Some time ago the Burton group, a consulting firm, released a report that compared OOXML and ODF: What’s Up, .DOC? ODF, OOXML, and the Revolutionary Implications of XML in Productivity Applications. When it was released I was quite amazed. It was human-readable, elegantly written. And the outrage of senior supporters ("Burton merde") of the struggle against Open XML only seemed to confirm that the Burton study was much better than what we had seen so far from the OOXML standardization supporter side. Wow, I thought, the struggle is getting more sophisticated.
The ODF Alliance quickly rebutted the claims about ODF's alleged shortcomings. I read their document myself, got lost in details and thought it was useless for ODFA to argue with Burton. Still as a rapid response it was an amazing piece of work, also considering that they were preparing other reports such as
- OOXML: Top 10 Worst Responses to National Standard Bodies Comments
- ODF Alliance response to the ECMA disposition of comments
I was wrong about the effects of the ODFA paper. Burton answered though it took some time for the Burton group to respond to the criticism of ODF Alliance. Burton's Guy Creese, one of the authors of the original document finally started blogging about the ODF Alliance criticism of their original paper.
There are three parts of the burton response to ODFA. Of course the Microsoft blogger Stalin organ got it out first but I will provide you with the links: part1 (8 Feb), part2 (11 Feb), part3 (11 Feb). I will put some quotes below, decide for yourself whether it demasks the Burton group. I made my own guesses from whom Burton's Guy Creese took media advice. Hint, hint: No death penalty for jerks.
We certainly do not believe it is inappropriate to compete with Microsoft. However, given that Microsoft Office has over 90% market share, we think that displacing Microsoft Office with another productivity application software suite will be an uphill battle.
We are speaking about file formats, not applications. The Burton position was characterised as follow the herd before which as a strategy suits a weak player. Governments are strong and they can exercise their power. Same for large companies. It is quite important to develop a procurement strategy to overcome your dependency on one product. Jamie Love stressed this week here in Brussels that governments could develop an office suite on their own for the money they annually waste on license fees. Jamie's proposal is the most radical one. In any case dominant users need to improve their negotiation position with an aim to break free the market
The first opportunity for Microsoft to include ODF in one of its office suites was in Office 2007—and it didn’t do so at that time because it felt ODF didn’t contain the necessary payloads to support the Office functionality that its large installed base expected.
This asserts inferiority of the ISO format. Interestingly Office supports many, many other formats including old school RichTextFormat that are not very rich. The only justification of a lack of support for the existing ISO format is clear anti-competitive intentions.
While there are more office suites that are ODF-compliant than OOXML-compliant, OOXML seems to be winning the ecosystem battle, because these ecosystem vendors (characterized as niche vendors by the ODF Alliance) are implementing OOXML support (and postponing ODF support) based on customer demand.
Right now only companies contracted to support the format by Microsoft attempt to implement it.
In talks with us, Altova co-founder and CEO Alexander Falk noted that Altova had not seen customer demand for ODF
Which is an as convincing argument as a press statement from the Vatican state that no one ever attempted to pray to Mekka there. Alexander Falk is part of the OOXML lobby machine. Find a better test case.
We noted the Swedish Microsoft employee incident in the overview, and we don’t believe the actions of a single Microsoft employee operating outside Microsoft corporate policies is reason to conclude Microsoft’s overall intentions for OOXML are somehow inappropriate.
You are free to inspect the irregularities website that documents few cases reported by the online press and blogs. We got much more reports on an informal base per email. The Swedish single employee story is not credible, actually committee stuffing took place in Sweden.
On loopholes, that’s another subjective call, but since Microsoft competitors managed to establish control over a standards initiative with potentially dire consequences for one of Microsoft’s most important business domains, we are not surprised that Microsoft (legitimately, albeit with what some consider to be poor standards etiquette) exploited the loopholes. As we noted, we assume ISO will update its procedures to eliminate the loopholes in the future.
What?
Microsoft competitors managed to establish control over a standards initiative…
What?
Microsoft competitors managed to establish control over a standards initiative with potentially dire consequences for one of Microsoft’s most important business domains, we are not surprised that Microsoft …exploited the loopholes.
???
but since Microsoft competitors managed to establish control over a standards initiative with potentially dire consequences for one of Microsoft’s most important business domains, we are not surprised that Microsoft (legitimately, albeit with what some consider to be poor standards etiquette) exploited the loopholes.
???
On loopholes, that’s another subjective call, but since Microsoft competitors managed to establish control over a standards initiative with potentially dire consequences for one of Microsoft’s most important business domains, we are not surprised that Microsoft (legitimately, albeit with what some consider to be poor standards etiquette) exploited the loopholes. As we noted, we assume ISO will update its procedures to eliminate the loopholes in the future.
Hang on a second. You can't be serious! Sorry, that's doubleplusungood.
For accessibility concerns, we also believe Microsoft’s recent success with the DAISY Consortium (see, e.g., http://www.disabilitycoordinationoffice.com.au/content/view/881/295/) is a useful example of how OOXML can be used to advance accessibility for all productivity application users.
Success == hired another player to voice support and release product announcements?
