Enterprise applications Toolkit

Story: Microsoft: IBM masterminded OOXML failure

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Speaking of witch hunts...

>> Thousands of pages beceause it is a better, richer standard
>> that enables many features that ODF does not (backward
>>compatibility with billions of existing docs, accessibility,
>>macros, etc). Also thousands of pages because IBM has
>>tried to sabotage and has bombarded the spec with
>>suggestions for "improvements." To their credit Ecma, and
>>its other members like MS have listened and addressed
>>issues, and improved spec., hence the additional pages.

I gotta admit, this bullet point made me laugh out loud. When it comes to standards, simplicity and clarity are good things. HTML is simple, it's done well. I don't think IBM is really to blame for Microsoft's 6000 page specification. I read elsewhere that the recent errata for MS-OOXML is almost six times the size of the full ODF documentation!

Another favorite talking point of the Microsoft pundits seems to be that MS-OOXML is somehow backward compatible with Microsoft doc files. This is actually nonsensical. Both ODF and MS-OOXML are formats, not applications. The only application which can faithfully and fully interpret Microsoft's proprietary binary doc files is guess what? Microsoft Office.

Other companies needing to support MS-OOXML in their applications are left without the ability to provide “backward compatibility” as they don't have the knowledge necessary to understand the look and metadata described within Microsoft's document files. In other words, it's not OOXML which is providing the backward compatibility, it's Microsoft and only Microsoft. Precisely the kind of thing standards are supposed to free us of!

Yes, OpenOffice.org does manage to render all these proprietary binary formats fairly well but this is only possible through thousands of man-hours of reverse engineering and hundreds of thousands (millions) of lines of programming source code. Reverse engineering is the polar opposite of "open and published". This is why tags such as “autoSpaceLikeWord95” DO NOT belong in a standard.

>>ODF is better.... NOT. But don't take my word for it.
>>Ask IBM (which now implements OXML in 4 of its
>>products), Apple, Google, Novell, and the many
>>OXML implementers.

Speaking of witch hunts, it's amazing how many news outlets picked up this headline and ran with it. It's extremely misleading. At any rate, Jeremy Allison, an employee of Google, but this fallacious argument to rest some time ago in another ZDNet Talkback posting:

" I don't usually speak for Google, but in this case I'm going to make an exception.

We don't believe that OOXML is suitable as an open standard. Google supports it in a very limited viewing capacity in search to allows users to find and view the information they are looking for. This hardly constitutes "support" or any agreement that OOXML is a preferred document type. We are fully behind ODF as the ISO standard document format."

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