Ongoing support for IS 29500 (Open XML)

[Open XML] Open XML devient une norme ISO !!!

Julien Chable — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:43:51 GMT

Après le vote final de la procédure de normalisation pour le projet DIS 29500 Office Open XML, les National

Open XML Overwhelmingly Approved as an ISO / IEC standard (IS 29500): the end of the file formats war

Brian Jones: Open XML Formats — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:32:23 GMT

I'm sure many folks have seen the news by now that Open XML has been approved as an ISO/IEC standard

re: Ongoing support for IS 29500 (Open XML)

I'm Brian Jones — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:51:39 GMT

Mike, you need to read through my previous blog posts and I lay this out pretty clearly.

In our mind, most of our customers will not move to other products because we offer the best Office suite. No one comes close in terms of usability, features, etc. (that's our opinion and it's what drives our decisions).

The data inside of the files we create is extremely valuable. By opening that data up and allowing other solutions to operate on the data, the value of those documents increases dramatically (orders of magnitude). This increase in the value of documents increases the value of the applications that work with these documents. It grows the marketplace, so that even if our share of the pie stays the same percentage-wise (or even decreases slightly), overall there is more pie, so we win.

-Brian

re: Ongoing support for IS 29500 (Open XML)

Mike — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 23:48:28 GMT

My comment still stands, a truly open and easy to implement format implies competition for Microsoft Office applications. Please explain how that will make Microsoft more money? If my company switches to Google Docs or Open Office because it is no longer an issue to send and receive Microsoft Office files (something that keeps us from switching to Open Office), you just lost money.

I'm not really sure how you want to counter argue that, but please try as nobody has been succesfull yet. I think you know why, it can't be denied, it's simple fact. But please feel free to dress your arguments up in irrelevant banter about pivot tables ;)

re: Ongoing support for IS 29500 (Open XML)

Mike — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 23:48:28 GMT

re: Ongoing support for IS 29500 (Open XML)

Dave S. — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 06:51:53 GMT

@Brian, "That's a very naive view." Is that a putdown or a fact? Try the phrase at your next staff meeting, perhaps with your supervisor. I'm pretty sure he'll take it as an accurate assessment and give congratulations on your insight.

Back to the topic - I remember the good old days of IGES. A CAD vendor would claim they implemented the IGES standard, but all they did was support lines and circles. Another would use only splines for everything. What the customer wanted from the Initial Graphics Exchange Standard was to exchange info between applications.

Subsets are not implementations of a standard, they are implementations of a sub-standard.

In the case of MSO-XML, the MS position appears that all of the new foramt is required to persist all the various nuances of prior MS-binary formats so that the information contained in the MSO-XML format compliant files can be displayed with full fidelity to the old. In order for that to happen one must be prepared to create features that accurately reproduce the operations and appearance the originator of the file respectivly had and saw.

Again, a slap at the non-topic of ODF.

re: Ongoing support for IS 29500 (Open XML)

I'm Brian Jones — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 03:01:13 GMT

Dave S.,

I think you're still a bit confused here.

1) There are far more than 5 formats... there is HTML, RTF, UOF, ODF, PDF, DocBook, Doc, Office 2003 XML, Office 2007 XML (which is the same as ecma XML), etc.

With the adoption of ISO XML, then Microsoft products will move to focus on that, and Doc, 2003 XML will hopefully quickly go away.

2) I still think you're missing the point on features vs. formats a bit. This is a file format standard. It is not a feature set standard. When you build an application you decide what features you want to build. A file format standard does not force to to implement any features... you build features based on what your customers want. Your customers may ask you to implement all features that can be represented by a particular format, but that's still an issue between you and your customers. All the file format does is give you a way of persisting your feature set to disk when a file is saved. Nothing more. So really the key thing is that you want a file format that is capable of representing your features. Ideally your features set is a sub set of what the format allows, but if it isn't the format should be extensible in the ways you need.

3) I really don't understand why you think my statements were an attempt to put someone down... I think most people have really taken this to a level that's a bit overblown. OpenXML is not a way for Office to get an unfair advantage. It's a way to move out of the binary formats and into an open world. ODF just can't do that... it's pretty simple.

-Brian

re: Ongoing support for IS 29500 (Open XML)

Dave S. — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:56:25 GMT

@Brian "It's not difficult to implement Open XML, it’s difficult to implement all the functionality that Open XML"

OK - I give. How is it possible to implement a format without an application?

@Christian - Brian's response to Mike was about file i/o vs software development, a topic Mike did not raise. It was not a clearly expressed argument for OpenXML, but a weak attempt at a putdown.

re: Ongoing support for IS 29500 (Open XML)

Dave S — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 23:17:15 GMT

Pivot tables are a great way for Excel users to avoid having to learn to use a database.

This is much like the way tables are included in Word and Powerpoint with differing functionality than is in Excel - a primarily table-based application. In Word 2007 one can have both a table and a spreadsheet in the same document. That won't be confusing.

@Rob B. - there are at least 5 formats. ISO ODF, MS-Office Binary, MS-Office 2003 XML, MS-Office 2007 XML, ECMA MSO-XML. That number will be six if ISO approves MSO-XML Fast Track.

re: Ongoing support for IS 29500 (Open XML)

Christian — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 12:55:40 GMT

Brian, I LOVED your response to Mike! That was the most clearly expressed argument for OpenXML ever and it is really THE base for arguing against the attacks from ODF.

I wish you would often have expressed this so clearly and in the main posts instead of talking around the subject but not really mentioning it.

You should post this as a new blog entry, I'd love to see Rob Weirds try to go against it, I'm sure that fool would try to.

The ODF-camp wants to drag Office down in this Office97-camp where all the good stuff in Office has to be disabled to support their old format!