Interoperability, Choice, and Open XML
This morning Microsoft released a letter outlining its position and intent to foster interoperability with the Open XML file format (a recently passed ECMA international standard) and also raised concerns about competitor activity to interfere with our current ISO standardization process. The letter, IMHO, is long overdue and I’m glad to see it published. Anyway, I’ve thought about interoperability for some time – especially from the customer and market perspective – and have tried to figure out what, if anything, we are doing wrong or half-heartedly with respect to the Open XML file formats. After all, there have been concerns raised about our motive, the size of the specification, and the ‘openness’ of the process for its development and standardization. The letter addresses these issues pretty clearly – nothing we haven’t said before – and I find it difficult to believe that even our most ardent competitors would think this is anything but goodness. Looking at this from a logical perspective our position is pretty self explanatory in fact:
1. We focus on Customer and Industry driven interoperability: The market is the community that matters
We realize that heterogeneity happens. In response, Microsoft is fostering a pragmatic approach to achieving interoperability ‘by design’ that respects diverse technologies and business models, encourages vendor autonomy to innovate and protect IP, while meeting customer needs of managing the complexity of heterogeneous infrastructure. Examples? Sure…
a. The Interoperability Executive Customer Council has driven significant work stream activity since its first meeting in October
b. The Interoperability Vendor Alliance is evolving with Red Hat being among the most recent to join
c. Novell and Microsoft recently announced their technical roadmap
d. The Open Specification Promise has been made available to release IP for industry use
2. ECMA Standardization.
We worked through ECMA for nearly a year with key industry stakeholders - keep in mind, ECMA’s process is an open one. During its time in the technical committee, the spec grew from 2000 pages to 6000 pages. All but one company voted to approve the specification during its review for standardization – IBM. Looking at Bob Sutor’s blog (he’s the VP of Open Strategy at IBM), he states the following:
IBM voted NO today in ECMA on approval for Microsoft’s Open XML spec.
I think Rob Weir and I (as well as many others) have made it clear in the last few months why we think the (1) Open Document Format ISO standard is vastly superior to the Open XML spec. (2) ODF is what the world needs today to drive competition, innovation, and lower costs for customers. It is an example of a real open standard versus a (3) vendor-dictated spec that documents proprietary products via XML.(4) ODF is about the future, Open XML is about the past. We voted for the future.
Anyway, just wanted you to know.
Couple of points to consider re: those comments…
(1) ODF is incomplete, even for its own intended goals, and is currently being revised through OASIS (accessibility was a key issue in fact).
(2) ODF may be what Open Office needs today – don’t know that the world is screaming for it. If you happen to use Open Office, you may still run into the occasional Microsoft Office Open file formats –which happen to be supported by translators.
(3) What better place to start than the source of the binary files (Not sure I get how XML is proprietary?) We offered an open spec to the industry which grew into what is today. The great thing is that…
(4) While ODF is a forward thinking spec (which is fine), Open XML is backward compatible and future proofed, linking billions (yes with a ‘b’) of legacy binary files with a new world of XML based and extensible documents.
3. The size of the specification.
The spec was not intentionally written to be overly complex or involved. Granted, its long. Very long. 6000 pages. But I think it’s fair to say that we had to document all of the features plain and simple – regardless of how significant or mundane they were perceived to be. As I mentioned before, its size evolved over time as we took input from technical committee participants. The size of the specification reflects the degree of sophistication for the document authoring technology - MS Office is very robust.
4. Access and availability to Implement – No Strings Attached!
As aforementioned, Microsoft introduced an Open Specification Promise under which the Open XML specification was released. Anyone is free to implement all or a portion of the specification to fit their needs and Novell, Corel, and others, in fact, have already announced that this is part of their roadmap. The first round of implementation, of course, may take significant work – it took significant work for Microsoft. And after all, this is a major change in our own technologies to foster interoperability. Once done, however, and as the spec evolves, future iterations will be much more streamlined to implement.
I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. I encourage folks to read the letter and think about what we’re doing. This is a huge step for the industry and a huge step for Microsoft. Anyone sitting in opposition to this effort must be putting their own interests before those of the market. C’mon IBM – where’s our Attaboy???
