Brian Jones: Open XML Formats
In case you missed it, ISO has approved Open XML as a standard. Brian Jones has more here. What does this mean? Well, among other things it means that the next version of Office ("Office 14" is the inspiring code name) will use an ISO standard as it's native file format. And going forward, the evolution of the format will be managed through ISO. Office file formats have not always been open, but have been a defacto standard for years. Opening the file formats and making Open XML an official document format standard shifts control to Microsoft customers and the national standards bodies that make up ISO.
Microsoft has long supported partners building on Office as a platform, and this continues to be true. Hopefully, making the format specification open and independently managed will give customers and third party solution providers an even greater level of confidence and certainty when directly implementing the standard themselves -- for example by programmatically creating, reading, and manipulating Open XML documents.
Similar in spirit, you might also be interested in Microsoft's "Open Specification Promise".
On a personal note, as I travel around and meet with customers and partners, people often say things to me like "Microsoft has changed in the last few years -- you guys are more open, humbler, and better at listening to customers and partners." I love hearing this, and hope that things like supporting ISO standardization for OXML, OSP, our collaboration with Novell/SuSE and Miguel de Icaza around Mono, the WS-* work, implementing part of the CLR on multiple platforms for Silverlight, etc, will help us keep moving in the right direction. :-)
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About john.mullinax
John Mullinax is a Platform Strategy Advisor with Microsoft's DPE Team. Before joining Microsoft in 2006, John held a vartiety of positions at Ford Motor Company, most recently leading IT services strategy to support explosive business growth in China. Other positions included: Enterprise Architect, Application Portfolio Management, Technology Governance, and Product Manager. Prior to joining Ford, John earned his MBA at the University of Washington. Before that, he was Director of Elections for Douglas County, Washington, where he conducted the first Federal mail-ballot election in the USA. Subsequently, he joined the Secretary of State's office as a consultant working with county election officials in Washington state to improve operational effectiveness, integrity, and security (aka, to prevent the kind of debacle we saw in Florida in 2000).
