Crunch time for Microsoft's OOXML bid

 

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By Barry Collins and Reuters

Posted on 26 Feb 2008 at 09:56

Microsoft has ramped up its fight to have its Office Open XML document format made into an international standard as delegates from 37 countries met to reconsider the proposal.

Their meeting hosted by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in Geneva is meant to help broker consensus after a preliminary vote on the standard failed six months ago.

There will be no ballot during the week-long talks, but the 87 national standards bodies who previously voted will have until 29 March to adjust their positions, giving the world's largest software maker another shot at the two-thirds majority it needs for approval.

"The ISO/IEC members who voted on the draft in September will have 30 days to change their votes if they wish," says Roger Frost, a spokesman for the Geneva-based agency. Microsoft won only 53% support in September.

Delegates submitted about 3,500 suggested modifications to the Microsoft documents in the lead-up to last year's ballot. Those have been whittled down to 1,100 comments for consideration during this week's meeting, according to ISO.

Standards push

Microsoft needs ISO approval for OOXML because many governments and organisations are mandated to use only ISO standards for their document storage, in a bid to safeguard digital archives.

Opponents of the proposed ISO/IEC standard DIS 29500 argue there is no need for a rival to the widely used Open Document Format (ODF), which is already an international standard.

They say that the Microsoft product's 6,000 pages of code, compared with ODF's 860 pages, make it artificially complicated and untranslatable.

Microsoft says multiple standards are normal in software and other industries, that competition makes for better products, and that its format has higher specifications and is more useful than ODF.

However, in an olive branch to the open-source community, Microsoft last week pledged that it would create new APIs for its Office software, which would allow rival document formats - such as ODF - to be used as the default in Office 2007.

That goodwill was reciprocated earlier this week, when the ODF project editor wrote an open letter calling for co-operation between the two rival camps. "If we had a co-evolutionary environment, one where the proponents of OpenXML and OpenDocument, their respective organisations, national bodies and other interested groups could meet to discuss the future of those proposals, the future revisions of both would likely be quite different," Patrick Durusau wrote.

Experts believe Microsoft's new, more open approach, will lead to OOXML being approved. "The timing is smart enough for Microsoft to achieve what it wants to achieve," claims Laurent Lachal, open-source research director at Ovum.