What Happens Next on the US Vote on OOXML

Andy Updegrove writes "As you may know, V1, the INCITS Technical Committee that had charge of the US vote on Microsoft's OOXML, failed to reach consensus on either approving or disapproving the specification. As expected, Microsoft has turned to the full INCITS Executive Board in an effort to salvage the situation. Between now and Labor Day, a complicated series of fall-back ballots and meetings has been scheduled to see whether the Executive Board can agree to approve or disapprove OOXML, in either case "with comments." A vote to approve would mean that addressing the comments would not be required for the US vote to stand, while a vote to disapprove would hold the possibility of US approval if the comments are satisfactorily addressed. The bottom line is that a vote to approve (either in the US or in many other nations around the world) does not appear likely, due to the sheer number of technical issues that have been raised with OOXML, and the expedited schedule upon which Microsoft has insisted throughout the process."

Comments

A friend in need ...

[Anonymous Coward]

is a friend indeed, as they say.

Following the report by V1 that it had failed to achieve consensus, Microsoft requested a place on the agenda at the Executive Board meeting held in California on July 18 - 20, in order to make a short presentation on the V1 events. That presentation occurred on Thursday of last week. However, after giving the brief overview, the Microsoft representative made a motion not provided for on the agenda (which was immediately seconded by the Apple representative) that the Executive Board consider a written ballot of "Approval with Comments," with the comments in question being the 96 issues that the V1 members had succeeded in agreeing upon before ending their deliberations. That would have meant that some 400 additional comments (the more difficult ones upon which consensus had not been reached) that V1 had received from various sources would not have been submitted to ISO/IEC JTC1 if the ballot passed.

Interesting, although unsurprising, to see Apple following the money here.

Re:I, for one, am for choice

[ozmanjusri]

Or, would you rather the MS Office document standard to remain closed?

OOXML doesn't open it.

It just describes it, and incompletely at that.

The sole purpose of OOXML is to torpedo any real standard document format. With Microsoft's machinations in the various ISO committees, it's ridiculous to continue pretending they have any intention of allowing real interoperability.

Re:I, for one, am for choice

[kennygraham]

Or, would you rather the MS Office document standard to remain closed?

OOXML is still closed. When the spec has things like "This element means to parse it like Word97 with all of Word97's obscure bugs", that's not an open standard. What we're opposed to is having garbage like that officially recognized as an open standard.

Re:I, for one, am for choice

[Ai Olor-Wile]

Maybe you should read about the actual OOXML specification before saying that kinda thing.

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/07/formula-for-fa ilure.html
http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/07/mathematic ally-.html
http://www.noooxml.org/
http://ooxmlhoaxes.blogspot.com/
http://blog.janik.cz/archives/2007/07/18/T18_02_54 /

Read these. Then decide if you really, really believe that making this specification a standard will do anything good for the environment. The spec is simply too big and poorly-defined for anyone else to come close to implementing. If it was worth the paper it was printed on (and if you see the last link, that can be quite a lot) Microsoft wouldn't be trying to fast-track it--specifications should speak for themselves in terms of quality. Anything reasonable would have no trouble getting written into an ISO-accepted standard, no matter what company it came from.

Pop quiz: Why the hell is fast tracking with this kind of system possible? Emergency economic situations?

Re:I, for one, am for choice

[KlomDark]

Wouldn't that be nice?

Unfortunately, the current OOXML (The Microsoft format) is so messy it's unmaintainable and unimplementable. Major holes, parts with undocumented binary data, etc. It's all a last-ditch attempt for Microsoft to continue it's office monopoly.

They are being way sneaky with the naming too. Note that the Open Office.org is called ODF (Open Document Format), while Microsoft sneakily called theirs OOXML (Office Open XML) - which confuses everyone, as many people think that OOXML is the "good" format, since they reasonably assume that OOXML means "Open Office XML". But it's not.

Our best attack right now is to make as many people as we can knowledgable of this name game.

ODF: Good and Open
OOXML: Bad and Closed by Microsoft. (It's not truly open when it comes to the details of the format)

Re:didn't know what OOXML meant

[mdm-adph]

Don't feel bad about not knowing -- the confusion was intentional on Microsoft's part.

Re:No OOXML; Maybe Not ODF

[MightyMartian]

Save that the specs are ridiculously huge, and full of what really amount to undocumented references. It's not a useful specification.

Re:I, for one, am for choice

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Choice in products, not in standards. You want GE and Sylvania and all other light bulb vendors fighting to sell you a light bulb which will fit the fixture you have in your house. GE should not be promoting its own "snap in" bulbs and Sylvania pushing its "screw in" standard and Phillips proposing a spring loaded catch standard. Just yesterday I discovered that the table lamp I bought from IKEA uses a bulb R17, and even IKEA does not carry replacement bulbs. I get R12 and R26 but not R17. Three "standard" bulb types and they manage to screw me. That lamp is junk now. That is what happens when you have multiple standards.

Do you really want both Betamax and VHS? Do you really want both DVD and Laserdisk? Come on. Demand real open standards. It is not about free software. It is not about open software. It is not about non-commercial software. It is perfectly OK to have two or three proprietary closed software supporting ODF and one or two Open Source but not-free software and a couple of Open Source and free software all supporting one document standard with perfect portability across them.

Only when users demand the ability to switch from one software to another without any loss of functionality they will have the power in negotiation. In the present situation, they have to buy whatever MSFT charges. Did you really think people will be forking over 150$ for a spreadsheet and word processor 10 years ago? The whole MS Office was selling for 50$. Now it is supposed to be 500$. Dont you see where the customers lost the ability to negotiate better prices because of vendor lock in?