Formats reign in Office news
It’s hard to get away from the format issue following Microsoft’s announcement that it will submit its proprietary XML format to the international standards board.
So here are two opposing views on the issue, one from Office program manager, Brian Jones, and a comment response from Bob Reynolds, who appears to be a Microsoft blogger. Here’s Brian’s explanation of the move :
Today we are making a really important announcement about our XML formats. We are going to bring the Microsoft Office Open XML formats to a standards body with the intention of eventually making the formats an ISO standard. This should really help everyone feel certain that these formats will always be available and fully accessible. We are going to work with Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, the British Library, Essilor, Intel Corporation, NextPage Inc., Statoil ASA and Toshiba to form a technical committee at ECMA International that will fully document all of our schemas so that anyone can understand how to develop on top of them. This is obviously a huge step forward and it really helps to increase the value of these document formats because of the improved transparency and interoperability. This will help to create a large ecosystem built around these formats that will support them in a large number of different scenarios for customers.
And Bob Reynold’s response : “Why does Microsoft ALWAYS have to re-invent the wheel? What’s wrong with simpy using ODF (http://www.oasis-open.org/)? The format is already widely supported by companies like IBM and Sun and many other office suites already support it.”
And that’s just about where the matter remains. Until we know more about the proposal, and exactly what Microsoft is offering to do, opinion will remain polarized between the two views quoted here. Stay tuned for updates.
Formats
Well, a concise and nicely-controversial little entry, but totally inaccurate.
Go and read Brian Jones’ blog – how many times do they (MS) have to say it, XML is open, and the Office 12 format is not a “proprietary” format.
And, the ODF matter has been thoroughly addressed.
What exactly are you “watching”? Crap stuff, mate!
That’s not what most of the commentators think, Ian. Read Joe Wilcox at Microsoft Monitor, or any of the others. Even Robert Scoble asked some searching questions to Jean Paoli, the XML man.
The problem they have is that there’s always a lot of suspicion when Microsoft offers something. “What are they getting out of this?” Whereas Google has built a reputation and a business on giving stuff away free. As Scoble says, it’s a question of trust.