[odf-discuss] Private deal to approve OOXML? More evidence surfaces

[marbux]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 7:19 AM, Ian Lynch <ian.lynch at zmsl.com> wrote:
>
>  > I'm guess #2.  Office 2007 already ignores much of OOXML.  Office 14
>  > is close to being released in beta form.  And if MS ignores OOXML,
>  > then so will Novell and Sun.  All SC34 has is a handful of dust.
>
>
>  Why would OOXML be of benefit to MS if it never gets implemented? Surely
>  the EU and governments in general are not so naive as to accept Office
>  14 as supporting an ISO file format if it clearly doesn't? So surely
>  they will be under the same pressure to go with odf documents and
>  applications that support them. Ok, it might delay things a bit while
>  governments hang around to see what the O14 file format is or possibly
>  the O15 format but in the end isn't it going to be obvious that the
>  emperor has no clothes. Have I missed something here?
>

What I think Microsoft managers have plotted is to make de jure
standards irrelevant in this area while maintaining their lock-in on
customers. OOXML is a signed but otherwise blank check for
vendor-specific extensibility and a virtual sea of interoperability
breakpoints. It gives Microsoft OOXML the mantle of a de jure standard
that is not in truth a standard at all but keeps OOXML at least
arguably eligible legally for government procurement tenders.

OOXML is a vehicle for embracing and extending Microsoft's own
formats. The only substantive difference between OOXML and the binary
formats from a market perspective is that OOXML is written in plain
text and substitutes patent IPR restrictions for the previous interop
barrier of writing to trade secret binary formats that are difficult
to decode.

E.g., Microsoft has always played the embrace and extend game with
their own formats. Each new version of Office has embraced and
extended the previous version's binary formats. Microsoft maintains a
moving interoperability target for competitors and forces customers to
upgrade.

ISO/IEC:29500-2008 grants Microsoft permission to continue the same
game in the XML context with the legal status of an international
standard. They remain eligible for government procurement contracts.

Microsoft's primary product feature throughout its tightly integrated
stack  is interoperability. But interop only for Microsoft apps and
only for the latest versions of them. It's the upgrade treadmill
whilst maintaining a moving interoperability target for competitors.

The key fact here is that ISO/IEC:29500 is not a true standard. It
does not specify a standard, uniform product. It includes some 600
identified extension points with no specified functionality, for
"future" vendor-specific extensions. (Grep for the exLst attribute in
Part 4.)  It's riddled with options and permissive "may" and "should"
interop breakpoints that conceal by ambiguity the hard-coded
SHALL/MUST decision points in the MS Office/Sharepoint, etc.,
interoperability framework, which is not part of the standard's
specification.

There are of course collateral benefits to Microsoft in monopolizing
OOXML interoperability, e.g., MOOXML is also a communications protocol
between MS Word and Sharepoint Server. So MOOXML extends the vendor
lock and competitor exclusion from MS Office into the Web 2.0 space.

My 2 cents