Microsoft Fails the Standards Test

The second anniversary of the approval of ISO/IEC 29500 (aka OOXML) is upon us. The initial version of OOXML (Ecma 376 1st Edition) was rejected by ISO and IEC members in September 2007, and it was only after extensive revisions and a bitter standards war in the following months that a revised format was finally approved on April 2, 2008.

The key breakthrough of the revision process was the splitting of the specification into two variant versions, called “Strict” and “Transitional”. The National Bodies confined all the technologies they found unacceptable to the Transitional format and dictated text to be included in the standard intended to prohibit its further use:

“The intent […] is to enable a transitional period during which existing binary documents being migrated to DIS 29500 can make use of legacy features to preserve their fidelity, while noting that new documents should not use them. […]

This annex is normative for the current edition of the Standard, but not guaranteed to be part of the Standard in future revisions. The intent is to enable the future DIS 29500 maintenance group to choose, at a later date, to remove this set of features from a revised version of DIS 29500.”

I was convinced at the time, and remain convinced today, that the division of OOXML into Strict and Transitional variants was the innovation which allowed the Standard to pass. Enough National Bodies could then vote in good conscience for OOXML knowing that their preferred, Strict, variant would be under their control into the future while the Transitional variant (which – remember – they had effectively rejected in 2007) would remain purely for the purpose of accurately specifying old documents: a useful aim in itself.

Promises and reality

Just before the final votes were counted, Microsoft made some commitments. Mr Chris Capossela (Senior VP, Microsoft Office) wrote an open letter promising what would happen if the Standard passed. Two years on, we can fill out a report card for a couple of these promises and determine how well Microsoft is doing …

Microsoft’s promise on standards support in products

“We’ve listened to the global community and learned a lot, and we are committed to supporting the Open XML specification that is approved by ISO/IEC in our products.”

On this count Microsoft seems set for failure. In its pre-release form Office™ 2010 supports not the approved Strict variant of OOXML, but the very format the global community rejected in September 2007, and subsequently marked as not for use in new documents – the Transitional variant. Microsoft are behaving as if the JTC 1 standardisation process never happened, and using technologies (like VML) in a new product which even the text of the Standard itself describes as “deprecated” and “included […] for legacy reasons only” (see ISO/IEC 29500-1:2008, clause M.5.1).

Knowledgeable experts present at the Ballot Resolution Meeting, knowing what Microsoft planned, have publicly repeated the International consensus position in alarm. XML Standards guru Rick Jelliffe (an Australian delegate at the meeting) wrote:

“If [Microsoft’s] default format is OOXML Transitional, then they have abandoned support for an Open Standards process: OOXML was only made a standard because of the changes that were made at the BRM. The original ECMA version of OOXML (which is the basis of Transitional) was soundly rejected, let no-one forget.”

And Danish expert and BRM delegate Jesper Lund Stocholm, running an analysis of Office 2010 files wrote:

“It has been the fear of many that Microsoft will never, ever care at all about the strict conformance clause of ISO/IEC 29500, and my tests clearly [are] a sign that they were right.”

Microsoft, however, takes a different view to the independent experts. Their representatives will argue (with some justification) that terms like “legacy”, “deprecated”, and “new document” are tricky to define, but then this argument extends to the bizarre assertion that the Strict variant need never be supported. I believe, however, countries expect a more reasonable, plain-dealing approach to their clearly expressed intent – not this kind of wheedling sophistry. Mr Capossela writes that Microsoft has “learned a lot”; but on the evidence before us now, this was wishful thinking.

Microsoft’s promise on standards maintenance

“We are committed to the healthy maintenance of the standard once ratification takes place so that it will continue to be useful and relevant to the rapidly growing number of implementers and users around the world.”

It all started so well – defect reports came in from many national bodies and (via Ecma) from Microsoft themselves. A number of useful improvements were made to the text correcting obvious defects, and (in the Transitional variant) fixing some of the evident mismatches between what the Standard said, and what legacy documents actually contained.

But as time has gone on, the situation has deteriorated. At the recent Stockholm meetings corrections agreed at the February 2007 Ballot Resolution Meeting were still being implemented, and while fixes which were evidently required for Office 2010’s headline conformance behaviour have been given the red carpet treatment, some other reports from National Bodies have been left to languish. Unusually, in Stockholm one of SC 34’s working groups (WG 2) recommended to the plenary that the OOXML maintenance group (WG 4) be reminded to answer overdue defect reports – in the ISO world that counts as a diplomatic incident!

Most worrying of all, it appears that Ecma have ceased any proactive attempt to improve the text, leaving just a handful of national experts wrestling with this activity. It seems to me that Microsoft/Ecma believe 95% of the work has been done to ensure the standard is “useful and relevant”. Looking at the text, I reckon it is more like 95% that remains to be done, as it is still lousy with defects.

Ironically, the failure to resource maintenance properly is only going to damage Microsoft Office in the longer term. The simple validators developed by me (Office-o-tron) and by Jesper Lund Stocholm (ISO/IEC 29500 Validator) reveal, to Microsoft’s dismay, that the output documents of the Office 2010 Beta are non-conformant, and that this is in large part due to glaring uncorrected problems in the text (e.g. contradictory provisions). It is also a worrying commentary on the standards-savvyness of the Office developers that the first amateur attempts of part-time outsiders find problems with documents which Redmond’s internal QA processes have missed. I confidently predict that fuller validation of Office document is likely to reveal many problems both with those documents, and with the Standard itself, over the coming years.

So – while maintenance is happening, I think calling it “healthy maintenance” would be over-optimistic given the current circumstances.

Someone has blundered?

Microsoft has many enemies who will no doubt see the current state of affairs as proof that Microsoft never even intended to be good standards citizens. Indeed standards and XML veteran Tim Bray, writing shortly after the standard’s approval, made a prediction which could now seem impressively prophetic:

“It’s Kind of Sad” • The coverage suggests that future enhancements to 29500, as worked through by a subcommittee of a subcommittee of a standards committee, are actually going to have some influence on Microsoft. Um, maybe there’s an alternate universe in which Redmond-based program managers and developers are interested in the opinions of a subgroup of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34, but this isn’t it.

I suppose they’ll probably show up to the meetings and try to act interested, but it’s going to be a sideline and nobody important will be there. What Microsoft really wanted was that ISO stamp of approval to use as a marketing tool. And just like your mother told you, when they get what they want and have their way with you, they’re probably not gonna call you in the morning."

For me, the puzzle of it is that in many respects, Microsoft does appear to get it. Senior management seems to want standards conformance, as Mr Capossela’s letter demonstrates – indeed strategically, playing fair by standards has always seemed like the most obvious way for the corporation to extract itself from the regulatory thickets that have entangled it over the past decade. Microsoft employs many eminent and standards-aware people of unimpeachable record – they also obviously “get it”. And on the ground in the standards committees there are many delightful, talented and diligent people who seem fully-signed up to a standards-aware (dare I say “non-evil”?) approach—as the SC 34 meetings in Stockholm again recently evidenced.

And if we look elsewhere within Microsoft we can see – for example from their engagement with HTML 5 and work on MSIE – that they can move in the right direction when the will is there.

So why – given the awareness Microsoft has at the top, at the bottom, and round the edges – does it still manage to behave as it does? Something, perhaps, is wrong at the centre — some kind of corporate dysfunction caused by a failure of executive oversight.

But whether Microsoft senior management have directed the company to behave badly, or whether they have failed to control a bad corporate impulse, is ultimately of no interest or concern to the National Bodies engaged in Standardization: for them, the effect is the same. Some responses will, however, be necessary.

Moving forward

If Microsoft ship Office 2010 to handle only the Transitional variant of ISO/IEC 29500 they should expect to be roundly condemned for breaking faith with the International Standards community. This is not the format “approved by ISO/IEC”, it is the format that was rejected.

However, it is foolish to believe they won’t ship it as is – and before long the world will be faced with responding to that release. In my view moving forward from there will be difficult …

In short, we find ourselves at a crossroads, and it seems to me that without a change of direction the entire OOXML project is now surely heading for failure.

Comments

Jesper Lund Stocholm (2010-04-01T15:38:14)

Hi Alex,

What a good post! I largely agree with most of your considerations, but I do find it silly (or unrealistic) to think that Microsoft Office 2010 would support OOXML. The time frame from publication of 29500 until launch of Microsoft Office 2010 was simply too narrow, and I would never expect Microsoft to pull the plug on release of Microsoft Office 2010 (even though one might wish they had done so) to get full support for OOXML.

I also find it puzzling to deal closely with Microsoft in this area – because as you point out, it is a like half of Microsoft “gets it” and the other half doesn’t. It can be really frustrating at times.

And finally – I completely agree that Microsoft should step forward and publicly commit to supporting OOXML. When pitching this thought to Microsoft employees I usually get the answer that Microsoft will never talk about future products. That’s fine – I don’t expect them to – but this is “just” the file format. It won’t reveal anything about any new features of Microsoft Office to commit to supporting OOXML. Microsoft has once shown that they are willing to break their internal rule about “not introducing new features in service packs” when it matters to them (ODF-support came with SP2 to Microsoft Office 2007). If they care about OOXML I’m sure they can do it again.

Alex (2010-04-01T15:56:57)

@Jesper

Yes, it may have been unrealistic for anyone to expect MS would implement Strict in Office 2010 – but ultimately this is a question of corporate will. Is the will there? I think not.

Having taken the (no doubt commercially advantageous) route of targeting Transitional, MS now have to be prepared to take the hit for having shirked their responsibilities in regard to Standards support. After all, we as standardizers can’t exempt implementers on the grounds that doing the right thing would have been too costly!

Rob Weir (2010-04-01T20:49:12)

The interesting thing, I think, is how the situation is very different in the browser world, where it appears the Microsoft is taking standards seriously now. Of course, in that area there is a single standard, and competition among the vendors to provide complete and conformant implementations. I think the key thing was that there was a single standard (or family of standards) in a single organization, with many vendors involved.

Imagine how it could have turned out differently if instead of having a common HTML standard, Microsoft had pushed through a “Microsoft Open Web ML” pseudo-standard, full of legacy crud and vague promises about future improvements. And if no other vendor except Microsoft implemented Microsoft’s Web ML. And if Microsoft stuffed the committees that control the Microsoft Web ML standard. And if they arbitrarily added or removed features to Microsoft’s Web ML based on what Microsoft’s plans were in the next release of Internet Explorer. And if they rejected or failed to act on feature proposals that they did not originate. I wonder how that would have turned out.

The situation with OOXML in SC34 is that Microsoft has no incentive to do anything more, and has sufficient dominance in that committee and in WG4 to ensure that nothing does happen. They have their ISO standard and the means to preserve it for their exclusive use.

Your sensibility on this topic is around three years too late. You don’t have the votes to ask for a glass of water in SC34 if Microsoft doesn’t want you to have it. “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” Anyone who believed otherwise was a fool. It is too late for remorse now.

Bjorn Sveinbjornsson (2010-04-01T21:46:54)

So. What will happen now? What do ISO procedure rules say.

Could OOXML T be destandardized as mr. Jelliffe suggested some moons ago?

Gopal (2010-04-01T22:06:58)

After a few lines into reading the post, I went back to check the date (it was too close to April-1), and then finished reading. Coming from the person who headed the BRM this is pretty serious.

Alex (2010-04-01T22:17:19)

@Bjorn

It’s not really an ISO issue. ISO makes standards and implementers may implement them (badly or well).

Sometimes market considerations may feed back into the process. For example if a standard is never implemented that is a good reason for withdrawing it – but that applies (now) more to the Strict than the Transitional variant of OOXML.

Standards can be withdrawn at any time if that is the will of the Countries that participate …

A. Rebentisch (2010-04-01T22:41:14)

Come on! Didn’t you notice that the EU commitment settlement mentioned the ECMA version of the standard instead of ISO/IEC: ECMA 376? At least that commitment is binding.

We currently have a debate in the EU concerning recognition of consortial standards. It makes sense to think more about the fundamental difference between de jure and market standards.

http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/european-standards/public-consultation/

As of ISO/IEC 29500 the process was incapable to fix the standard. Insufficient review was already given on the ECMA “fast track” level. The question on how to improve documentation can also be addressed on the level of productivity tools for standard development, review and compliance.

Btw., in terms of hands-on: http://odf.cenatic.es/

Alex (2010-04-01T23:03:30)

@André

Ecma 376 is in step-lock with ISO/IEC 29500; they are effectively identical. In any case, I think the relevant clause is 17:

(17) Office Open XML. The “.docx, .xlsx and .pptx” file formats used in the Office 2007 version of Microsoft’s Primary PC Productivity Applications shall implement the ECMA 376 Specification. This commitment shall apply to successor versions of Microsoft’s Primary PC Productivity Applications with respect to IS 29500.

MS Office 2010 will be a “successor version” and so (by my reading), it shall implement IS 29500.

On consortia standards - my understanding is that the EU was already minded to recognize standards from a variety of sources (so, IETF for network standards). But then there’s also the question of European-level standards (e.g. from CEN and CENELEC). Frankly, the politics and complexity of this topic keeps me well away from it!

I don’t agree that JTC 1 maintenance process is insufficient - in fact I think JTC 1’s maintenance processes are one of its strongest features. The problem here is not how the machine works, but that we need to be feeding a lot more into that machine …

Granada - nope, can’t make that. The Brussels one, maybe (that’s an easy trip for me).

Jonas (2010-04-01T23:34:39)

Sorry for a stupid question beamed in from five years ago: But if Microsoft wanted to use a standardized document format (for regulatory, business or other reasons), why wouldn’t they use ODF?

When the ISO standardization process was in full swing the answer was one of perceived pragmatism: They just won’t and OOXML is much better than the old proprietary format, so let’s not ask that question anymore.

Well, Microsoft came around on TCP/IP, they came around on the web and HTML, they will come around on HTML5 and the very second important customers demand it they will come around on ODF. I wouldn’t be surprised if the ODF filter from Microsoft (wasn’t that unthinkable a few years ago?) produced code closer to the standard than what Office OOXML does respectively.

Rick Jelliffe (2010-04-01T23:54:07)

Jesper: I don’t know why it is unrealistic to expect Microsoft to accept and generate Strict OOXML in Office 2010: they have had more than two years already. Most of the changes are trivial or systematic or were well in progress (e.g., VML had mostly been dropped for DrawingML by 2007) or would be features required for better support of ODF/Open Formula anyway.

Rob: You mistake Alex’s sensibility, I think. SC34 in general and Alex in particular has treated Ecma and Microsoft professionally, fairly and in an unprejudiced way, regardless of any expectations or MS’ track record or the shrill innuendos of some of MS’ competitors. (Alex of course is not speaking for SC34 in this blog.) And SC34 (and Alex) will continue to do so, I expect, just as it will continue to also treat OASIS in a professional and encouraging way, even though in both cases this may sometimes involve negotiating around different expectations about maintenance responsibilities and technical content, that may look like weaseling out of commitments to some, for example.

You seem to want SC34 to judge incoming standards on something else than technical content, but you know that isn’t the way it is allowed to work. (You may reasonably disagree on the specifics of OOXML’s technical content, of course.)

On your comment that no-one else has implemented OOXML, why don’t you try OpenOffice? This is an open source product that claims to have OOXML import.

Alex: A standard can certainly be withdrawn if has been superseded by a new standard: that the old one has some market traction has never been enough to prevent new versions of standards. In the case of OOXML, it is just the withdrawal of a part that this is explicitly marked as not being suitable for new systems. (Though perhaps some NBs might prefer making Part 4 entirely non-normative or transferring it to a Technical Specification, rather than being entirely removed.)

Rob Weir (2010-04-02T00:20:56)

Rick, I would have been very pleased if you, Alex and several others NB experts in SC34 had judged OOXML purely on its technical merits. But you didn’t. You fell into the false promises from Microsoft, that if you held your nose on this one, and approved all the legacy crap, that if you averted your eyes just this once and opened the doors, that the standard would be put under international control and evolved in an open, transparent and vendor neutral way. But that isn’t quite what happened. They played you for Useful Idiots. At least you, unlike Alex, got paid for your services.

Rick Jelliffe (2010-04-02T01:07:08)

Rob: What a vivid imagination.

IS 29500 mark 2 was approved by a large majority of National Bodies, not ‘me, Alex and several other NB experts.’

If Microsoft was pulling all the strings, how come they didn’t get the standard they wanted first time? Or even the second time: the standard they got, with the ’legacy crap’ removed to the Transitional part and marked with a big sign (that Alex mentions above), is one MS are still pushing against, it seems.

Your claim that SC34 or experts should have one rule for Microsoft and one for everyone else doesn’t wash. It is unprofessional. But you know that.

(I hope no reader understands Rob’s comment to mean that I was paid by MS for any lobbying activity at SC34 or Standards Australia or my blog, then or now, or to alter my opinions. I wasn’t. Sticks and stones…)

Frank Warren (2010-04-02T01:21:27)

Dear Mr Weir and Mr Jelliffe,

My name is Frank Warren

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Warren_(promoter)

Since the Joe Calzaghe fiasco, I need a big ticket event to get me back on track.

Do you have any interest in being involved in a bout in Las Vegas later this year?

Going by your long history of trash talk, it should be a mouth-watering prospect.

Frank

Alex (2010-04-02T01:25:43)

@Rob

In many NBs the approval (or not) of OOXML was a policy decision, but even on technical grounds many NBs found the defects they had identified were satisfactorily addressed in the Fast Track process. Get over it.

(ODF was, of course, the ultimate “approved for policy reasons” JTC 1 Standard – since few, if any, NBs bothered even to glance at the text before voting for it!)

OOXML does not have problem being “evolved in an open, transparent and vendor neutral way” (except of course, in the PR narratives of its enemies) – the problem I am concerned with is the rate of evolution.

And - sigh - you continue the ugly pattern of behaviour demonizing independent experts whose views don’t sit well with the IBM line. Rick has always been completely open, honest and up-front about his activities and is known and respected (among standardizers and FOSS developers anyway) as both a FOSS and Standards champion.

I don’t know - I used the phrase “lack of executive oversight” about Microsoft in my post. When you get into your attack mode you are an in-person exemplification of the fact that IBM has the same kind of problem! – and it’s a shame, because in person you’re a gent …

Rui Miguel Silva Seabra (2010-04-02T02:14:34)

If Microsoft was pulling all the strings, how come they didn’t get the standard they wanted first time? Or even the second time: the standard they got, with the ’legacy crap’ removed to the Transitional part and marked with a big sign (that Alex mentions above), is one MS are still pushing against, it seems.

Oh, it’s very easy to explain that. Here in Portugal they almost succeeded to get almost unanimous approval at first time. They stuffed a committee in a 7 against 1 ratio.

When that 1 asked to enlarge the committee, they kept stuffing and eventually the committee refused SUN and IBM for “lack of chairs” which was a blatant and convenient lie. There were multiple people per Microsoft friendly entity and there was a much bigger room in the building.

The number one reason they didn’t get it as they wanted it the first time, is that they found much more resistance than what they expected.

They expected that just stuffing committees with friends would be enough to to get a rubber stamp approval.

Jeremy Allison (2010-04-02T02:21:46)

Mr. Brown,

The outcome that many had predicted, yet you insisted would not occur, has now come to pass. Better late to the party than never, I suppose.

I’m a little sad it took a lack of Microsoft following through on their promises (so easily given) for you to get to this realization. Had you listened to others who have had much more experience than yourself in dealing with Microsoft, maybe you wouldn’t now find yourself in this somewhat humiliating position.

What do you think should be done about this sorry state of affairs now?

Jeremy Allison.

orcmid (2010-04-02T02:27:53)

I don’t know what the reasoning was with regard to the pragmatic impacts, but my impression is that there is an amendment to IS 29500 somewhere in the works that will change the namespace used for entirely-strict OOXML documents versus those that bear transitional features.

While, technically, I think this is a good idea, I don’t see how this is something Microsoft has had 2 years to deal with. I’m fairly confident that this was not something that Microsoft perpetrated on itself via its alleged dominant control over SC34 WG4.

I would hope that whenever Microsoft is able to recognize strict arrivals and optionally produce strict outputs for transitional arrivals, the juggling of namespaces will also work out.

I think caution is called for here. I’m not that confident that the massive changes made to accomplish the separation of strict and transitional into separately-namespaced definitions has been achieved without new defects to deal with. I just worked over a much smaller set of errata proposals for defects against ODF 1.0/IS 26300/ODF 1.1 and the mishap rate is surprisingly high. Excruciating care is required and we don’t seem to live in an era that has much tolerance for what that takes.

Going forward, I think the establishment of dual namespaces will be beneficial, but the transition in products is non-trivial (though maybe easier now). I would also expect there to be support for transitional at least as long as there is product support for “Save as … 97-2003 Document” and for the same customer-serving purpose. To consider otherwise strikes me as absurdly disconnected from reality.

Expecting a way for a community of users to establish “Save as strict” as an option or even a configuration default or at least the default for updating an already-strict document is a different story. I expect that this sort of thing will have to be accomplished carefully and delicately with adjustment over time as the community of users and further product releases/updates adjust around that objective. I am not going to second-guess how Microsoft, or the communities that consider only strict as acceptable, will work their way to some accommodation en route to International Standard Valhalla.

Stephen Walli (2010-04-02T02:38:49)

I suspect I know what is “wrong at the centre” with respect to implementation problems and the like. Blogged it here: http://bit.ly/9G1oty

Alex (2010-04-02T02:43:03)

@Mr Allison

The outcome that many had predicted, yet you insisted would not occur

Oh? I don’t recall making predictions about Microsoft’s behaviour? URL please!

Had you listened to others who have had much more experience than yourself in dealing with Microsoft

What, you mean get some off-the-peg set of prejudices? I’ve noticed that’s how some people prefer to proceed.

Don’t you think corporations change? Google from wide-eyed startup to the new Big Brother megacorp; Sun from centre of the technical solar system to bin-end bargain; IBM from evil monopolist market-abuser to … no, wait … ;-)

Standardizers should be skeptical of corporations, but even within corporations there are many different voices. I think the view that reduces corporate disputes to some kind of soap opera with “goodies” and “baddies” is reductive and unintelligent. And I think the view that holds every corporation to continual account for its worst past misdemeanor is an impediment to any kind of progress …

Jeremy Allison (2010-04-02T02:57:36)

Not some off-the-peg prejudices. 18 years of experience with them, dealing with compliance on network interoperability I’m afraid :-).

My opinions on Microsoft are actually more nuanced than you might think. After dealing with them for so long my view of Microsoft is rather similar to Churchill’s view of the Americans: “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing…after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”

I’m truly interested in what you think should be done about this.

Jeremy Allison.

Gareth Horton (2010-04-02T03:03:46)

@Jeremy

As a member of WG4, I don’t in any way see this as an “outcome”. That implies a finality, whereas standards maintenance is a continuum (until they get stabilized/withdrawn).

In Alex’s view, as a long time standards participant, the progress and modus operandi in WG4 seems to have worked counter to his experiences in other SC34 working groups.

As a relative newcomer to the standards work, it’s difficult to know what the benchmark is. I have worked with company internal people that have been less responsive and committed than the Microsoft people involved in WG4, so the problem is less clear cut than many are making it out to be.

It’s easy to take the opportunity to use Alex’s post as a gloatfest - fine, enjoy your moment of smugness.

What I think is valuable from Alex’s post is really trying to pinpoint the issues on this anniversary. As far as I am concerned it is a lack of resources, both from the ECMA/Microsoft side and the implementer side.

There are very few technical experts involved from implementers that can help fix and improve the standard, as well as provide more balance within the working group.

The reasons for the known failures in validation are simple bugs, one in the text of the spec and one in the Office implementation (IMHO). I know, as the testing I was doing against Alex’s validator is the source of them. It is not, as far as I can see, due to abject apathy on the part of Microsoft.

I assume Samba has or has had bugs at some stage in the development process right?

So, the upshot of this is that Microsoft will be reminded of their commitments to the process and adjust their budgets accordingly, if they are indeed committed to the process.

I strongly feel that greater non-Microsoft participation is essential, both from the technical input perspective, as well as any political dynamics.

If people and organizations feel strongly about improving the standard and holding Microsoft to account, then they should participate. Jeering from the sidelines is not going to change anything. Dealing with ECMA/Microsoft as a member of a National Body with a vote is far more powerful platform.

Alex’s post as a key participant of the process holds more weight than any moaning from Groklaw and the other NOOOXML’ers and might actually help improve matters.

Gareth

Gareth Horton (2010-04-02T03:08:56)

@orcmid +1 Dennis, as usual.

@jeremy working well with them on Excel compatibility since 1991, so just a little less than your 18 years. Maybe they just don’t like you ;-)

Jim Smithers (2010-04-02T03:26:03)

And - sigh - you continue the ugly pattern of behaviour demonizing independent experts whose views don’t sit well with the IBM line. Rick has always been completely open, honest and up-front about his activities and is known and respected (among standardizers and FOSS developers anyway) as both a FOSS and Standards champion.

As an avid open source user, I know this for the smell it emits. Your and Mr Jelliffe’s name sank below the bottom of the barrel for your part in the OOXML saga. This article was a small step back up the ladder. But the comments in reply to it still show you and Mr Jelliffe are still Microsoft fools.

Alan Bell (2010-04-02T03:31:40)

Well as the date on the article is not the 1st of April I guess this is serious. I can well imagine the frustration of all the people working on the committees to try to make this whole thing work for the benefit of everyone. It seems that the conformance is close enough for marketing purposes and that is where it is destined to stay. How is their ODF support these days? I seem to recall predictions that Microsoft with their impressive development resources might end up making a stricter more accurate implementation of ODF than OpenOffice.org or anyone else.

orcmid (2010-04-02T03:40:46)

@Stephen Walli - +1 for sure. I missed that the first time. The historical sleuthing around Unix/POSIX/Linux, how Microsoft was blind-sided, and the Java missteps is wonderful.

[The only disconnect for me is that I saw OSF as an IBM-DEC Play against Sun dominance and a beautiful move regarding AIX. Some DEC Hardware may have run a lot of Unix implementations, but I didn’t know many folks who knew the name of DEC’s version. I knew people happily running (close-enough) Unix on Sun that resented IBM’s disturbing arrival. At the OSF announcement event I attended, there were many unhappy-faced old-guard IBM reps in the back of the room, too.]

Gareth Horton (2010-04-02T03:41:26)

Alex,

Is “Microsoft fool” a new one? You need to let Jesper know and update the scores.

@Jim Smithers - partying like it’s 2007 with good old Roy Schestowitz I see. You might want to check your open source software and rip out anything Rick might be responsible for - make sure your principles remain intact.

Gareth

Alex (2010-04-02T04:01:26)

[I’ve just deleted a comment. Jibes mentioning “thalidomide” cross the line.]

Jomar Silva (2010-04-02T04:08:00)

Alex,

Good to see that you’re now seeing things that thousands had seen at that time… again, good to see that we’re starting to agree more.

As I explained to you in Stockholm, BR is very concerned with the transitional-to-forever OOXML, and this is a joke that isn’t fun anymore.

Worst than this, we now see WG4 reverting most of the decisions taken at the BRM regarding the Transitional… the ISO 8601 removal is the latest trick on that.

BTW, at that time I’ve had a good conversation with a friend that followed all the development of the video and multimedia standards, and he told me several histories about Microsoft behavior in TCs… some of those histories are being reenacted right now.

I honestly don’t understand why we need to still spend money and resources on a standard that was only sent to ISO to have the “status” as someone already commented… They still playing with us!

Alex (2010-04-02T04:21:00)

@Jomar

The odd thing about the ISO 8601 reversion is that it is really nothing to do with Microsoft’s wishes (in fact, in some senses, it is quite the opposite).

Check out Gareth’s post here:

http://aristippus303.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/why-do-we-need-serial-dates-in-the-transitional-form-of-is-29500/

The push to revert this comes from the National Bodies who are concerned their users will get screwed by silent data loss if T files start to appear with ISO 8601 dates.

Microsoft had already written code in an Excel pre-release to use ISO 8601 dates. See Jesper’s screenshots at:

http://is.gd/baaQJ

So, in fact, this was an argument where MS were broadly pro 8601, and the NBs were (broadly) saying no – hence the upcoming proposed amendment to remove ISO 8601 dates from T (not S), which I hope Brazil will support for the safety of Excel users everywhere.

This is a real-world case which proves things are rather more complex than in Rob’s fantasy-land of a working-group controlled by Microsoft!

bob (2010-04-02T04:25:26)

All of this high minded talk is nice, but it misses the key point: money. MS Office is worth a heck of a lot of MS’s profits, because they can charge more having a close to a monopoly on it. If they go to a strict standard defined file format they open themselves up to competition and will have to cut prices, at a minimum. And if competitors are multi-platform customers may stray from the other big profit center: the Windows OS.

MS has always been brilliant at marketing. This allows them to claim the marketing plus of standards compliance without suffering from real standards and the competition that would ensue.

Stephen Walli (2010-04-02T04:45:54)

@Gareth: You said:

There are very few technical experts involved from implementers that can help fix and improve the standard, as well as provide more balance within the working group.

This is the real problem. A standard with only one serious conforming implementation isn’t a standard, especially when they have their own product difficulties with which to contend. Because of the way Microsoft played the early marketing game with claims of all the others “supporting” the standard rather than actual conformance, I’m betting there is little reason for the likes of Apple to continue to play on. Without real implementer participation it will be very difficult to get the standard on track. (I grumbled about this two years ago: http://bit.ly/abtyOY)

W^L+ (2010-04-02T04:57:08)

You’re dealing with a corporation, one that derives much of its profit from the difficulty of switching out their office products for competing products. You should not ever expect serious standards compliance until they face a loss of market share.

If OOXML-Strict compliance is important to you, help StarOffice / OpenOffice or WordPerfect or iWork to produce more-compliant documents and then promote those products instead of Microsoft’s products. If you succeed, the loss of market share will cause them to pay attention. (As a side note, the effort spent improving the products’ OOXML compliance may also benefit the products’ ODF compliance, which is what I personally care about.)

Don’t pretend that you did not expect this result. No one who watched the standards battle would believe you are that naive. Instead, focus on how to move forward from here.

Finally, Rob and Rick: It is possible to disagree about nearly everything and still maintain personal respect. You both have a lot to offer here. The way forward is not “us” versus “them”, but a much larger “us” finding areas of agreement. Can we start by acknowledging that much?

orcmid (2010-04-02T05:04:25)

@Alex

“The initial version of OOXML (Ecma 376 1st Edition) was rejected by ISO and IEC members in September 2007 …”

For me, there’s something too strenuous in the emphasis on rejection. It is clear that the submission was not accepted, but it was also in the ball-park for ballot resolution.

Not being there, I don’t quite know how to temper this but to observe that the BRM made changes that were acceptable enough to the objecting parties.

To suggest that OOXML was strongly rejected seems too much like the claims by some parties here that the American people strongly and resoundingly reject the Health Care Reform legislation that was finally passed here.

Having said that, I do recognize your concern for the pace of evolution toward a strict-OOXML world and even a time when there is a strict-OOXML opportunity. The lack of a roadmap is not helpful. On the other hand, maybe what’s required is a little more sharpness about “support” in the Microsoft warrant that includes:

3.3(c) (iii) Microsoft shall Support the ECMA 376 Specification in the .docx, .xlsx and .pptx file formats used by Word 2007, Excel 2007, and PowerPoint 2007; (iv) Microsoft shall Support IS 29500 in the .docx, .xlsx and .pptx file formats used by successor versions of Word 2007, Excel 2007, and PowerPoint 2007;

We could save up our allowances and paper-route money and maybe purchase one of those warranties with a rider about strict-versus-transitional?

cheve (2010-04-02T05:09:19)

Dear Mr. Brown:

I find it ‘very’ interesting where you state that “..In many NBs the approval (or not) of OOXML was a policy decision, but even on technical grounds many NBs found the defects they had identified were satisfactorily addressed in the Fast Track process…”

If I recall(based on reports) correctly, people were running out of the time to discuss the tech issues(and that there were many) – A large portion of text were not even look at due to the lack of time. So your stating that “on technical grounds many NBs found…were satisfactorily addressed” is, somewhat dishonest IMNSHO.

Rob Weir (2010-04-02T05:25:03)

Re-reading Alex’s post I think he misplaces the blame, at least in part. The fact that maintenance has not been staffed to his satisfaction – this is not a Microsoft issue. It is not an Ecma issue either. Neither of them are assigned maintenance of ISO/IEC 29500. That was assigned by JTC1 to SC34. Alex described how control had been handed over back in 2008:

“JTC 1 have handed full responsibility for the standard over to SC 34”

http://adjb.net/index.php?entry=entry080409-221633

Is there some part of “full responsibility” for 8000 pages of crud that makes you a bit uneasy now, Alex?

More from that post: “The passage of ISO/IEC 29500 has instituted a new era of standards activity in SC 34 related to document formats”.

Indeed.

“SC 34 has a plan: it envisages taking control of OOXML”

A cunning plan, my lord. But as I said before, it is more like Microsoft took control of SC34.

It seems to me that if the committee were not dominated by Microsoft (which I believe it is, but Alex denies) then there should be no problem staffing the work adequately without relying on Microsoft. Maybe Alex can explain how Microsoft is now to blame for the slow progress of OOXML maintenance in a committee that has “full responsibility for the standard” and which had broad participation from non-Microsoft experts? Does SC34 have responsibility or not? Does it have broad and active participation from non-Microsoft employees or not?

And if you cannot handle the work for projects already assigned to SC34, then why are you proposing new work items like an ISO ZIP format?

I can appreciate that you think progress here is slow, but the blame appears to be entirely misplaced. OOXML is your albatross now.

Alex (2010-04-02T05:25:20)

@Dennis

On “rejected” v “not accepted” - if the text had remained unchanged, the initial voting result would have stood (in that case no vote modification would have been permitted). So in terms of JTC 1 rules I’m comfortable with “rejected” being the right word for NB opinions on the Ecma 376 text as it was in September 2007.

I completely agree that a “roadmap” would be of immense value to moving things forward!

Alex (2010-04-02T05:27:26)

@cheve

You have your “reports”; I have my first-hand knowledge and second-hand accounts from the people involved.

If an NB felt there had been insufficient time to review the text, it was open to it to vote no. Some (e.g. India as I recall) did just that for this reason …

pan (2010-04-02T06:07:51)

The MSFT standards campaign was simply window dressing to prevent uppity governments from rejecting the Window DOC[x] monopoly as non-standards compliant.

When the immediate danger that some activist government would emulate Massachusetts, USA and similar municipalities, Microsoft dropped any concern for “standards”.

The whole Doc format standard campaign was simply meant to avoid rejection of the proprietary format. It worked, the political will to punish MSFT for trying to patent text authorship has passed into a vague, and confusing bramble of standards.

The unfortunate fellow travelers with Microsoft are now waking up to how simply they were co-opted by a monopolistic criminal organization.

Sorry guys, but you got used.

TheOpenSourcerer (2010-04-02T06:58:27)

I note with interest the (so far at least) silence from Microsoft.

Alex, I am surprised, after all the allegations of stuffing, bribing and coercion of NB’s that were, until DIS29500, uninterested in XML document standards, that you seem surprised at the outcome thus far.

eduardo (2010-04-02T09:45:33)

Microsoft, being a corporation, does what it believes will earn it the most profits. For decades this has been maintaining a proprietary document standard. Apparently those with the authority to decide believe this is still the case. If at some point in time it decides it would make more money converting to a standard it will do so.

Your error, Alex, was to fail to look at Microsoft’s promises from this perspective. Remember, past history (i.e Kerberos, the Java contract) makes clear that Microsoft will lie quite convincingly if it believes it is in its interest to do so (or do you think I am wrong about this?) It would be helpful if you described what Microsoft said to persuade you of its good intentions, and why you believed it to be telling you the truth.

Alex (2010-04-02T17:14:13)

@Alan

Well, a simple “Hello World” ODF file passes the Office-o-tron with no conformance errors, which is more than can be said for the same document from the latest OpenOffice.org … so, watch this space in anticipation of more meaningful testing!

Alex (2010-04-02T17:31:33)

@Rob

What a strange comment.

You need to read that blog post of mine a bit more - especially the section entitled “Bringing Ecma In”.

As you well know, Standards organisations ultimately rely on contributions from individuals and corporations to progress technical work. It is not a tap they can turn on and off. The fact that Microsoft provides resources through Ecma is to be welcomed. The fact that any corporations provide resources to standards bodies is to be welcomed - bravo I say! But I am greedy: I want more.

In International standards committees (like SC 34) liaisons and corporations members have no power of decision-making: the framework is there to handle this well.

The view (from certain corporations) that certain other corporations should not make contributions to standards activity is, in my view, very short-sighted and ultimately anti-standards.

If WG 4 is not sufficiently resourced then we have a problem. We might find ourselves getting into a situation where - I don’t know - maybe it would take us 5 years to get a modest update out of the door. Imagine that!

As to ISO ZIP – that would not be a WG 4 project and so the concerns of my blog don’t really apply. If it can’t be resourced it won’t be done. However, since it’s likely to be only 20-40 pages, and since - informally - I’ve already heard offers of help from several sources, I don’t think that will be a problem. Perhaps an IBM guy might like to contribute? If so, I would again say bravo!

Alex (2010-04-02T17:53:23)

@eduardo @pan @Sourcerer

I think there’s a misconception at large that NBs voted in favour of OOXML because they somehow “trusted Microsoft”. As far as I’m aware this is a long way from being true. If anything, some positive votes may have been motivated more by a distrust of Microsoft!

Remember that the maintenance regime of OOXML took decision-making away from Ecma/Microsoft and placed it in the hands of the National Bodies. The international community controls the OOXML standard (beware spin from MS competitors saying otherwise: they fear of course the same wrenching of control may happen to them), but the international community does not “pick winners” or necessarily even concern itself over-much with what Microsoft does. Those concerns are more properly dealt with by market regulators, not standardizers.

For myself, I have always advocated taking a skeptical view to corporations and putting more faith in conformance testing. See for example what I wrote here before about interoperability testing:

When it come to Office Document interoperability we do not need to rely on bitter blog exchanges, the warm words of press releases, or even on the success (or not) of workshops in Redmond. Questions of interoperability will be decided by the cold hard fact that certain bytes arranged in certain ways will betoken good behaviour; other arrangements will betoken bad behaviour. We, the users, can measure which is which, and we, the users, can improve the tests by making the standards that govern office document more thorough. If we deal honestly and standardize well, the optimal outcome for us is within reach.

A. Rebentisch (2010-04-02T18:24:26)

Whatever the standard says, the simple task of office applications and office productivity tools out there is to ensure compatibility with the original format. In this sense it seemed important in the process to get certain deliverables and ensure the white angel gets taped when it is butchered by the dark knight. Despite Sohne in Kenya of course no one physically died.

Rob Weir (2010-04-02T20:28:45)

Alex, I think you overestimate the value of the ISO imprimatur. I cannot think of any large corporation that would consider it a fair trade to hand over control of a critical part of their technology to a cabal of petty consultants, especially ones with such a poor reputation. Anyone who thinks the contrary is a fool. No one is going to hand over control of their technology to a bunch of loose cannons that run alternatively hot and cold, who make up the rules as they go, that whine and moan and run to the press whenever they feel that their dignity as International Grand Poobahs is impugned.

You seem to want to play ODF and OOXML off each other, in hopes that you can force concessions, hoping that continual threats against both standards will ensure that the midget in the middle can control both. That might have worked before, but we’re all on to your little game. Remember, ISO approval is worth only a small amount of inconvenience. And there always remains the possibility of both ODF and OOXML removing themselves from ISO, at which point SC34, as well as you yourself, would just descend back into its original and justifiable obscurity.

So whenever you start making demands on a large international corporation, I suggest you think more like a salesman, and tell them why this is to their benefit, what value they would get, why it is worth their trouble. If the best you can do is to lead with idle threats about withdrawing their standard, then you are making a weak argument. This hooliganism is also causing S34’s future pipeline to dry up. Microsoft was once going to send along XPS from Ecma for Fast Track processing in JTC1. They backed off that, no doubt evaluating the cost and the benefit and deciding that working with SC34 on this is simply not worth the trouble. I cannot find fault with that calculus.

Laszlo Kurti (2010-04-02T20:46:43)

Oh Microsoft really don’t give a s…t for their own promises? What a surprise! Oh come on. Considering the circumstances of OOXML voting it was more than obvious that MS want the ISO standard for marketing reasons only. MS feared of the growing impact of OO.o (ODF) and wanted their own standard at any price. If the OOXML would have been “standard ready” at that time then why were many strange activities within different National Bodies such as in Italy, Sweden, Hungary, not to mention many African countries which have never been near ISO. Sorry to say but the story so far is if you have enough money then you can buy your own standard, from ISO as well.

Did you really believe that MS just changed? You are really surprised that MS just left ISO (you) alone? Hey wake up, it’s all about money, as the OOXML proves it clearly.

Olivier (2010-04-02T23:38:00)

This situation needs fixing. An open standard with no reference open implementation is a problem. An “open” standard with not even one proprietary implementation from the standard’s main promoter is a disgrace and a joke.

Microsoft abused the ISO process, and the ISO committees let themselves be bamboozled.

The lessons are:

The actions needed are:

Anything less would be still more hypocritical kow-towing to the lying bully.

foo (2010-04-02T23:42:19)

And if we look elsewhere within Microsoft we can see – for example from their engagement with HTML 5 and work on MSIE – that they can move in the right direction when the will is there.

You mean… like the 55/100 result in the ACID test Microsoft proudly displays on their web site? Link:

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/benchmarks/Acid3/Default.html

No, Microsoft is not interested in standards. They want to control the platform, and let everyone play catch up.

Olivier (2010-04-02T23:50:04)

Regarding the “how come MS did not get the standard they wanted?”… This question shows how naive you are.

MS did not want a specific standard. They wanted anything that vaguely looked like a standard so that their salespeople could counter ODF. Actually they’re very happy with the standard they got, with its 2 versions, one of them un-implementable by anyone else and the other un-implemented even by themselves.

That way the “open” check box on governments’ and Big Corps’ purchase-approval checklist are ticked, but they remain locked-in to MS’s proprietary formats. Best of both worlds.

Alex (2010-04-02T23:59:48)

@foo [not your real name]

I did say “move in the right direction” - and MSIE is a Hell of a lot better than it used to be … (MSIE 6 anyone?)

Sebastian Gomez (2010-04-03T00:13:00)

Many previous posts said it was unrealistic to expect Microsoft to implement proper support in Office 2010. I think what is unrealistic is expecting Microsoft to implement any kind of standards.

The only time they will implement anything that is standards compliant is when they have no choice. Think about IE. It took 15 years to get them to implement standards in IE (In IE9) and they only did so because Mozilla, Apple, Opera and Google forced them. Only after they lost significant marketshare against these companies that they implemented HTML5. And, remember, embrace, extend, extinguish. IE9 is only phase1 (Embrace). In a year or so, we’ll see IE9 marketshare grow, and the proprietary extensions will start rolling. In a few years, It’ll be 2001 all over again. IE15 will be as incompatible as IE6 was.

This is Microsoft. That’s what they do. They won’t change. They are the most hostile company I’ve ever seen. They blatantly attack the rest of the industry, and as long as people put up with it and buy their products, they have no reason to change their tactics. They’ve worked well for them for almost 3 decades.

Common Sense (2010-04-03T00:13:12)

Microsoft ditching open in favor of proprietary…. only fools expected otherwise. ISO got bent over like countless techies said they would. end of story. ISO now supports closed proprietary formats as “open”.

Alex (2010-04-03T00:24:07)

@Sebastian

I’m not sure who was “expecting” Microsoft to implement OOXML Strict in Office 2010; though certainly many hoped they would. However what MS does (or does not do) is not the business of the standards organisations.

@Olivier

OOXML Transitional unimplementable? I think not. If you’re interested in office suites then OpenOffice.org will read it, and check out SoftMaker Office (http://www.softmaker.com/) - I know I will soon. (And of course these formats are used in the tool chains of countless back-office and enterprise systems the world over).

@Common Sense

This isn’t an open/proprietary issue, it’s an issue about standards variants and conformance.

Olivier (2010-04-03T00:47:17)

OOXML Transitional unimplementable? …I think not… OpenOffice.org will read it, and … SoftMaker Office… (And …tool chains…)

OO.org, plenty of competing Office software and other apps also import “regular” MS formats. Does that mean they are standards? The point of an official standard is not to be able to kinda read/write a subset of a format for kinda OK results.

A standard is a complete and unambiguous spec, with a reference (open if possible) implementation, more is better. Transitional is not a standard, it’s much too vague for that. Yes, you can import and manipulate a subset of it. No, it does not guarantee interoperability. Nowhere near, actually.

Alex (2010-04-03T00:59:27)

@Olivier

Well, you said T was unimplementable - now you’re on to a different topic.

In JTC 1 there are no reference implementations, instead the emphasis is on the text of the Standard being entire unto itself.

I think that document format standardization is a fairly immature discipline and this is reflected in the standards themselves and in the level of interoperability between implementations of them. It’s an interesting question whether sending out a .docx file (say) will result in greater fidelity when opened with MS Office/SoftMaker Office/OO.o as an equivalent ODF file would opened with OO.o/KOffice/MS Office.

Sebastian Gomez (2010-04-03T01:05:11)

@Alex

You are suggesting people to checkout other privative software like SoftMaker? All that’ll do is perpetuate this problem.

Emacs is all you need people. If you want formatting, use TeX.

makomk (2010-04-03T01:10:01)

Rick Jelliffe: Open Office doesn’t actually support the OOXML ISO standard, or at least didn’t last time I checked. Instead it supports the OOXML that Microsoft Office actually produces and reads. The developers concluded that support for the ISO standard was useless since nothing was likely to actually read or write it, and it’d just confuse people expecting to be able to exchange documents with Microsoft Office.

All the non-Microsoft applications that might add ISO OOXML support are far better served by ODF already.

Alex (2010-04-03T01:14:20)

@Sebastian

I don’t see why - I assume you mean - commercial software will perpetuate any ‘problem’.

I somehow can’t see the proposition of shifting a workforce of office document users over to TeX being particularly easy to follow-through on!

Olivier (2010-04-03T01:23:01)

I’m trying to make the point that some level of interoperability (your “OO.o and others open OOXML”) does not a standard make. Hence my counter example of other formats OO.o and others can work with, which are NOT standards. A standard has to ensure almost perfect interoperability; When, as in Transitional’s case, the specs are at best unclear, and on top of that there are no 3rd party (let alone open) implementations, there is a problem. Strict’s case is even worse, with neither implementation nor much confidence in the specs.

As for your cop-out that other standards are screwed, too… I can’t politely react to that. I guess I’m gonna go steal some money now, but less than others, so that’s OK…

Freedom (2010-04-03T01:25:28)

Mr. Brown, you are a tool. This is exactly the behavior one should expect from a convicted, but not punished, monopolist. You and the ISO have been had, and have given Microsoft no reason to change their abusive tactics.

Ian Lynch (2010-04-03T01:27:20)

MSFT has a commercial interest in holding out against interoperability as far as they credibly can and for as long as they can. They need to buy time because their desktop monopoly is going to die a death of 1000 cuts with migration to the web rather than competing desktop technologies. Problem is that it is difficult to see how they could replace the Windows/Office combination as a cash cow but everything has its day and change is inevitable. Really we should have one ISO document standard and that should be ODF.

Alex (2010-04-03T01:35:54)

@Olivier

A standard has to ensure almost perfect interoperability

Yup - but dream on. ISO/IEC 26300 (ODF 1.0) has no spreadsheet formulas for example! As I say, immature standards.

@Freedom

ISO makes standards; it does not regulate markets. You confuse these activities.

@Ian

Why do I have this sudden sense of déjà vu? ;-)

Doug Mahugh (2010-04-03T01:39:47)

Hi Alex and others. Interesting post, and interesting discussion.

I’d like to respond in some detail, and will do so in a blog post early next week. Have a great holiday weekend everyone, and I look forward to your feedback next week.

Olivier (2010-04-03T01:45:34)

At least ODF has an open source reference implementation, which is the second-best thing.

And, once again, you’re using others’ issues as a cop out. Those “morals” are extremely easy to live by. I feel I’m hearing my kid explain that his E is pretty good, because someone else got an F.

And by the way, that’s an F you got.

Jamie (2010-04-03T01:51:07)

For many who followed this from the beginning, I find it rather amusing you seem surprised by the current situation Alex.

I’ve never previously followed an ISO standard, so perhaps all the ballot stuffing and irregularities are common; personally I found them shocking, and even more so how people involved such as yourself seemed to simply turn a blind eye to the whole mess.

Ian Lynch (2010-04-03T01:52:22)

@Alex

There will be a lot of deja vu simply because the issues are not going to go away and they will be constantly revisited. In the end the trend is to open standards and interoperability, particularly in document and web related formats. The discussion is really in how long legacy de facto standards and their control by particular interests can be maintained. Personally I’m finding I’m using WP a lot less and publishing direct to web pages, sharing spreadsheets on Google Docs etc. We encourage schools to teach more of this to prepare their learners for the future.

Peter (2010-04-03T02:00:55)

Forgive my ignorance, but does this mean that OOXML’s status as a recognized ISO standard could be withdrawn?

Rick Jelliffe (2010-04-03T02:10:35)

Jeremy: It seemed to me that your position against a standard for OOXML at ISO was to some degree at odds with the struggles in the rest of your SAMBA career to get better more complete documentation, better IP disentangling, and to get competitors or other stakeholders at the table discussing technical details and how to get the rough edges and legacy kludges cleaned up.

For years, we in the document industry have been demanding the same kinds of things, but in relation to Office file formats. When the EU made its call for MS to use XML and submit their formats for standardization, were we really supposed to say “Oh, after calling for this for all these years, we don’t really want it or need it?”

If MS had come to the SAMBA people 10 years ago and voluntarily submitted to internationally QA’ed open scrutiny on their documentation and its completeness, devoting substantial resources to put out so much documentation (remembering that OOXML went from around 2000 pages to around 8000 pages in response to requests for information by standards bodies) that people even began to complain it was too big, would you really have turned around and said “Oh, no, we didn’t mean it, we would prefer the status quo where we have to be satisfied with whatever partial crumbs that they post on their website!”?

I suspect most people would have said “Let’s raid the chicken coop while the gate is open!”… Let’s get that documentation vetted and published and the parties into some kind of dialog.

Corporations always blow hot and cold with standards, and shop around for the most suitable standards bodies. Take Google’s Ian Hickson’s efforts with HTML5 and the WHATWG for example. Indeed, XML itself is the poster child for this, when Sun’s Jon Bosak took the development of the SGML profile from ISO to W3C, taking many of us with him. I came back to SC34 by invitation, largely after becoming disenchanted with what I saw as domination by two large corporations (not Google or Microsoft or IBM sort of) in a particular W3C standard, in effect denying a whole set of use cases that didn’t fit in with these companies technologies.

A necessary but not sufficient tool for dismantling the grip of a monopoly or oligopoly technologies is to have a viable FOSS alternative, which is what SC34 did when making alternative schema languages available. It is not up to experts to decide that ODF is better than OOXML or OOXML is better than ODF; it is the market and time and procurers. We are better off with competition and real alternatives, not monocultures. We were better off having both TCP/IP and OSI rather than just one (imagine if it was OSI!)

Many of us, I think, have had confidence that ODF would progressively be capable of providing that alternative, and that the ODF/OOXML kerfuffle was, as Alex memorably put it, a phoney war. I have every confidence that ODF will continue to thrive, and that it will completely displace DOC/RTF/DOCX for simple editable public documents; but this will happen not because ODF was standardized nor held up because OOXML has been also standardized, but when market decides that implementations have good enough interoperability (which then relies, in turn, on the base standard being good enough.) [[Indeed, ISO SGML was mandated for DoD use in the USA but never successfully transitioned from aircraft manuals to the desktop because the applications were not available.]] All standardization does in this case is to help the documentation for both to get better QA, and to help some of the wrinkles in feature sets to get ironed out: they have to duke it out in real implementations.

So the fact that Microsoft would sooner or later blow cold (if indeed it has, at least in its conformance for OOXML, which remains to be seen) is no surprise or mystery or embarrassment. The precursor to SC34 was largely supported by IBM, now some IBM-ers are not so keen, but in the future other personalities may find SC34 a useful forum again. The wheel will turn. We may see Google keen and participating at SC34 on some technology at some time: why not? There are lots of useful things to do in lots of areas where Google is getting an interest, and sooner or later SC34 may be an appropriate forum.

Mark Pellegrini (2010-04-03T02:16:38)

@Gareth - “So, the upshot of this is that Microsoft will be reminded of their commitments to the process and adjust their budgets accordingly, if they are indeed committed to the process.” - that was gracious of you to rebut your own comment and save everyone else the job of pointing out the obvious.

Rob Weir (2010-04-03T03:21:30)

Thanks, Rick. That takes the prize for the most idiotic thing I’ve read today. It was a competitive day, but you managed to pull ahead. Congrats.

Now it is obvious to all that SAMBA is not based on a standard. It is based on proprietary Microsoft networking protocols. So the connection to OOXML is not apt. I and many others have said that having technical documentation on OOXML was a good thing, but standardizing it was not.

You mention that IDABC asked Microsoft to standardize OOXML. This is not quite true. They “urged Microsoft to publish and provide non-discriminatory access to future versions of its Office document specifications” in 2006 but only asked them to “consider” submitting them for standardization. In any case, if you look at the progress of Microsoft technical disclosures and the EC over the past 4 years, you see that they have not asked Microsoft to standardize anything else. All of the agreements since then have been around private publication of their proprietary interfaces. The EC appears to have progressed in their thinking in this area and learned from past mistakes. Why haven’t you?

You (and Alex) also err when you suggest that standardization stands outside of the market and is not involved in picking winners and losers. Baloney. Look at ISO’s own definition of a standard where it says “Standards should be based on the consolidated results of science, technology and experience, and aimed at the promotion of optimum community benefits”. If you are not making decisions, rejecting the bad ideas and promoting the good ones, then you are failing at standardization. You are looking toward a plot of dirt filled with weeds and calling it a garden that the magical market will figure out.

Take the VML example, that Alex is complaining about. The W3C rejected it years ago. Yes, they picked winners and losers, and the winner was SVG and the loser was VML. But SC34 came about, with Microsoft apologists/contractors like you, and approved VML as part of an ISO standard. And now you have the gall to complain that Microsoft is still using VML? Well enjoy your unweeded garden, Rick. You deserve it and its fruits.

Scott (2010-04-03T03:36:13)

@Alex:

I somehow can’t see the proposition of shifting a workforce of office document users over to TeX being particularly easy to follow-through on!

Why not? There are nice programs available now that use it on the back end to serve as examples of how easy it can be. LyX, for example. It doesn’t have to be any harder to transition to and to use than it was to move workers from typewriters to computer-based word processors.

That was achieved through training and/or brute force, and I believe it was a much harder transition than this one would be.

The key difference between using TeX and the usual practices of most word processor users is shifting from a formatting mentality to a semantic markup mentality. Initially it would be jarring to many people. But, they would quickly get over it when they realize that they don’t have to think about the mundane details of fonts and margins any more.

Today’s word processors are, to put it bluntly, stupid. The work of formatting documents should have been delegated to the machine years ago. Instead, the typewriter was virtualized as the word processor, right down to leaving it to the typist to decide where on the page text should appear, what font and point size it should appear in, etc.

It’s funny that a technology from the 1970’s holds the promise of correcting the blunders of today’s technology, yet it is so easily dismissed as being too hard to implement. It’s a good thing businesses didn’t think that way about introducing computers to their work forces in the 1980’s and 1990’s, or this discussion would only be possible in the letters column of some print magazine or newspaper.

Rick Jelliffe (2010-04-03T04:12:29)

Rob: My pleasure.

So ISO standardization is involved in “picking winners” after all, is it? I thought you wrote earlier that Alex “overestimated the value of the ISO imprimatur” and its influence was only worth a small amount of inconvenience?

Your comment “No one is going to hand over control of their technology to a bunch of loose cannons that run alternatively hot and cold” is particularly revealing on many levels: I thought we were supposed to be compliant apologists.

Your comment “You seem to want to play ODF and OOXML off each other, in hopes that you can force concessions, hoping that continual threats against both standards will ensure that the midget in the middle can control both. That might have worked before, but we’re all on to your little game.” But the midget is a forum of the National Standards Bodies of multiple nations of the world.

From what I can see, it is legitimate for SC34 to want for parties to stick to the agreements they made or have good-faith negotiations out if circumstances change. Last year it was with ODF issues, and it embarrassed you; this year it may be with OOXML issues, and it may embarrass Microsoft. You complain that SC34 is some kind of passive lapdog, and yet you also complain that it has its own bark and agenda independent of your large US corporations. Err, that’s rather the point of its existence.