Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

For those of you that pay attention to open standards, this is old(ish) news. Earlier this week, ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, rejected Microsoft’s bid to fast-track OOXML (Office Open XML) to standard status. What this means is that MS will have to take all of the varied input from the ISO bodies, and go through a second vote early next year.

Microsoft thinks that it will win approval, but that is far from clear. (If you read that link, which is basically a copy of a press release from Microsoft, you’d think they had it all sewn up. In fact, that is far from the case.)

Office Open XML is Microsoft’s XML-based file format which is now native in Office 2007. Instead of adopting the already ISO approved Open Document format, it attempted to get through ISO a standard that, among other things, depends too much on non-standard, non-publicly available legacy file formats. Which, of course, kinda defeats the purpose of an open standard.

Microsoft is in an interesting place with their cash cow, Office. They have increasing competition from OpenOffice.org, Google Apps, and, on the Mac, iWork. A lot of governments are demanding that document formats be open standards, so it is important for MS to be able to get OOXML through ISO.

I’ll keep you posted.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 8:00 am and is filed under Open Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.