Patrick Durusau (5 March) stresses the "importance of beeing heard":
… I have been trying to sort out fact from fiction in the highly imaginative accounts of the meeting. I have been able to isolate only one common point of agreement in all the published and unpublished reports that I have seen. That point of agreement is that everyone at the table was heard. That may not seem like a lot to an Oracle or IBM, but name the last time Microsoft was listening to everyone in a public and international forum? At a table where a standard for a future product was being debated by non-Microsoft groups? So, now that Microsoft is listening (something we should encourage), in an international and public forum, what are our options? Reject DIS 29500? The cost of rejection is that ordinary users, governments, smaller interests, all lose a seat at the table where the next version of the Office standard is being written.
Approve an admittedly rough DIS 29500? That gives all of us a seat at the table for the next Office standard.
Isn't the whole Open XML advocacy a cynical farce? Do you want to comment on this. Please do! Let me start with the premises:
- There is no guarantee that the OOXML format will ever be implemented according to the ISO specification. ISO standardisation is a sales argument for government users, nothing more.
- The Open XML specification is immature and both ECMA and the BRM failed to fix it. Not their fault as it was an abuse of process.
- if the ISO process is delayed for now, everyone still has the ECMA specification that would hopefully be improved and needs to be improved.
- Will non-approval weaken the position of "ordinary users, governments, smaller interests" and ISO?
- Open XML has ISO competition: Patrick Durausau should be aware of and its future is held hostage by Microsoft stuffed ISO committees.
- What is a seat at the table worth when you may not have any significant influence? Cmp. the poodle defense.
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