Microsoft’s OOXML– ECMA to the Rescue

Microsoft’s quest to get its Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML) application approved as a standard-based software received a significant boost on Thursday, with ECMA International, a body that helps develop standards, approving it. Finally, Microsoft seems to be getting to where it wanted in terms of its products and applications being recognized as standards-based.

Microsoft has often faced stiff criticism from its competitors as well as detractors on issues such as standardization, interoperability, and compatibility. The view among Microsoft baiters and competitors is that OOXML is too complex and compatible with other legacy Office applications for its own good. Too much of an inward focus has meant that it probably would lack the flexibility necessary to work harmoniously with other rival applications and platforms.

This view was given ample fillip when, in September 2006, the State of Massachusetts chose to recognize OpenDocument over OOXML, directing all its agencies to implement OpenDocument from January 1, 2007. That was a serious blow to Microsoft’s attempts to get recognition of OOXML as a flexible and standardized application, something that is very necessary to get government organizations to officially use OOXML as a reliable and tested document format supporting data retention, mining, and other related capabilities.

The debate has been fuelled further, with eminent industry people, such as Andrew Shebanow from Adobe, voicing their own doubts about OOXML’s cross-platform capabilities. In his blog Shebanation, Shebanow questions the possibility of implementing OOXML as a fully functional file format by a rival PPA.

Shebanow refers to open standards guru Bob Sutor of IBM, and quotes from an article by Rick Schaut, from Microsoft Mac BU, where Rick is quite vocal about the Mac version of office being unable to support OOXML for at least another year or so. If that is the amount of time the Mac version of Office is going to take to be able to support OOXML, one can only imagine what it would take a rival!

The question remains whether rival companies would want to invest that amount of time, effort, resources, and funding to adapt to an external application when they could very well invest it all to develop something of their own, or work with other currently existing formats such as OpenDocument.

With ECMA’s approval, Microsoft now has some breathing space. ECMA’s approval, as I mentioned earlier, is the first step. The culmination would be approval by the ISO. That is a long way off, and is not a certainty.

There are many more twists before this one ends. After the ECMA approval, the matter goes back to where it all originally started, in a manner of speaking – the Massachusetts Information Technology Division. Bethan Popoli, acting director, Massachusetts IT Division, said that the next step would be a review of ECMA’s evaluation of Microsoft’s 6,000-page submission. To add a further twist, the state government of Massachusetts is all geared up to use OpenDocument from January 1, 2007.

It will be interesting to watch how things go from here. The gut feeling among industry sources is that it will only get hotter.