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Office Open XML ISO certification process grows even murkier for Microsoft
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Office Open XML ISO certification process grows even murkier for Microsoft
By Jeremy Reimer
| Published: July 26, 2007 - 11:23AM CT
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Microsoft has been pushing hard for its Office Open XML file format—which was approved by the ECMA back in December 2006—to get fast-tracked to become a full ISO standard. However, its efforts hit a snag recently when the V1 committee failed by two votes to get the required two-thirds majority to recommend the official US position on the fast-track proposal. Now, things get even more complicated. Andrew Updegrove explained the state of the game on his blog, and in his opinion, the end-game is near.
The situation in the US
The INCITS, the technical committee advised by the V1 group to give its recommendations for ISO approval, still has to deliberate the findings of the V1 and submit its decision before an early September vote. In accordance with INCITS policies, the details of these deliberations will not be made available to the public. Microsoft, as expected, gave a presentation to the INCITS executive board last Thursday and moved that the INCITS consider a written ballot of "Approval, with Comments" with the comments being the 96 issues that the V1 committee had reached a consensus on during its deliberations.
This motion was defeated, but a follow-up motion of approval with 498 comments (the total number brought up by the V1 committee) was accepted. The executive board of the INCITS will deliberate this motion until August 9. If this vote fails to win a majority, the INCITS will then have a chance to review whether or not any of the 498 comments have been addressed to its satisfaction. If they are, the US may still vote to approve Office Open XML as an ISO standard. Currently, the executive board of the INCITS consists of Apple, EMC, Farance, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Lexmark, Microsoft, Oracle, Sony, Adobe, AIM Global, the Electronics Industry Alliance, GS1 US, IEEE, NIST, and the US Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.
The rest of the world
While the US is an important member of the ISO, it is still only one of many member nations, most of which are in the process of finalizing their own decisions on the bid. The general trend among non-US countries is for rejection of the Office Open XML fast-track proposal, with many nations voicing objections to the process and some to the file format itself.
South Africa, for example, voted 13-4 not to approve Office Open XML: two votes of Yes, With Comments, two votes of Yes, Without Comments, and 13 votes of No, With Comments. Their primary concern was that the standard had not been discussed widely enough. Interestingly, South Africa stated that many previous efforts to push ISO standards through had been derailed by vocal objections from the standard-bearer's direct competitors, which led the country to typically abstain from voting. However, the country now believes that voting No is a better solution for standards that are not adequately understood by their technical committees.
Portugal's meeting was even more interesting. In what can only be described as a comedic farce, representatives from Microsoft attempted to argue that Sun Microsystems, the creators and supporters of the competing ODF document standard, could not be given a seat at the conference table because there was a lack of chairs. In the debate, representatives brought up many of the standard criticisms of Office Open XML, such as the infamous "AutoSpaceLikeWord95" tags. Microsoft confirmed that such tags would never be included in a new document, and were only there for backwards compatibility with older applications, and had been added only at the request of organizations such as the US Library of Congress and the British Library. Microsoft was also asked why it couldn't simply extend ODF to include its backwards compatibility needs, and the company representative said that the OASIS group "rejected Microsoft's proposals and expelled/excluded the Microsoft representative because the proposed changes would add backward compatibility to legacy documents."
The battle for Office Open XML ISO certification is certainly shaping up like an actual battle, with corporate representatives from both sides literally jockeying for position at the table. Some industry observers have commented that Microsoft's aggressive push to fast-track Office Open XML as an ISO standard may end up hurting the company's position in the long run, whereas a more sedate approval process might not have raised so many eyebrows. In the end, however, a blessing from the ISO may not be the last word on document formats. Office Open XML will eventually become a de facto standard simply because it is the default file saving format for Microsoft Office, which continues to dominate the office suite market. Even ODF, which has already been enshrined as an ISO standard, is meeting with some criticism. Some European governments are already working on forking ODF to come up with yet another standard, ODEF, that is more suitable for their archiving needs.
Filed under: Office XML, OOXML, Microsoft, ODF, OpenDocument, ISO, Software
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