Businessweek (Jennifer L Schenker) quoted Gartner analyst Michael Silver last week who puts OOXML in a wider commercial perspective:
[OOXML] is an important domino for Microsoft that is in danger of falling" says Michael Silver… That is why, he says, Microsoft is making such a great effort to appear more open.
… "appear more open". This is how Gartner views the credibility of the new openness. Microsoft's Nick Tsila will not agree with him on this. He would highlight that his company marches the openness road and gets more bashing than before. But here Michael Silver gets the perspective right, the domino effect forces them to march the road and we are getting the bare minimum from them. A much better deal is waiting for us when ISO standardization would fail:
If ISO fails to approve OOXML as a standard, Microsoft could lose more customers than just European governments. The governments could require corporations doing business with them to use ODF instead of Microsoft's standard, says Gartner's Silver.
In other words: a "free market", competition on (almost) equal grounds, what a threat! Let us not forget that a company that talks so much about "choice" recently does not offer its customers to chose ODF, yet. But an adoption of ISO 26300:2006 by the public sector could make that happen. Simple market requirements.
If ISO fails to approve OOXML ISO will win. If ISO approves OOXML then ISO fails. However, the withdrawal should not be left to the national bodies. For the sanity of the ISO process the vendor should abandon its standardization project of the immature specification for OOXML. It's not ready for becoming an international standard. Oh? The vendor cannot stop it because the OOXML spec belongs to ISO and national bodies decide? Yes, it can. The only party backing the OOXML standard and owning the committee votes can just stop its attempts and go home with their exciting ECMA-376 standard that received so many beneficial community improvements through the ISO fast-track process.
For project World Domino the result does not matter that much. The Gartner analyst is at least partly wrong. It will be difficult to sell an ISO "blood standard" to governments and we will see some investigations against the company in the aftermath, esp. if it goes through. I am sure the ISO label won't be worth much on national grounds in this particular case. Rather the opposite.
Look how optimistic Gartner's Silver is:
Microsoft could lose more customers than just European governments
