Comment: OOXML - the vote that nobody won

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 2 Apr 2008 at 09:42

Has there ever been a more depressing, bitter and ultimately futile episode in the history of the IT industry than the OOXML vote?

Microsoft may have eventually won its bid to have OOXML ratified as an ISO standard but nobody involved in the process emerges with any credit.

Whilst it would be lazy to assert there's no smoke without fire, there's so much smoke rising from so many different national voting bodies that it's positively choking. Allegations of voting irregularities and heavy-handed lobbying seemingly prove that Microsoft hasn't lost its famed ability to throw its (albeit diminishing) weight around.

Microsoft's decision to jump the gun and declare victory ahead of the official announcement gives further ammunition to the critics who claim Microsoft showed a complete lack of respect for the ISO process - especially given its declaration just hours beforehand (since hastily withdrawn from its website) that it would "respect ISO's desire to first inform its National Body members."

Even though the results were leaked elsewhere, would it really have hurt Microsoft to hold on for a few hours more? Microsoft's never been particularly good at losing; now it can't even win with dignity.

Embittered rivals

Microsoft's commercial rivals should also take a long, hard look at their conduct. IBM's anti-OOXML lobbying has been both aggressive and ham-fisted, and entirely motivated by its own naked interest in the rival ODF format.

Big Blue's argument that there's no need for another ISO-approved document format is entirely without merit. The IT industry thrives on competing standards - how many different image formats are there, for example? There's no reason why ODF and OOXML can't exist side-by-side: the editor of the ODF format even argued that it would benefit them both.

IBM was trying to use the ISO process to exclude Microsoft from a sector of the market, and it blatantly failed.

It's also difficult to fathom why Google waded into this debate for anything other than its own "anyone but Microsoft" agenda.

The end result was that the debate became an impassioned "them and us" spat rather than the rational, measured examination of the technology that the ISO process was meant to produce.

Over-the-top protest

The level of protest against OOXML has also verged on the ridiculous. Stories of activists disrupting the sleep of delegates before the ballot resolution meetings led Ovum analyst David Mitchell to compare the process to a riot.

Somewhere along the line people lost sight of the fact that what's being decided here is the future of an office document - not a decision to go to war or the election of a government.

As Mitchell himself declared: "It's only a document format. Get a life."