IBM Slams Microsoft, Calls OOXML "Inferior"

cristarol sends word that Microsoft's accusation, that IBM has sabotaged Redmond's attempts to have the Office OpenXML format approved by the ISO, has drawn a heated response from IBM. Ars Technica has the story. "'IBM believes that there is a revolution occurring in the IT industry, and that smart people around the world are demanding truly open standards developed in a collaborative, democratic way for the betterment of all,' IBM VP of standards and OSS Bob Sutor told Ars. 'If "business as usual" means trying to foist a rushed, technically inferior and product-specific piece of work like OOXML on the IT industry, we're proud to stand with the tens of countries and thousands of individuals who are willing to fight against such bad behavior.'"

Comments

Re:we've come a long way

[Bert64]

Actually, It was the likes of Compaq who were responsible for the opening of the PC compatible hardware market. Microsoft are responsible for fighting tooth and nail to keep the software closed, while trying to benefit from the open hardware.

Re:we've come a long way

[Gr8Apes]

IBM used to make overpriced hardware sold at tremendous profit True, but so did everyone else in the space at the time. Go look at your history and look at the number of players in the game. It was far more than '1'.

... until that little upstart microsoft came along and elegantly used their own weight against them in a classic game of corporate judo. Actually, MS was merely along for the ride on the original IBM PC boat. What killed IBM is manifold, from their lack of vision of where PCs would go to the massive infighting among divisions (the above mentioned high profit businesses especially) choking the life out of the PC divisions. Even the open nature of the PC hardware spec wasn't that big an issue. But I really don't want to bring up the entire "what-if" set of threads again.

It may just be that IBM still smarts from that or it may be that they've really 'seen the light'. This is good news, personally I'd like to see the transparency of these committees and their members go up a notch or two, too much potential for procedural trickery still exists. I guarantee you the only the light IBM has seen is the green one from profit in services. Open Specs means everyone can play. More implementations means more bugs to work around. More bugs means gee - we can build you this layer.... which is merely the layer they built 900 customers ago and are reselling yet again for 90000% profit. Those are numbers that make even MS drool.

Re:What doesn't make sense

[Just Some Guy]

Except for the fact that OO.org is free.

And the scary thing (for MS) is that it being free changes, well, everything. At my company, we used to have a few people who needed a word processor, so they got Office. When OOo got good enough, we start giving it out to everyone on our standard deployment. Have a PC? You're getting OpenOffice. Now we find ourselves in the position where OOo is our standard suite, and only a couple of people get MS Office (mainly because of legacy documents, like complicated spreadsheets etc.).

In more recent news, my little Eee PC ships with OpenOffice. A few million units later, a lot of people will have OOo who never knew such a thing existed before. Free-of-charge isn't a huge selling point for large corporations where maintenance costs are more important than initial purchase costs, but it's extremely influential everywhere else. The thin end of the wedge is already in, and now it's starting to split the market wide open.