IBM to sit out Office format standards process

IBM does not intend to participate in an Ecma International standards committee that is standardising Microsoft Office document formats, an IBM company executive said on Tuesday.

As a member of the Geneva, Switzerland-based Ecma organisation, IBM can participate in the committee, called Ecma 45, which is creating an internationally recognised standard from the XML-based document formats used in the forthcoming Microsoft Office 12 product. Microsoft submitted the 1,900-page Office Open XML specification to Ecma last week.

But IBM has decided sit on the sidelines, at least for now, according to Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of standards and open source.

"We think there are just too many open switches on this right now for us to go in and do something there. Given the charter, it's not clear what anyone other than Microsoft is going to be doing on this committee," Sutor said on Tuesday.

IBM is a big supporter of OpenDocument and intends to have that document format as the default in its forthcoming Workplace products.

Sutor said Microsoft was trying to have its document formats "rubber-stamped" as standards by Ecma. He said it doesn't appear that the committee, which has Microsoft representatives as co-chairs, can be influenced by companies other than Microsoft.

A Microsoft representative was not available for comment on Tuesday. The company posted a FAQ about Ecma and the standardisation process last week.

Sutor said that within the next year or two the committee should consider a "convergence path" between the Office Open XML document formats and OpenDocument, another set of standards for creating and storing documents.

"We want to see flexibility. We'd like to see some convergence path. Fundamentally, it has to be community-driven thing and we don't see that now," he said.