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Microsoft Wins Industry Standard Status for Office

Posted by Zonk on from the bully-for-them dept.

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."

2 of 281 comments (clear)

  1. OpenDocument vs. XML by revlayle · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Which one can store more features about a document? which one is more flexible? Would that warrant the difference in the size of specifications? (besides a bad specification, if that being the case).

    It's that or.... um... IBM used like a 6 pt. font for it's entire document! ;)

  2. Re:EMCA by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Ummm... that'd be ECMA you're thinking of. This would be EMCA. Two different groups.