I wonder if this is correct? My understanding is that the California Group will be brushed aside by the Feds?

Yeah, like interoperability and integration with exsting documents, applciations and processes - near all of which are dominated and controlled by Microsoft. The Interoperability API for the MS products should have been totally opened by anti trust actions. Instead, MS was allowed by the USA anti trust settlement to commercialize interoperability - to the tune of $8 Million dollars per year per interop license.

Uh, the diffusion we really should be focused on involves the OOXML plug-in for MSOffice, IE 7.0, MSOffice 2007, and the Exchange/SharePoint Hub. 

The Exchange/SahrePoint juggernaught is now at 65% marketshare, with Apache servers in noticeable decline.

So it seems the improtant "diffusion" is going forward nicely.  The exploitation of the E/S Hub has also started, and here the Microsoft deelopers have an uncahllenged advantage.  Most of the business processes being migrated to the E/S Hub are coming off the MSOffice bound desktop.  Outsiders to the MS Stack do not have the requisite access to the internals that drive these MSOffice bound business processes, so they have little hope of getting into the "exploitation" cycle.

This aspect was on full display at the recent Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.  The only way a O2 provider can position their service as a collaborative addon to existing business processes is to have some higher level of interop-integration into those processes beyond basic conversion to HTML.

Most O2 operatives struggle to convince the market that an existing business process can be enhanced by stepping outside the process and putting the collaboration value elsewhere.  While this approach is disruptive and unfriendly, it tends to work until a more integrated, more interoperable coolaboration value becomes available.

And that's the problem with O2.  Everyone is excited over the new collaboration possibilities, but the money is with the integration of collaborative computing into existing business processes.  This is a near impossible barrier for non Microsoft shops and would be competitors.  If you're Microsoft though, and you control existing formats, applications and processes, the collaboration stuff is simple value added on.  It's all low hanging fruit that Microsoft can get paid to deliver while O2 players struggle to f

What is he talking about? Does a developer write to Vista? Or do they write to MS Stack ready .NET - OOXML-Smart Documents, XAML, Silverlight stuff?

Then why is Microsoft dragging us through this standardization nonsense? Is this nothing more than thinly veiled assault on open standards in general?

The battle between OOXML and ODF is very much about two groups of big vendor alliances. Interestingly, both groups seek to limit ODF interoperability, but for different reasons.

See: The Plot To Limit ODF Interop

Presentation fidelity and round tripping? Looks like someone has been attention to what happened in Massachusetts.

Keep in mind orchmid that it is the OpenOffice code base that ODF is bound to. There are many instances of the OOo code base pushed by various vendors. Sun provides OpenOffice.org and StarOffice versions of the code base. Novell Open Office is the same code base. Same with Red Hat Office and IBM WorkPlace. Outside this common code base, ODF has near ZERO interoperability.

Let's all hope Marino isn't called on to back up these statements! ODF has zero interoperability. Conformance is entirely optional and in direct violation of ISO Conformance Directives.

In May of 2006, the ISO JTC1 requested of the ISO Directive Counsel an exception for ODF. The request was refused. ODF remains in violation.

A "Yes with comments" is a yes for the ISO approval of MS-OOMXL. If ISO approves MS-OOXML, it won't matter what Bosak's "comments" strategy is. Microsoft and the Vista Stack will be off to the races. The full disclosure of the MS binary document secret blueprint won't matter much at that point.

There you go Geir!

Sun and Bosak have held the door open for MS-OOXML since 2002, when Sun blocked an effort to write the ODF Charter to include as a priority, "compatibility with existing file formats". This of course would include the billions of legacy MS binary documents.

The thing is that those who work in the conversion-translation field will tell you that it is currently impossible to pipe converted legacy binary documents and OOXMl docs for that matter into ODF. Just as Microsoft claims, ODF in it's current state is insufficient and unable to handle the rich feature set of the MSOffice developers platform.

The problem could of course be easily fixed by the inclusion in ODF of five structural generics. In the past year, there have been no less than five iX "interoperability enhancement" proposals submitted to the OASIS ODF TC for discussion and consideration. As uber universal interop expert Florian Reuter points out in his blog, these iX proposals did not fare so well.

What Florian doesn't point out is that it was Sun who opposed any and all efforts to improve compatibility with existing Microsoft binary and OOXML documents. Just as they have done for nearly five years now.

Sort of puts the Sun-Bosak support for ISO approval of MS-OOXML in a different light. ~ge~