It was a week when much turned in the balance. The date, February 5th -- coming up about two weeks from now -- sets the end-point, the close of the contradiction period when ISO members hear from knowledgable sources if there are any problems with a certain standards submission currently on their desks. The public won't know until after Feb 5th whether the voting members of ISO in each country have actually voiced concerns within the body.
This week on Tuesday (23 Jan 2007) an influential document went live on Groklaw, "Deadline Looms to Express Concerns about ECMA 376 Office Open XML"; citizens will use this information to express concerns to their regional voting members at ISO. The document outlines in detail an extensive list of objections found by members of the ODF and software standards communities about the Microsoft Office Open XML specification work that was submitted to ISO last month (Dec 2006) for fast-track approval by Ecma International.
The article's length and depth of technical detail is a deterrent to its consumption by normal folks who haven't time in the Attention Economy to catch up on standards arcana. Allow me to provide a table of contents here that will make the document more accessible as well as summarize its basic points. ("Ecma 376" referrs to the Microsoft Office Open XML specification document, which can be found here.)
Introduction & Summary
Ecma 376 contradicts numerous international standards
Ecma 376 is immature & inconsistent
Ecma 376 uses bitmasks, inhibiting extensibility and use of standard XML tools
Ecma 376 relies on undisclosed information
Ecma 376 cannot be adequately evaluated within the 30-day evanluation period
Ecma 376 cannot be reasonably implemented by other vendors
Ecma 376's full name confuses the marketplace
Related Cases
Ecma 376 raises serious issues as to the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade
There is an eerie quiet as all the material supporting these points is digeted by people in every country. Even though February 5th is the close of the contradiction period, many of the meetings by country voting bodies have taken place this week. Communications & decisions are in process.
If ISO members concur that these issues & contradictions are meaningful, it will set Microsoft's process to standardize its document formats back in time because fast-track process will be denied and the company will need to address fundamental restructuring of either the formats or the manner in which it presents them to ISO.
There are a few constructive ideas we've seen that would permit Microsoft to adopt ODF and require the relevent office suite applications to cross-incorporate the necessary missing feature extensions. But Microsoft's headache would extend throughout its software product catalog to the many products in this important new generation which have been designed to use features in the Microsoft Office Open XML formats that are likely to be denied under close scrutiny by the standards bodies. Affected products would include Office, Windows Vista, Internet Explorer, Exchange, Sharepoint, Windows Server, SQL Server, MS Dynamics, VSTO and the many versions of each of these categories as well as others not mentioned.
The setback could be devastating to Microsoft's plans this year. New product launches will go forward, but major architectural alterations will be known to be required even before the first public purchases of products in the catalog.
All this depends upon ISO's disposition to the Ecma 376 formats.
Bub-Bye.
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