I first saw the pre announcement final briefing last weekend, and in the past few months I've been in some meetings including some with Jean Paoli where the topic was an open format for Office. The following ZDnet article http://news.com.com/IT+giants+accused+of+exploiting+open+source/2100-7344_3-5726714.html also caught my eye yesterday, just reinforcing the 'no free lunch' theorum but I'd really not like to turn this blog into some marketecture spiel which is what some companies have based their standards engagement strategy on; including patent / IP management blurring the boundaries between open source & open standards but see my earlier blogs for what I think about that. Personally, I think the user community / customers are smart enough to see what is really going on and with time the real truth always comes out so I can comfortably wait and see.

Anyway I'm glad to see the new 'Office 12' XML news finally came out BUT what this all keeps reminding me about is the general topic of 'open standards' and what different platform vendors (Microsoft, IBM, Sun, HP, ...) and independent solution vendors (SAP, ...) do to leverage standards.

Starting off with no one should ever immediately jump to the conclusion that any standard has everything in it by design, to fully make a complete professional product in the commerical market space; rather a lot of standards these days are designed for 'interop' and not 'product features'. Think about it - a commercial product fully based on an open (community) standard; nothing more than what's in the free spec is in all of the commercial products. Sounds like the cart (a standard really meant for interop) is getting in front of the horse (a compeitive market place of new innovate products and services). Standards for standards sake? Doesn't even make for good text book material!

For anyone who has ever sat in standards development meetings, you must have noticed the different viewpoint in the discussions around what goes (and usually with a little emotion added in the meeting what does not go) into a new standards spec. Usually what makes it into a standards meeting is driven by those who physically manage to make it to the meetings, and what drops off the spec is a reflection of who didn't manage to make it to the meetings.  When we talk about 'open and transparent standards procedures' the real goal should be to have the widest possible audience involved (for max interop), and if you want to try something interesting have a look at some standards which seem to have been in development for years but not much market acceptance - and have a look over time on who actually went to all those standards meetings and who wrote the standards spec; and who votted the standards spec from draft to 'adopted'.

The other comment I have noticed about 'open and transparent' standards development is the tendancy by some standards work groups to not clearly publish their mandate scope / charter clearly at the beginning of their work - and more importantly stick to the charter. Tendency of some standards work groups / teams is to deviate, expand / contract scope of their work as they get deeper into writing up the spec - which is all part of the natural process so that's a good thing BUT the problem is some work groups then produce a new spec which doesn't match their original advertised charter to the surprise of many people. What's wrong with that? Well, if you are aware that a new group is starting up and you take the time to review their charter to see if you want to join but you think the scope of what they say they want to do is not what you want to work on - only to find out to your surprise that months later the work group actually changes their work program, and didn't publicly communiate their new program - you might have had a 2nd thoughts about joining them! How 'transparent and open' is that standards development process, when you are really getting excluded from the development process. False advertising?

But back to implementing a 'standard' in products, a standard often becomes just one input to making a new product work and typically product development concentrates on creating a positive commerical competitive difference in the market so 100% of all product features naturally tend to go beyond the scope of a standard. As I mentioned, a standard usually tends to promote 'interop' and not 'product features'.

Back to the new Office 12 news, having Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents all saved as xml (as opposed to .doc or .ppt) should really give everyone benefits including smoother data interoperability, improved security and error recovery, and my favorite - reduced files sizes. Looking into the technical specs I even see some very promising extensibility capabilities in the document container for ancilliary business purposes to what one normally does with Office products. This whole Office 12 announcement probably best can be seen as following on the New World of Work (NWOW) vision laid out by Bill G at the CEO Summit a couple of weeks ago here in Redmond.  I fully expect more words to be said about this at TechEd next week, but wait and see.

/Dave