Stephane Rodriguez Dismantles Open XML

Elektroschock writes "Stephane Rodriguez, a reengineering specialist who became popular for his article on MS Office 2007 binary data, now comprehensively debunks Microsoft's new Open XML format. With small case studies he demonstrates the impossible challenges third-party developers will face. His conclusion: it is 'defective by design.' Next week members of the International Standard Organization are likely to approve the format as a second official ISO standard for office documents, even though most nations have submitted comments. Rodriguez claims he is 'not affiliated to any pro-MS or anti-MS party/org[anization]/ass[ociation].'"

Comments

Re:This is not proof of OOXML being defective by d

[setagllib]

It's deliberate. The standard is just a distraction, to keep competitors busy trying to implement it, while documents are actually being created in the Office 2007 variant of OOXML. A few months of legacy almost guarantees a transition to the real OOXML would be an uphill battle, especially with no real documentation of how *either* format works. So even with a supposed 'standard' and a near-enough implementation, the vendor lockin is just as strong as it was with the binary formats.

Re:This is not proof of OOXML being defective by d

[swillden]

This is not proof of OOXML being defective by design. It only shows that apparently MS's software isn't able to handle OOXML properly.

If Office can't read OOXML files produced by other tools, and other tools can't read Office OOXML files, where do you suppose end users will place the blame?

And what do you suppose users will do when faced with incompatibilities?

It's a brilliant strategy: Define a new "standard" but don't quite implement it yourself, ensuring that no one can implement a competitive office suite that is compatible with yours. Further, make the standard complex and weird enough that you can always blame inconsistencies on the other implementations. Voila! You get to proclaim to the world that your de facto standard office suite supports an open, ISO-blessed international standard format -- but with no worries about losing your lock-in.