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Microsoft Wins Industry Standard Status for Office
everphilski writes "The International Herald-Tribune reports that Microsoft has won industry standard status for Office. EMCA International, a group of hardware and software makers based in Geneva, approved the MS file formats with only one dissenting vote - IBM. IBM backs the OpenDocument standard, which was approved by the ISO in May of this year." From the article: "Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president for open source and standards, called Microsoft's Office formats technically unwieldy - requiring software developers to absorb 6,000 pages of specifications, compared with 700 pages for OpenDocument. 'The practical effect is the only people who are going to be in a position to implement Microsoft's specifications are Microsoft,' Sutor said."
I wasn't aware that file formats could have all those flaws. Perhaps you didn't even read the summary.
IBM FUD. Comparing two standards by the number of pages is like measuring programmer productivity by lines of code. Many pages is just as likely to mean "complete and well-documented" as it is "unwieldy."
I'm all for open standards and I'm not a Microsoft fan-boy, but Microsoft's flagship product is Office. Excel kicks OpenOffice's ass around the block still in stability, speed, and features, so I'm comfy with Microsoft knowing what the hell it is doing with the standard.
I create XML Spreadsheets all the time without problems in the applications I manage, and I'm comfortable with what I've read of the newer XML standard in Excel 2007. I'm not happy about everything, particularly the separation of worksheets into separate XML files in the zip package, but overall I'm comfortable that we'll be able to support it well before 2-3 years from now when our clients finally upgrade.