So Infoworld launched the story first and participants confirm us Microsoft has just another evangelist message:
"ODF has clearly won," said Stuart McKee, referring to Microsoft's recent announcement that it would begin natively supporting ODF in Office next year and join the technical committee overseeing the next version of the format.
I've checked in Internet, the Microsoft representative hold a position on the Washington Public Administration, before he was a Microsoft employee. Stuart McKee has hold an executive position on IT matters at the Government at Washington. 2003 at Washington Admin. coming from Microsoft. But at 2004 he resigned and joined back to Microsoft. This is important, because this means that he is a person with profiled
authority to speak about public administrations.
McKee said what he said as part of his initial opening remarks and did say it as part of a bigger sentence though. So it seems to be an explicit corporate message.
It is time to disseminate the idea that OOXML is dead and that ODF is still the "lingua universalis" for office documents. But the resistance of Microsoft to ODF and its OOXML campaign is also very helpful and essential for the domino project's success. If Microsoft surrenders prematurely we get difficulties to further grow the community for open standards.
Multiple standards for the same application, in my opinion, is a bad thing…. We should collaborate on developing standards and compete on their implementation.
It is just not funny to have that sudden break-through of common sense through McKee.
Something Venky Hariharan highlighted, a new notion of awareness:
"People are now seriously concerned about the governance of the standards process."