Revealed: the true scale of opposition to OOXML

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 8 Nov 2007 at 14:23

Microsoft has revealed that it's received 3,500 "comments" regarding its OOXML format, following the controversial ISO vote earlier this year.

The software giant was embroiled in controversy in August when it was defeated in a fast-track vote to have OOXML approved as an ISO standard. Microsoft was accused of rigging the vote by applying pressure to voting countries - an accusation it strenuously denies - even though the company lost the ballot.

In an exclusive briefing with PC Pro, Microsoft's general manager for corporate interoperability and standards, Tom Robertson, says the company remains confident OOXML will be approved in a second vote early next year. However, he revealed the scale of the opposition facing the company.

"All of the comments that came in during the balloting phase are now being addressed," Robertson says. "3,500 comments came in from around the world. About a thousand of those are unique comments, the rest are duplicates. We're working very systematically through those comments and preparing a response to those."

ECMA, the standards body behind OOXML, will submit its response to each of these comments in January, before a second vote is carried out a month later.

"A lot of the comments have been very good comments," claims Robertson. "It's remarkable how much energy has been put into the specification and how to make it better. A lot of those comments will absolutely improve the specification."

However, he admits that some of the objections are simply intractable. "There are some in there that simply can't be resolved because they're comments like 'this isn't ODF'. Of course it's not ODF. That's the whole purpose. It's a different technology, it has different characteristics, it's meant to address different needs in the marketplace. That's why it's so appropriate for ISO to accept it as an additional standard," Robertson adds.

Yet another standard?

He's also quick to dismiss critics that claim the world doesn't need another ISO standard, following ISO's approval of the ODF standard. "That's not what we hear from our customers," Robertson argues. "Our customers are telling us there is a need for an additional standard, there is a need for the things that OOXML was designed to do that weren't part of the design for ODF."

"A couple of examples are backwards compatibility with billions of existing documents. The other is support for a user-defined schema."

Robertson concedes that getting ISO approval is a necessary requirement for governments and public bodies around the world. Yet, he claims the success of OOXML, and by association Office 2007, doesn't hang on a "yes" vote. "OOXML is already an international standard. The question in the ISO context is 'does the global community want a voice in its evolution?'. It's already out there, it's fully specified, it's available for everyone."

"We've seen a real uptake in implementation of OOXML already. It's in the iPhone, iWorks, it's on the Java environment, it's on the Palm operating system, it's in the Linux environment. It's all over the place."