Saturday, June 7, 2008
Microsoft and the OOXML debacle.
I find Microsoft quite an interesting beast. Their business methods are predatory, to say the least, in order to maintain their monopoly just about everywhere and on everything!!!
Their behaviour in getting their unproven and non working anywhere Office Open XML (OOXML), into the ISO fast-track process was quite beyond belief. At the end of the day, despite great opposition to get this approved as an ISO Standard, it did become an ISO Standard. All the the published details has been a very interesting: they have cheated, brided, stacked the deck in the ISO committees, etc. etc. in such a way, that it practically destroyed the ISO’s integrity.
So we now have OOXML as a second ISO standard with the ODF Standard. The real weird news about all this is:
- Microsoft has not implemented OOXML any where yet!
- Microsoft has announced that they will support ODF!
Now, what gives? Since I really don’t trust them at all, I see this as a preemptive move to undermine the ODF community: if MS-Office supports ODF, why would anyone else use anything else. In addition, they can now answer the European Union’s (EU) requests that ODF is a Standard in their Suite…
However, the OOXML Story is not over as India,
Venezuela, Denmark, Brazil and Brazil are getting into Appeals and Objections. This will certainly be worth watching for a while.
Regards!
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