Frankly Speaking: Microsoft's Cynicism - Flock - 0 views
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In July, Jones was asked on his blog whether Microsoft would actually commit to conform to an officially standardized OOXML. His response: “It’s hard for Microsoft to commit to what comes out of Ecma [the European standards group that has already OK’d OOXML] in the coming years, because we don’t know what direction they will take the formats. We’ll of course stay active and propose changes based on where we want to go with Office 14. At the end of the day, though, the other Ecma members could decide to take the spec in a completely different direction. ... Since it’s not guaranteed, it would be hard for us to make any sort of official statement.”
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Gary Edwards on 13 Sep 07Then why is Microsoft dragging us through this standardization nonsense? Is this nothing more than thinly veiled assault on open standards in general?
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To at least some people at Microsoft, this isn’t about meeting the needs of customers who want a stable, solid, vendor-neutral format for storing and managing documents. It’s just another skirmish with the open-source crowd and rivals like IBM, and all that matters is winning.
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Good commentary from Frank Hayes of Computerworld concerning a very serious problem. Even if ISO somehow manages to approve MS-OOXML, Microsoft has reserved the right to implement whatever extension of Ecma-OOXML they feel like implementing. The whole purpose of this standardization exercise was to bring interoperability, document exchange and long term archive capability to digital information by separating the file formats from the traditions of application, platform and vendor dependence.
If Microsoft is determined to produce a variation of OOXML that meets the needs of their proprietary application-platform stack, including proprietary bindings and dependencies, any illusions we might have about open standards and interoeprability will be shattered. By 2008, Microsoft is expected to have over a billion MS-OOXML ready systems intertwined with their proprietary MS Stack of desktop, server, device and web applications.
How are we to interoperate/integrate non Microsoft applications and services into that MS Stack if the portable document/data/media transport is off limits? If you thought the MS Desktop monopoly posed an impossible barrier, wait until the world gets a load of the MS Stack!
Good article Frank.
~ge~