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UK Agency Files OOXML Complaint, EU Demurs
Christopher Blanc writes to let us know that although BECTA, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, has filed a complaint with EU regulators about Microsoft's business practices, the European Commission won't be doing anything particular about it. BECTA claimed that the OOXML format discourages competition. BECTA lodged a similar complaint with the UK Office of Fair Trading last October. A Commission press officer said, "We are already looking into the issues raised in that complaint already and we are not treating it as a formal complaint to us."
One of the biggest problems with this "standard" is that it specifically allows proprietary add-ons. That's no standard at all. Programs like Ooo.org will still not be able to properly open a Office document because A) you can bet your ass that Microsoft Office will be using any number of proprietary add-ons to the format, thereby screwing up Ooo.org's ability to render it correctly. And B), Microsoft will do like what they ddi with the internet and intentionally render it incorrectly. Since they have the lion's share of the market, this "not to standard" rendering will of course be the standard, and competitors will be forced to guess at how microsoft intentionally broke the standard in order to display Microsoft Office generated OOXML files, or just not display them correctly at all.
When Microsoft was doing this with the web, web developers had to create all kidns of hacks to get their page to display properly in IE, often times breaking the page in Mozilla. The non-techie types, of course, don't blame this on IE, they say that it must be Firefox that doesn't work correctly. It will happen exactly the same way with Ooo.org. It won't be Office that's doing it wrong, it will be blamed by the ignorant on Ooo.org.
I've gone on the record supporting Microsoft before, but OOXML is not one of the times I'll be doing that. This whole thing stinks.
Note that the EC commission said: "We are already looking into the issues raised in that complaint"
Reading between the lines, and doing some extrapolation based on previous event, I am guessing that what is going in the their minds is something like that:
"Microsoft think they are above our laws and disrespect our authority by ignoring our rulings. That complaint is redundant because we are already investigating the OOXML mess, since it's going to be great ammunition when we need to bash them on the head AGAIN for continuing to break the rules"