OpenDocument

In light of the Microsoft announcement of ODF support, a prescient July, 2007 blog article by Rick Jelliffe deserves revisiting. Jelliffe surveyed the pressure points for various players that he saw in the File Format War and made a set of suggestions that bear a remarkable resemblance to subsequent events. The goal he recommended for eGovernment and open standards advocates was to push to get ODF and OOXML out of the hands of Ecma and OASIS and into the hands of ISO for harmonization work, arguing that it is the most vendor-neutral eligible forum for such work.

The Bill Gates "Office Rendering" email from the IOWA-Comes vs Microsoft antitrust case

Also includes stats in table form indicating that according to Google Search OOXML documents now outnumber ODF documents on the Web, for word processor documents, spreadsheet documents, and presentation documents.

Finally! Someone who gets it. For an office suite to be considered as an alternative to MSOffice, it must be designed with multiple levels of compatibility. It's not just that the "feature sets" that must be comparable. The guts of the suite must be compatible at both the file format level, and the environment level. Randall put's it this way; "It's the ecosystem stupid". The reason ODF failed in Massachusetts is that neither OpenOffice nor OpenOffice ODF are designed to be compatible with legacy and existing MSOffice applications, binary formats, and, the MSOffice productivity environment. Instead, OOo and OOo-ODF are designed to be competitively comparable. As an alternative to MSOffice, OpenOffice and OpenOffice ODF cannot fit into existing MSOffice workgroups and producitivity environments. Because it s was not designed to be compatible, OOo demands that the environment be replaced, rebuilt and re-engineered. Making OOo and OOo-ODF costly and disruptive to critical day-to-day business processes. The lesson of Massachusetts is simple; compatibility matters. Conversion of workgroup/workflow documents from the MSOffice productivity environment to OpenOffice ODF will break those documents at two levels: fidelity and embedded "ecosystem" logic. Fidelity is what most end-users point to since that's the aspect of the document conversion they can see. However, it's what they can't see that is the show stopper. The hidden side of workgroup/workflow documents is embedded logic that includes scripts, macros, formulas, OLE, data bindings, security settings, application specific settings, and productivity environment settings. Breaks these aspects of the document, and you stop important business processes bound to the MSOffice productivity environment. There is no such thing as an OpenOffice productivity environment designed to be a compatible alternative to the MSOffice productivity environment. Another lesson from Massach

Microsoft's proposed undertaking for resolving the ECIS complaint to the European Commission regarding its office productivity software can be downloaded from this linked web page. I've given it a quick skim. Didn't see anything in it for anyone but competing big vendors. E.g., no profiling of data formats for interop of less and more featureful implementations, no round-tripping provisions. Still, some major concessions offered.

The ever audacious and prevaricating lobbyist group known as the ODF Alliance has posted their critique of Ecma's (Microsoft's) proposed disposition of ISO comments rejecting OOXML. The critique's appeal to ignorance is breath-taking in scope. E.g., whilst slamming DIS-29500 on the subject of interoperability, the same document pushes for harmonization using the following argument: "Harmonization starts from looking at where the two formats overlap - and there is a significant, perhaps 90 percent or more, area where OOXML and ODF do overlap - and expressing this functional overlap identically. This common functionality between ODF and OOXML would also include a common extensibility mechanism. The remaining 10 percent of the functionality, where these standards do not overlap, would represent the focus of the harmonization effort. That portion of it which represents a widespread need could be brought into the core of ODF. That remaining portion which only serves one vendor's needs, such as flags for deprecated legacy formatting options, could be represented using the common extensibility mechanism." And precisely how do vendor-specific extensions aid interoperability, particularly when the proposed "harmonization" does not require profiles and an interoperability framework?

"In light of changes in Microsoft's behaviour, the increased opportunity for third parties to exercise their rights directly before national courts and experience gained since the adoption of the 2004 Decision," this morning's statement reads, "the Commission no longer requires a full time monitoring trustee to assess Microsoft's compliance. In future, the Commission intends to rely on the ad hoc assistance of technical consultants. "Microsoft has an ongoing obligation to supply complete and accurate interoperability information as specified in the Commission's 2004 Microsoft Decision," the EC goes on. "However, given that the original set of interoperability information has already been documented by Microsoft, increased opportunities through private enforcement provisions in Microsoft's license agreements for third parties to exercise their rights directly before national courts, and experience gained since the adoption of the 2004 Decision, the nature of the technical assistance that the Commission requires is now of a more ad hoc character."