF TC, which would have resulted in an expanded ODF designed to meet the interoperability needs of the great herd of 550 million users; and second, that Microsoft refused to release the secret binary blueprints.
Since it turns out that both IBM and Sun have had access to the secret binary blueprints since early 2006, and in the two years since have done nothing to imptove ODF interop and conversion fidelity, this second claim doesn't seem to hold much water.
The first claim that Microsoft didn't participate in the OASIS ODF process is a bit more interesting. If you go back to the first OASIS ODF Technical Committee meeting, December 16th, 2002, you'll find that there was a proposal to ammend the proposed charter to include the statemnt that ODF (then known as Open Office XML) be compatible with existing file formats, including those of MSOffice. The "MSOffice" reference was of course not included because ODF sought to be application, platform and vendor independent. But make no mistake, the discussion that day in 2002 was about compatibility and the conversion of the legacy BIN's into ODF.
The proposal to ammend the charter was tabled. Sun objected, claiming that people would interpret the statement as a direct reference to the BIN's, clouding the charter's purpose of application, platform and vendor independence. They proposed that the charter ammendment be taken up a later time after the OASIS TC members had had a chance to read through the Open Office XML specification proposal.
Later attempts to change the charter (and the specification) to recognize the marketplace needs of compatibility with the BIN's were defeated. These issues came to a head when Massachusetts passed an ODF mandate, and was unable to implement ODF exactly because they couldn't convert existing documents, applications and business processes to an ODF based footing. This in turn lead to a major push within the OASIS ODF TC to ammend the specification and charter. If the compatibility - interoeprability problems with legacy desktop systems could not be resolved, there was no way ODF could succeed in Massachusetts.
That would of course leave the door open for OOXML and the OOXML plug-in for MSOffice as the only means of Massachusetts moving to a highly structured XML document footing. Massachusetts needed to get their desktop documents, applications and business processes into some form of useful XML before they could push forward with their SOA-SaaS-Web 2.0 enterprise infrastucture initiatives.
Between July 12th of 2006, and February 20th of 2007, there were six proposals submitted to the OASIS ODF groups designed to improve ODF compatibility - interoperability with the legacy desktops. Six different proposals! And not one survived the OASIS ODF discussion process.
One last point. The German DIN group was authorized by the EU to write a report for ISO concerning the prospects of harmonizing ODF and OOXML. DIN invited all the players with Microsoft and Novell accepting the challenge, and the ODF contingent led by IBM and Sun refusing to participate. The OASIS ODF TC was also inviited, but so far has waffled and stuttered even thoguh a number of meetings have already been held.
Given this past history, is it reasonable to assume that the OASIS ODF TC would have cooperated with Microsoft at any time in the past five years? There simply isn't any evidence to support claims that the ODF TC supports marketplace needs of compatibility - interoeprability. The evidence is quite to the contrary. And it's substantial.
