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."

Comments

Re:6,000 pages (in what format?)

[camperdave]

Yeah, we're going to need to send that off to the Reader's Digest to get it condensed.

Re:Just to set things straight...

[the_humeister]

Way to bring facts into the discussion. Your Slashdot license is hereby revoked.

In other news....

[tnk1]

Microsoft's spokesman countered the IBM executive's statement by pointing out,

"Actually the Open standard we propose is six thousand pages, but that's only because we printed it in 256 point boldface fonts in order to be handicapped accessible for the visually impaired, you insensitive clod."

Microsoft further countered allegations of being too hard for developers by pointing out,

"If you take away the title information, the table of contents, the index and the pages that say This Page Intentionally Left Blank, all the standards document says is 'Buy a copy of Microsoft Office'. What could be simpler than that?"

Re:In other news....

[Hoi Polloi]

"...we printed it in 256 point boldface fonts..."

Actually the layout was done by an ex-editor for the New York Post.

"OPEN STANDARDS WREAK HAVOK ON CITY!"

Re:why are there two standardization groups

[Kopl]

"The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from"-Grace Hopper

Standards for Standards.

[camperdave]

I guess your standards for standards is higher than the standard industry standards standards used by standard Microsoft employees. In other words, "I've upped my standards, so up yours".

Re:6,000 pages (in what format?)

[nschubach]

I think if you remove or even replace all the instances of the word Microsoft or "Copyright Microsoft" in the document, it might reduce to somewhere around 2-300 pages.