Microsoft has made all kinds of promises about them dropping control of OOXML. Yet when it really counts they don't stand up to their promises. Rob Weir from IBM uncovers that the promises only apply to the 1.0 version of the standard.
A critical point to note is that "maintenance" in ISO terms is not the same thing as what the average software engineer thinks of as "maintenance". The work of producing new features or enhancements is not maintenance. The act of creating OOXML 1.1 or OOXML 2.0 is not maintenance. What is maintenance is the publication of errata documents for OOXML 1.0, a task that must be completed within 3 years.
Control of errata production is not what I would call important. Still this might answer a real puzzle. We have probably all seen the comments from Brian Jones of Microsoft that Microsoft is not making any commitment to stay using OOXML in the future. Question is…why make a statement that indicate Microsoft only promise to support version 1.0 of the standard? At the surface this seem to weaken the OOXML movement, but with the new imformation available now a new interpretation opens.
If what Brian Jones says is truth any complaint about Microsoft using the extend and extinguish pattern is voided since he assert that Microsoft has no real control. To me it sounds like the loss from people spreading the word that Microsoft might leave OOXML if ISO makes the standard change to much is pretty minimal compared to the complaint that Microsoft can extend and extinguish the competetion with OOXML.
So what Ecma is offering SC34 is nothing close to what was promised. Ecma is really seeking to transfer to SC34 the responsibility of spending the next 3 years fixing errors in OOXML 1.0, while future versions of OOXML ("technical revisions") are controlled by Microsoft, in Ecma, in a process without transparency, and as should now be obvious to all, without sufficient quality controls.
Intersting enough Rob Weir in another blog post note that Novell has a complained about a similar set up for the RTF file formats
So, the RTF standard was just a dump of Word's features, done when and how Microsoft felt like doing it. As one wag quipped, "RTF is defined as whatever Word saves when you ask it to save as RTF."
Sounds familiar?
Further from the Novell complaint:
93. …As in the case of of RTF, Microsoft forced Novell to delay its time-to-market while redeveloping its applications to an inferior standard. Because these standards were lifted directly from Microsoft's own applications, those applications were always "compatible" with the standards.
And that is the key, isn't it? By owning the "standard" and developing it in secret, without participation from other vendors, in an Ecma rubber-stamp process, Microsoft rigs the system so they can author an ISO standard with which they are effortlessly compatible, while at the same time ensuring that their products maintain an insurmountable head start in implementing these same standards. There is no balance of interests in OOXML. It is entirely dictated by Microsoft, and voted on, in many cases, by their handpicked committees in Ecma and ISO.
There is much talk about standard wars or standard battles…Rob Weir finish up by a pretty important view on the matter.
Looking at this long history of standards abuse by Microsoft, in the file format arena and elsewhere, I'm drawn to take a broader view of this controversy. It is not really a battle between ODF and OOXML. It isn't even really a battle between OOXML and ISO. It is, in the end, a battle between having document standards and not having them. Microsoft is trying to dumb down the concept of standards and interoperability to a point where these concepts are meaningless and ineffective. This is not because they want to support standards more easily in their products. No, it is because they do not want standards at all.