Woowar

Category odf ooxml
For the last week or so there's been a thread running on Ed Brill's blog about the Open Letter from Microsoft concerning the OOXML v ODF debate.

The debate was capped off (unless somebody chooses to re-awaken it) with an excellent post from Douglas Heintzman of IBM. I'm taking the liberty of reproducing that post in full here, so let me state clearly that what follows is a quote (i.e. is not my original work) from Douglas Heintzman of IBM:

Unfortunately I don't think that the debate about what supports what is terribly productive. If we have to I suppose we could talk about support with a lower-case “s” and Support with an upper-case “S”. Microsoft is certainly grossly abusing the facts, and manipulating the debate when it argues that IBM and other companies are Supporting their file format initiative by “supporting” it in various products. Just because you can put an OOXML file into one of our databases or content management systems doesn't mean that we are “Supporting” their format. That is like saying that Microsoft is “Supporting” ODF because I can save all my ODF documents to their file system in Windows on my hard drive. The fact that Microsoft is publicly arguing that there is broad industry “Support” and momentum for their specification using the examples that it does is a gross abuse of the truth.

Let's be clear. IBM believes that the monopolistic domination of the office productivity market has inhibited investment and innovation. We believe that XML based file formats have tremendous potential to improve workflow, activities, and team collaboration. We believe that a modern XML based file format will allow customers to perform business analytics, generate automated semantic information, improved searchability, and make the information contained in documents much more socially and process aware and increase its overall value to the customer. We think that documents will become much more seamlessly integrated into business applications and processes.

At the end of the day we don't care what specification is used or what it is called as long as it has some basic characteristics. It needs to be technically elegant (which includes simplicity of design) and pragmatically implementable (which includes the pragmatic use of existing well defined standards where appropriate). It needs to be truly open and managed in an open, and by extension predictable, way, not controlled by any one company. Ideally it needs to be unencumbered by by the intellectual property of any company. We have communicated this to Microsoft repeatedly for many years and they have been invited repeatedly to participate in the industry's collective efforts to build such a specification.

It is very true that OOXML and ODF have slightly different design points. ODF is a forward looking specification. It endeavors to do as good a job as possible in providing high fidelity access to legacy documents stored in proprietary formats. It endeavors to do an excellent job of being forward looking and having the feature set and pragmatically implemental design to unlock innovation and allow developers and users to leverage document content in ways that were not previously possible. We have a major strategy project underway and have many very promising research projects that are showing tremendous potential. Many other companies are doing the same. OOXML in contrast was designed to provide excellent reverse compatibility with legacy documents but makes many compromises in design to achieve this objective which compromises its usefulness in doing many of the new things we believe are possible. The ODF TC at OASIS has been grappling with these tradeoffs for years.

It is no wonder that Microsoft on the one hand, and IBM and Google and Oracle and Sun and many others on the other hand have chosen to pursue different strategies. Microsoft wants to preserve its monopoly and its massive market insertion power. I certainly don't fault them. But the interests of monopolies are always in tension with the interests of their customers and the market in large, both in terms of reduced freedom of action (lock-in) and the associated monopolistic pricing, and in terms of the potential innovation and improvement in capability that has been forgone.

Of course I recognize that some people just want to write a letter or build a simple presentation, and they don't care what the underlying format is, and they may very well be happy to pay Microsoft's asking price for what I happily admit is excellent software. I also recognize that as a whole we are all paying an awful lot of money for a very mature technology in a market space that, in large, hasn't seen much innovation for a very long time (the talking paper clip notwithstanding). I believe that we are on the cusp of a “Beyond Office” era with much more socially aware and semantically rich information that organizations and individuals can leverage to create value in unprecedented ways. We believe that we need a specification that is technically elegant, pragmatically implemental, and truly open.

It's definitely worth reading the full debate that culminated in the above, here.