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Story: Google: OOXML 'insufficient and unnecessary'

Posted by: lars (Tuesday 26 February 2008, 9:04 PM)

Very nice Albert

So you think Google could have based Google apps on a proprietary, closed undocumented Microsoft format.
I do not know if that had made Microsoft very happy or very unhappy,
It would have made Google very stupid, however.

I think you should read a lot more.
Try consortiuminfo.org. They have followed the whole story from the beginning.
For instance:

http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20080224143425160

With some cutting and pasting.

Here is the conclusion.

>> If the eligible members of ISI/IEC JTC1 vote not to approve OOXML, then OOXML will still be an Ecma standard, and all of the benefits to Microsoft customers and developers will still be preserved. Microsoft will also reap the principal benefits that OOXML can provide for it: its developers will be more likely to continue to support Office, and new developers will doubtless become motivated to become part of that environment. In short, a vote against OOXML does not deprive either the marketplace or Microsoft of the value of OOXML having been made public, and all of the changes already made by Microsoft will still bear fruit.

>> But if the National Bodies vote to approve OOXML, what then?

>> If they do, OOXML will achieve titular parity with ODF in the eyes of legislators around the world, most of whom will lack the existing knowledge and the time and interest to learn whether there would still be a reason to prefer products that implement ODF over OOXML. Presumably, the high water mark of interest in ODF would have passed, and the credibility of ODF-compliant products, as well as the importance of open document formats in general, would begin to recede from public and legislative view.

>> Microsoft, like any other publicly held company, would then have no incentive at all to consider moving even one step farther down the path to openness with OOXML than it had on the date of the vote, except to the extent compelled to do so by the European Commission – a glacial process, as witnessed by the more than nine-year duration of the EC’s last prosecution. Microsoft would not have even the incentive to fully implement OOXML, nor to agree to implement any later Ecma-approved change that it did not find to its liking. Nor to work towards merging ODF, OOXML and UOF (the Chinese open document standard). And then we would be back where we started.
Perhaps most tellingly, neither Microsoft nor any other dominant vendor would be any more likely to cooperate in the creation of another Civil ICT Standard that threatened its hegemony than Microsoft has done in the past. There is an historical antecedent for this as well, because Microsoft stood aside rather than join the working group in OASIS that created ODF, despite the fact that it held a seat on the Board of Directors. Had it chosen to participate rather than bet that the ODF effort would fail, we might have one standard today instead of two, and everyone would be better off, including Microsoft’s customers and ISVs. I believe that this is the type of behavior that government should encourage, rather than the opposite.

>> What is needed for the future is a commitment by governments to ensure that proper Civil ICT standards are created and adopted. I believe that this will happen sooner or later, and the question is only how it will be accomplished. Too often, industry holds out as long as it can, until legislators finally act legislatively, usually long after the point in time at which the public would best have been served (e.g., in the United States, where domestic car manufacturers successfully resisted an increase in government-mandated fleet mileage efficiency requirements for over 20 years).

>> If industry (and not just Microsoft) wishes to preserve its freedom to act, and indeed if the formal global standards infrastructure itself wishes to retain a role in the process of creating Civil ICT Standards at all, then each would be wise to consider the fact that a vote aga

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