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Stephane is right on target. This is a must read for anyone trying to understand ISO approval of OOXML, and the sudden change of mind at Microsoft to support ODF!

Stephane Rodriquez sums it up: Microsoft has won ... "Future of OOXML? There are two answers. Frankly, who freaking cares the paper? This paper will ALWAYS be at odds with the actual Office implementation. We have a good example for the time being, but it has always been the case. What about the actual file format then? It will be the subject of reverse engineering from implementers whose only recourse is to catch up all the undocumented stuff. Make no mistake though, now it's about applications, not documents anymore." "Conclusion : if you are still in the OOXML conspiracy game, about time to move on guys. "

Another article from Charles Forelle of WSJ on Microsoft's efforts to corrupt the international standards process

This is nonsense. Whether an organizations standardizes on ODF or OOXML, the "interoperability" they seek will still be based on every desktop running the same application. Neither format enables the interchange of documents between different applications - even if those applications properly implement the format standard. Anyone can prove this for themselves. Simply shuttle a few OpenOffice ODF documents between Symphony, Novell Office and Google Docs. Then weep. At least with MSOffice-OOXMLyou can exchange documents between different versions of MSOffice. Even though OpenOffice, Symphony and Novell Office are based on the same code base, interop might as well be zero. Besides; what end users really want from a modern desktop office suite is collaborative editing of web ready documents. This discussion is so last century - 1995!

This is the article that shut down the Web on Monday morning, when Rush Limbaugh dedicated a whole show to it.  Also appears in American Spectator! excerpt: As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors' "toxic assets" was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's "systemic collapse." In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets' nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.  When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term "political class" came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public's understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the "ruling class." And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to domin

Great article series from eWeek.  A must read.  But it all comes down to interoperability across two stack models:  The Microsoft Vista Stack, and an alternative Open Stack model that does not yet exist!

Incompatible formats become a nightmare for the kind of integration any kind of SOA implementation depends on, let alone the Web 2.0 AJAX MashUps this article focuses on.

I wonder why eWEEK didn't include the Joe Wilcox Micrsoft Watch Article, "Obla De OBA Da".  Joe hit hard on the connection between OOXML and the Vista Stack.  He missed the implications this will have on MS SOA solutions.  Open Source SOA solutions will be locked out of the Vista Stack.  And with 98% or more of existing desktop business processes bound to MSOffice, the transition of these business processes to the Vista Stack will no doubt have a dramatic impact on the marketplace.  Before the year is out, we'll see Redmond let loose with a torrent of MS SOA solutions.  The only reason they've held back is that they need to first have all the Vista Stack pieces in place.

I don't think Microsoft is being held back by OOXML approval at ISO either.  ISO approval might have made a difference in Europe in 2006, but even there, the EU IDABC has dropped the ISO requirement.  For sure ISO approval means nothing in the US, as California and Massachusetts have demonstrated. 

All that matters to State CIO's is that they can migrate exisiting docuemnts and business processes to XML.  The only question is, "Which XML?  OOXML, ODF or XHTML+".

The high fidelity conversion ratio and non disruptive OOXML plugin for MSOffice has certainly provided OOXML with the edge in this process. <br

Famed Microsoft WikiPedia editor Rick Jellife takes on the HTML-CSS proposal put forth by Opera Browser CTO Håkon Wium Lie's in his recent CNET column.

Rick claims that the Opera proposal is "solid in its ultimate premise .... that inspite of .. all the talk about ODF and OOXML, it is important not to lose track of HTML's potential and actual suitability for much document interchange.

Good discussion except that MS Rick can't help himself when it comes to the tired moral equivocation argument that the world can and should accept and use two ISO/IEC desktop productivity environment file format standards, ODF and OOXML.  Once again he puts forward the claim that ODF is OPenOffice specific and OOXML is MSOffice specific - each having it's place and value as an international standard.

Are we standardizing applications here?  I thought it was about creating a universal XML file format that all application can use::  One file format  for OpenOffice, MSOffice, KOffice, Writer, WordPerfect Office, Novell Office, GNOME Office, and even the Flash-Apollo based " Virtual Ubiquity " from Rick Treitman.

ODF does need to provide the marketplace with at least three profiles; desktop productivity environments, server side portal publication-content-archive management systems, and devices.  This would greatly improve interoperability as ODF documents transition across desktops, servers, devices and Internet information domains.  It would also help the implementation of ODF by SOA, SaaS and Web 2.0 systems.

But having two file formats that irreconcilably incompatible servicing the exact same market categories?  Doesn't make sense.  And can only end in massive end user confusion where the application with dominant marketshare end up crushing any and all competitive alternative

I hope the anti trust police are awake.