Category: OOXML

The BRM – the ballot resolution meeting – for Microsoft’s office “standard” DIS-29500 is set due on 25-29 February 2008 in Geneva, Switzerland. On this meeting all the different local standard bodies can discuss and resolve the 662 comments they’ve send in with their vote on September 2nd. A webpage has been created by some committed individuals to make this comments easily browsable here, because they apparently weren’t published properly to the public by Microsoft…

To ensure all the individual standard bodies actually step up and take their seat at the BRM in February, the NoOOXML campaign sent out a letter yesterday to all the people who signed the petition online. In this letter they motivate us all to call our respective standards body (for me here in Germany this is the DIN, the “Deutsches Institut für Normung”), ask who exactly will go to the BRM for the standards body (and when this is decided), ask if those delegates are independent enough from “the company” (Microsoft) to actual do their job (i.e. provide criticism and helpful resolutions), and, finally, ask if the body itself is at all working on change requests based on the comments (even their own ones). The gathered information then should be send to the local FFII.org representatives – in my case berlin [at] ffii.org

The results of these efforts can be viewed here: http://www.noooxml.org/brm

So, whom do you want to contact today…^TM?

Microsofts XML-based Office format failed to receive the needed votes for a fast track standardization. However, the differences have been more than marginal: Microsoft received 74% of all qualified votes, whereas 75% would have been sufficient to get it through. The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) has put out a nice graphic which visualizes the votes:

(There is a textual overview of the results available here.)

Microsoft surely won’t give up the format just now, it is far too important for their business strategies in the next years. And its likely that they try to “fix” at least some of the outstanding issues (you could also say: do even more lobbying) to get the needed 75% in March 2008 for the final voting. Microsoft itself already speaks of “Strong Global Support for Open XML” in their press release on the topic:

“Technical experts around the world have provided invaluable feedback and technical recommendations for evolving the format,” Robertson said. “The high quality of the Open XML format will be improved as a result of this process, and we take seriously our role in working within the Ecma technical committee to address the comments received. We believe that the ISO National Bodies will be pleased with the results.”

Now lets see if we are equally pleased with the results…

Whoever thought that Microsoft would not be up to every trick to push their document format, should read some of these blog postings. To quote one of the blog, in which a blogger writes about the standardization process in Portugal:

Let me remark the fact that representatives of Sun and IBM [obviously against OOXML] didn’t attend to [a decision meeting] because there were no chairs for them. […] Microsoft alone wasted three seats. ASSOFT wasted two more, business partners of Microsoft wasted a few more spots. [There were a total of 30 seats]

[…]
The President, Microsoft representative, tried to shut me up twice. At the second attempt I accomplished my promise of speaking louder if I had to in order to be heard, refusing to be cut off.

Nothing more to say here.

And I was pointed to another excellent blog post which outlines the technical difficulties to actually modify OOXML Excel documents outside of the Office 2007 suite. An eye opener, in my opinion.

I’m sure most of the techies out there already know about the effort of Microsoft to push their XML-based file format “Office Open XML” (OOXML in short) of the Office 2007 Suite as open standard. The problem with it is though, that the whole format description is way too bloated (more than 7000 pages; ODF not even has 1000), doesn’t honor other, existing ISO standards (f.e. date and time formats in ISO 8601) and is spicked with references to proprietary attributes like “useWord97LineBreakRules” or “autoSpaceLikeWord95”.

To make a long story short, if people were enthusiastic in first place on Microsoft’s step towards an open, XML-based format, away from the proprietary binary format they used earlier versions, this enthusiasm soon ebbed away when it became obvious that the whole action is just window-dressing. In its current state, OOXML will not allow any third-party software developer to fully support the format, because of all the undefined holes in it. Rob Weir, a software architect from IBM, gives a good insight of what this format is actually about in his personal blog, if you like to read on.

Now since ISO standardization seems to be a global process where every country must cast a vote, it seems that Microsoft has done a good job lobbying for their format in many of them (f.e. Australia, which is said to vote positive), while having a hard time in others: Yesterday was announced, that Microsoft failed to get the needed 9 votes in the USA, which is a very good signal. The deadline, however, is September 2nd, 2007. Until then, a lot of stuff can happen. There is a petition going on on noooxml.org, which has been signed by more than 33.000 people already. I’d strongly encourage you to sign that as well, and, if you get the chance, write your local ISO standards body to vote against OOXML in your country. For Germany this is the “Deutsches Institut für Normung” , in short DIN, which seems to review the format since May this year already.

Lets see where Germany and the other, yet undecided countries, are heading. Its already a farce that OOXML made it through ECMA and is now a standard after ECMA-376 (though the process leading to this is highly debatable).

However, what disappoints me the most as of now is, that Apple voted “Yes” in the aforementioned US ballot. I was always thinking, Job’s company is a bit smarter than the rest and not just follow the leader, but I guess business considerations were more important in this particular case. If Apple looses Microsoft as developer on the Mac, they loose the Mac Office Suite and also one important selling factor in business environments: Compatibility with Microsoft Office.

Pussies. They could do better. And they partially did better already, by launching the new iWork ’08 with Office Open XML support now, before Office for Mac 2008 arrives in January next year – now if they’d just include ODF support as well…

EDIT 2007-08-22: It seems that the German standards body voted PRO Office OpenXML (German source) – imho a very sad day. I hope the other countries will not follow Microsofts approach equally blind.