Ecma Receives 3,522 Comments on Open XML Standards

Bergkamp10 writes "Microsoft's Office Open XML document format attracted 3,522 comments from the national standards bodies that participated last summer in balloting that has so far derailed the effort to certify the format as an ISO standard. Brian Jones, an Office program manager at Microsoft and the sole Microsoft employee on the Ecma Technical Committee, revealed the total number of comments that had been received in a blog posting this week. Ecma International is a Swiss standards body that already ratified Open XML and is guiding the format through the ISO. According to Jones many of the 3,500-plus comments, consisting mainly of objections and suggested changes to Ecma's standards proposal, overlap with one another. "When you group them into similar buckets, it narrows down pretty quickly into a more manageable list," he said. Still, he apparently acknowledged that the number of comments was "still pretty impressive." Open XML just missed out on a fast-track to approval as an ISO standard in the initial balloting that concluded in early September. Ecma's proposal won a majority of the votes that were cast but not enough to meet the requirements for approval. Ecma has until January 14 to provide responses and rebuttals to the comments submitted by the national standards bodies. The issues raised will then be debated at a so-called ballot resolution meeting that ISO will hold starting February 25, after which the various national standards bodies will have a chance to amend their vote — the last chance for Open XML to be approved."

Comments

More people wasting their time ...

[Gopal.V]

Not that my opinion matters, but I think a lot of really talented people are wasting their time getting pulled between OOXML and ODF. Right from Jody Goldberg and a lot of others are spending a lot of time supporting both (and debating why).

And looks like I'm not the only one who thinks that - quoted from Jdub's email to gnome-lists.

> [9] What is your positioning with respect to the issue of OOXML?

An exasperating waste of time -- on both sides of the debate -- that will
ultimately harm international technology standards more than it will ever
help Microsoft's bottom line or harm the absolutely inevitable success of
Software Freedom.

I've already shouted down MooXML, but I think I'm done talking about this, if I'm not going to do anything in particular (say, does the Koffice ODF guys need some help?).

Re:More people wasting their time ...

[innerweb]

My only question is how much will it cost Microsoft to fix this for themselves? Yeah, mod me down fanboys. But, the reality is this is something Microsoft has done all too often. So have many other companies. This seems to be a huge issue to Microsoft. Maybe they will let it slide for now and spend time building up their bastardized version of open format (truly a closed format) while doing what they can to destroy a truly open format (like they did with so many other standards before), or will they decide to go for the quick kill and buy the standard?

I used to really like Microsoft products. I used to look forward to when they came out with new products. I also used to like Monsanto for their *engineering*. Reality is they both have too much in common. I believe Open Format is far more important than anything else in computing at the moment. The implications for the future and the present are huge. Open Format is truly what is needed to create competition. As long as the documents are interoperable across applications, then the applications will have to compete on best of breed, not best of lock in. And, as a bonus if the formats are open, then the worry of data loss due to format loss or is much lower. How many times I have had to pull something from an archive in the Microsoft world only to find none of the current tools can open a document that old (happens in law and finance). That is one of the reasons everyone I have worked with keeps digital images of their documents. They are still human readable, though it does defeat several of the strengths of digitally stored documents.

What do you all think? Will Microsoft go for the long term takeover or try to force the issue now (and why do you think so)?

InnerWeb

Re:World record

[louarnkoz]

Actually, that would not be a record, and yes, other standards beat that. For example, the draft 802.11n standard received over 5,000 comments during the ratification process by the IEEE 802.11 working group. Yet there was basic consensus on the specification in the industry, and there are already interoperable implementations certified by the WI-Fi alliance. (I am in fact using 802.11n right now, with a D-Link router and an HP/Centrino laptop...)
-- Louarnkoz