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Microsoft Standing Firm On OOXML ISO Vote
christian.einfeldt writes "Microsoft has responded via the industry trade group ECMA to some of the thousands of criticisms of its submission of Office Open XML as an ISO standard. Open standards advocate Russell Ossendryver takes a look at those responses to see if Microsoft has made significant changes in either the substance of OOXML or the manner in which the OOXML specification will be maintained going forward. Ossendryver concludes that Microsoft's position has not significantly changed, but only hardened in place in advance of the Ballot Resolution Meeting which is to occur from February 25 through 29 in Geneva. While no one can say for certain whether Microsoft will succeed in having OOXML win the nod from the international community, Ossendryer thinks that Microsoft's firm stance is likely to backfire."
I believe Microsoft made 5 billion in revenue from having customers worldwide locked into their proprietary office document format.
The vendor lockin from Office makes up almost half the company's yearly revenue.
Microsoft would cease to exist as we know it if the office document lockin revenue went away to an open format.
Fight? LOL! This is the type of shit Microsoft execs live for.
Fake grassroots efforts.
Standards body subversion.
Paid for media shills.
Shame studies.
Mysterious compatibility problems with the competition.
All in a days work.
Petition currently running at noooxml.org
http://www.noooxml.org/petition
Which OOXML most certainly isn't. There's real doubts that even Microsoft could implement it as it currently stands.
It's a scam, pure and simple.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Many reasons:
1. There is already an ISO standard for this same purpose.
2. There are exclusions in Microsoft's Open Specification Promise, meaning Microsoft can sue over other parties writing implementations of some of the things that the OOXML standard references (ActiveX and VBA are examples).
3. OOXML is designed so that fully-compliant applications can only be written by Microsoft, and mostly-complaint applications can be written by other parties but only to run on a Windows platform. Therefore OOXML is not inter-operable with other applications and especially not with non-Windows platforms, and the whole purpose of making something a standard is to facilitate such inter-operation.
4. OOXML is technically very inferior to the existing standard, ISO 26300. For example, OOXML specifies three different implementations of "a table", instead of just one common to different Office applications. This means that you cannot write a "table handling class" as a library, but instead you have to duplicate equivalent functionality several times over.
5. OOXML includes deliberately mandating bugs (such as dates before 1900) just to pander to errors in Microsoft software.
6. OOXML is controlled by just one corporation
7. ISO 26300 already has many implementations by many vendors on multiple platform. OTOH even Office 2007 running on Windows Vista does not implement OOXML
8. ISO 26300 even works with Microsoft Office (up to Office 2003) using a free plugin written by Sun. Microsoft deliberately broke Office 2007 file filters so that this plugin (or any other plugin not written by Microsoft) would not work in Office 2007.
9. ISO 26300 has a compliance test suite. You can use this test suite to make sure a given application works properly with ISO 26300. No such thing exists with OOXML.
10. It makes no sense to have "choice in standards"
It's a scam, pure and simple.
So what do we do?
That's right: whenever you receive a .docx, .xlsx and other .*x documents, send them back, asking that they be converted into a readable format.
Include a link for Sun's ODF plugin for MS Office, if need be.
Fight fire with fire.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Of course they are. There is, for example, only one ISO standard for paper sizes, ISO 216. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size#The_international_standard:_ISO_216
This standard is used in all countries bar two. Becase there are two countries that use a competing non-ISO standard (they use an ANSI standard instead), it causes all sorts of un-necessary costs all around the world.
Actually, it is you who is misleading here, and your anti-ODF FUD is from brian Jones in 2005 (when OOXML also lacked any definition of formula syntax). ODF version 1.2, which is currently going through the approval process, has a far more detailed definition of formula syntax, known as OpenFormula, defined by an independent body. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFormula This is what will be formally agreed in the upcoming version of ODF, but it is backward compatible with the (admittedly vauge) syntax definition in earlier versions of ODF, and it is also what all of the ODF applications actually now use.
OpenFormula is indeed technically superior to the formula syntax of OOXML, for the following reasons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFormula#OpenFormula_Attributes
No, it is not. Before it was an ISO standard, it was an OASIS standard, and Microsoft were part of OASIS. Microsoft were invited to join the development process of ODF, which began in 2002, but Microsoft refused. Apart from the solitary exception of Microsoft, however, ODF otherwise has full industry consensus. In fact, after a long review period where comments from a broad array of interested parties were invited and incorporated, the ODF specification was put to a formal vote for OASIS approval, and it was passed unanimously. Yes, as an OASIS member, Microsoft approved ODF. Further, after that vote, ODF was submitted to ISO for approval as an International standard, via the long-winded PAS process (not fast-track), and after world-wide solicitation of comment and incorporation of recommendations, it was again approved unanimously. Yes, Microsoft approved it a second time ... then refused to implement it.
It wasn't wrong for the original release of Ofice 2007. Full plugins were borked in that release. I'm pleased to see that Microsoft fixed it (now that Office 2007 has a foothold) in SP1. As for Microsoft-sponsored ODF convertors ... they are convertors, not plugins. You cannot use Microsoft's convertors to open & save as ODF ... you must have an OOXML version of your document first, and then you can import & export it as ODF. Microsoft convertors do a terrible job compared to the Sun plugin, and of course you cannot set Office 2007 as the default for .odx file extensions because Office 2007 can't open them directly (without Sun's plugin).
... all the more reason to use ODF (ISO 26300) format and not OOXML.
Anyway, now that Sun's plugin works for Office 2007