Google Pleased With ISO OOXML Decision

yogi writes "In a blog post from this Friday past, Google welcomed the ISO decision not to fasttrack OOXML. They also (once again) voiced their public support for the ODF standard. 'Technical standards should be arrived at transparently, openly, and based on technical merit. Google is committed to helping the standards community remain true to this ideal and maintain their independence from any commercial pressure ... Google supports one open document format and calls on industry participants to collaboratively work on ODF. With multiple implementations of one open standard for documents, users, businesses and governments around the world can have both choice and freedom to access their own documents, share with others and pass onto future generations.'"

Comments

Re:OOXML... what's the point?

[bealzabobs_youruncle]

If you and your friend are so bright you could go into the options and set Office 2007 to save in Office 97-2003 compatability mode. I'm all for piling on with MS, but lack of user effort does not equate to wrong-doing in this case.

Did I miss something?

[Cassini2]

The fast track process does not officially end until after the next ballot resolution meeting (BRM). According to the ISO press release http://www.iso.org/iso/newsandmedia/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1070, if Microsoft scrapes together enough support at the BRM, then the OOXML standard will be accepted.

On the other hand, if Microsoft doesn't get the support at the BRM, then OOXML is out of the fast track process and referred back to committee for development.

badsummary

[achurch]

The fast-track process isn't over yet; all ISO has decided is that OOXML didn't pass the initial vote. There's still (probably, unless Microsoft backs down at the last minute) a Ballot Resolution Meeting to come, where the committee looks at all the comments received with the votes and tries to resolve them. If the various national boards decide that the result is good enough and vote for OOXML, it can still become a standard in the near future.

Re:OOXML... what's the point?

[ushering05401]

"Can anyone out there make a convincing case that Calc or Gnumeric are just as good as Excel, even for advanced users?"

Not I, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't install and play with the alternatives. Hell, if you feel so motivated you might even contribute some feedback to the dev community about what would motivate you to switch away from Excel.

Long story short, Excel is one of the few areas that MS actually delivers the goods. There are issues with Excel, but nothing like the issues that plague most other MS products.

Re:Google vs. Microsoft

[Zeinfeld]

However, with ISO standards, isn't there a bit more enforcement of whether or not something adheres to the standard? Don't they actually check that products that say they meet some standard actually meet the standard? Don't they take legal recourse against products that use there standards incorrectly? Maybe I'm just wrong here, but I don't think that ISO has built up such a large reputation for standards by just letting things slide, and having their name slapped on products that don't adhere to the standard.

Completely off base. Wrong on every count.

First off I think you need to understand what ISO is, ISO does not set standards. All ISO does is to recognize standards that have already been set by other standards bodies. So ISO 3103 is actually the same as BS 6008. ISO 9000 is BS 5750 and so on.

The IETF is actually accredited as an ISO member body and in theory RFCs could become ISO standards. They never have and never will as long as ISO charges money for its standards.

There is a compliance program for ISO 9000 but it isn't run by ISO. ISO 9000 consulting is one of the things that Y2K vampires went on to do after Dec 31 1999.

If you want standards go ISO 3103 is pretty critical yet you would be hard pressed to find any US companies that are in compliance. Still, least they don't use salt water any more.

Re:OOXML... what's the point?

[MillionthMonkey]

If you and your friend are so bright you could go into the options and set Office 2007 to save in Office 97-2003 compatability mode.

What part of "he can select an earlier format, but then it saves as read-only" did you not understand? Office 97-2003 compatibility mode has three different meanings in Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, and the one in Excel prevents documents with "new features" from being saved to a file that can be edited by a previous version of Excel.

Re:So why don't they actualy support ODF in search

[Anonymous Coward]

Because 'odf' isn't an actual file extension used for ODF documents...try odt (text), odp (presentation), etc...

Re:Google's "hypocrisy"...?

[Rakishi]

1. You're redundant: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=300601&cid=20646489
2. You have no idea what you're talking about: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=300601&cid=20646837

Re:So why don't they actualy support ODF in search

[Rakishi]

WTF are you smoking, yes they do:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=filetype%3Aodt+the&btnG=Search

A little premature.

[AJWM]

The ISO decision to not fast-track this won't be made until the ballot resolution meeting (BRM) in February, where they look at the comments, decide which can be resolved, and re-vote. If it passes that vote (and you can be sure MSFT is working on that), the fast-track succeeds. The ISO press release that TFA links to explains this. (I guess someone at Google has reading comprehension issues.)

It ain't over yet.

Re:Of course.

[Bert64]

In what way?
What do old versions of msoffice do that cannot be represented by odf?
Most of the so called "compatibility" present in ooxml is poorly conceived, and hinges on adding extra complexity to the format when it would be much easier to simply mimick the behaviour in the conversion program and store the results in a standard way.