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In 2007, IBM's Rob Weir roundly criticized OOXML because the principle justification for having a largely duplicative international standard was compatibility with the billions of extant legacy Microsoft Office documents in binary formats, yet the specifications for the binary formats were not included in the OOXML specification. Just how committed IBM management was to that position may be seen in the fact that IBM later instigated an antitrust investigation of Microsoft Office by the E.U.'s DG Competition through the European Committee on Interoperable Systems, alleging monopoly abuse by Microsoft on the same grounds, an investigation still ongoing. \n\nIn this blog post comment, IBM's Rob Weir takes a hard line position that the sufficiency of the OOXML standard's specificity must be determined on the basis of what is stated in the standard itself, as opposed to Microsoft's subsequent recoding of Office to remove compatibility defects between Microsoft's implementation of OOXML and the binary formats.\n\nThe quoted passage may be usefully compared to later IBM arguments and actions in regard to the OpenDocument.standard that will be included in later bookmarks. For example, Weir has been unyielding that vendor-defined extensions to the ODF standard must be classified as conformant in ODF 1.2, yet their specifications are definitionally not part of the ODF specification. As another example, in 2009 Weir attacked Microsoft for having implemented ODF 1.1 using formula markup different from that used by OOo, despite ODF 1.1's lack of specifications for spreadsheet formulas. Weir's rationale: that vendors must collaborate to code around holes in the standard. He came very close to arguing that data gaps in a standard are irrelevant. See e.g., http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/battle-for-odf-interoperability.html \n\nHypothesis: IBM's treats ODF as a double standard rather than a standard. What IBM argues in effect is that what is required for OOXML does not apply

Gareth Horton offers a satirical view of IBMer Rob Weir's recent arguments but captures the dilemma Weir's arguments put developers in.

The ad hominem fallacy is a tactic frequently employed by IBM and its followers, most notably by Rob Weir, against those who disagree with IBM's positions and goals. Those who advocate for repairing the badly broken ODF standard or prepare bug reports on that standard are among the most frequently targeted victims of IBM's ad hominem fallacy attacks.

As will be seen in other bookmarks, many IBM staffers' arguments relevant to office document format specifications have been based on variations of the ad hominem fallacy, more commonly known as the "personal attack." .