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RTF Vs. OOXML
Rob Weir has an interesting essay comparing the viciousness of RTF and OOXML: "The [document format standard] concerns of 2004 (or 1995 even) are very similar to the concerns of 2007... 'RTF is defined as whatever Word saves when you ask it to save as RTF.' This should sound familiar. OOXML is nothing more than the preferences of Microsoft Office. Whenever Word changes, OOXML will change. And if you are a user or competitor of Word, you will be the last one to hear about these changes. The coding of Office 14 a.k.a. Office 2009 is well underway. Beta releases are expected in early 2008. But are file format changes needed to accommodate the new features being discussed in Ecma? No. Are they being discussed in ISO? No. Are they being discussed anywhere publicly? No. By owning the 'standard' and developing it in secret, in an Ecma rubber-stamp process, Microsoft rigs the system so they can author an ISO standard with which they are effortlessly compatible, while at the same time ensuring that their products maintain an insurmountable head start in implementing these same standards. Is this how an open standard is developed?"
No.
Here's a copy of the draft OpenISO.org "Problem Report" entry for this issue:
Microsoft's attempt to essentially unilaterally dictate office document standards is an abuse of their dominant position
Problem description:
Normally standardization is conducted by means all interested parties participating in a discussion of the desired features, so that all interested parties have an essentially equal opportunity to develop products implementing the standard.
By contrast, OOXML is simply documentation of the document format that Microsoft's products already use, and there is no indication that Microsoft would intend to make the details about future versions of OOXML available to competitors before Microsoft is ready to release their own implementation of the new features for public beta testing.
Expected impact:
To the extent that OOXML is accepted as a standard, all of Microsoft's competitors will be encumbered with a permanent economic disadvantage.
Possible solution:
Reject all claims about OOXML in some way being a standard, and take legal action, on the basis of national and international competition law, against Microsoft as well as against Ecma and all other organizations which are guilty of aiding and abetting Microsoft's anticompetitive actions.
You know, if the only item I had to compare formats with was MS and applications trying to be MS, I might have come to your conclusion.
However, you should look to older and other standards. HTML - 4 versions and all of them work seamlessly together, although newer versions may not have the pizazz in older renderers. WordPerfect and WordStar, good examples of how file formats don't have to break backwards compatibility from what I recall.
As for winsock, that was a poor port of the BSD socket stack. Actually, it's a really poor port. Multicast still doesn't work, and if it did, an entire set of applications could occur with much lower traffic on the internet. (Think IPTV, IPRadio, and other streaming type applications)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
That's not an accurate description. The point that article makes about the spreadsheet is that OOXML distributes information all over the place so that to make the simple change of replacing a formula in a cell with a constant it is necessary to edit multiple files. The problem is not that you can't make changes inconsistent with the schema - it is that the schema is poorly designed.
Furthermore, the spreadsheet example is only one of several cases discussed, so even if you were to rebut it successfully the article would still contain a valid critique.