Enterprise applications Toolkit

Story: Details emerge of 'shocking' OOXML meeting

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Not the end

Oh it's a mess alright. It's a very public and embarrassing mess that is making a monkey of the standards process. As for whether BillCorp comes out of this with a gain, that is far less certain. Outcome one is of course that the vote is no and OOXML slips into obscurity. Yaay woop woop. If however, as looks more increasingly likely, the vote is a fully bought and paid for yes, where do we stand?

Office will of course have some way of using OOXML. Will it also properly implement ODF? Will the folks that are already using ODF then implement OOXML? One of the main strands of protest is that implementing OOXML is all but impossible unless you are a package called Microsoft . So this leaves us with one file format that can bridge the gap between the various different document editors.

From there on we have two paths. Either the current momentum continues to push Open Office et al further and further into the light, a la Firefox. In which case the fact that there is only one properly interoperable file format, ODF, will take big lumps out of Microsoft's dominance and accelerate the progress of non Microsoft Office tools. The other path is that the current trend for biodiversity reverses and MS Office moves back towards 100% dominance, in which case the fact the ODF is in practice MS only, will be a huge boon for them.

I watch this space with interest.

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