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Microsoft Spokesman Says ODF "Clearly Won" Standard War
Elektroschock writes "At a Red Hat retrospective panel on the ODF vs. OOXML struggle panel, a Microsoft representative, Stuart McKee, admitted that ODF had 'clearly won.' The Redmond company is going to add native support of ODF 1.1 with its Office 2007 service pack 2. Its yet unpublished format ISO OOXML will not be supported before the release of the next Office generation. Whether or not OOXML ever gets published is an open question after four national bodies appealed the ISO decision."
Sadly, no, this is not the end of vendor lock-in for Microsoft. I guarantee that ODF will not be the default format and that Microsoft's implementation of ODF will clearly be some variation of 'embrace, extend, extinguish,' just like everything else they do.
Still, it feels good to hear a Microsoft employee admit that OOXML lost.
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Now we shall all have to wait and see if MS plays nice with ODF because they are scared of the EU, or if they try to extend and break the standard to prevent true interoperability, as they have done with HTML, CSS, etc. since being late to the Web standards game.
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Given the lengths they went to, first to fight the very notion of an open standard format, and then to push OOXML, it seems hard to believe that this is over.
I'm as happy as anyone else if it is, but it's very unlike MS. To my knowledge, this has happened only once before, with HTML, and we're still paying for the fallout of that one.
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Two phrases come to mind:
"The cake is a lie."
"Beware of Greeks bearing gifts."
And in fact asked the question "Is this just Microsoft doing the first stage of embrace, extend, extinguish?" I was not happy with his response. He floated the idea of merging the two standards, which really concerns me, and also seemed to acknowledge that there was going to be some extension.
From the impression I got, we got thrown a bone, and ODF and OOXML are going to be merged in the next couple of years, and MS will have de facto control because OOXML allows for proprietary extensions.
MS is not going to take this lying down.
I did shake Stuart's hand afterwards, however. He deserves props for showing up and taking a little abuse, although I was not near as hard on him as I would have liked to be, just because other people also deserved a chance to ask questions.
One thing that struck me is that one of the Singapore standards guys was there, and he was NOT happy. He was pretty pissed off that they could not provide even one reference implementation.
But... like I said. Props for showing up, MS. Now you just have many years of monopolistic behavior to live down, and I'll never trust anything you say again.
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We are in a very important phase. We (someone) needs to create an ODF compatibility test utility, like an HTML validator, that will test the compliance of an ODF file.
It can be used to catch Microsoft's crap. Remember, a word processing document is unlike HTML. HTML is likely to be seen by a multitude of people where as a document is probably only going to be seen by a specifically targeted group. Microsoft will be able to add incompatibility and almost no one will be able to notice until they wish to open THEIR document with a non-microsoft word processor or spread sheet. At that point it will be too late.
We also have to make sure that Microsoft's products render ODF compliant documents correctly when they are created by non microsoft applications.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
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