In last week's news about the Ecma vote to sign off and pass OOXML on for a year's (or two years') process at ISO, we'd like to separate the wheat from the chaff. Here are a few selective press clippings to highlight some of the subtler points...
Bob Sutor
IBM
Make sure you follow how well the Novell and Corel implementations do...If they falter, watch out for those who try to blame those companies or open source itself, when the root
of the problem may be with the Microsoft Office OpenXML spec in the first place.
Martin Veitch | IT Week (UK)
Simon Phipps
Sun Microsystems
Ecma is a coin-in-the-slot standards organisation...The OpenXML [submission] is 6,000 pages. Imagine what it takes to implement that specification.
Martin Veitch | IT Week (UK)
Sam Hiser
OpenDocument Foundation
The ECMA spec stacks up on a desk as high as your shoulder...It can cost $1,000 just to print it out.
W. David Gardner | InformationWeek
Microsoft's Alan Yates got to respond a day later to the ODF press blitz-krieg and had this to say...
Clearly OpenXML and ODF serve different requirements...ODF takes more of a Greenfields approach, while OpenXML takes more of a practical approach toward documenting compatibility and interoperability.
Peter Galli | eWEEK
What Mr Yates refers to as OpenXML's 'more-practical approach' follows the reality theme with which government & enterprise customers are very familiar. The reality is that Microsoft owns the document formats today, so we might as well lie down and accept the status quo for another 5 to 15 years, goes the resigned thinking of the CIO (nearing retirement).
Any one taking a sincere evaluation of the goals of ODF -- the universal & portable document format -- could easily draw the contrary conclusion: that ODF is the more practical approach.
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