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Whatever Happened to OOXML?
April 30, 2009
Posted by: Glyn Moody
Remember Office Open XML – a name chosen to be as confusingly close to OpenOffice XML as possible – better known as OOXML? Remember how just over a year ago this and many other blogs and news outlets were full of sound and fury, as OOXML slouched its way through the ISO standardisation process, finally staggering across the finishing line at the beginning of April 2008? I certainly do, but it's extraordinary how things can change in a year.
A year ago, the fear was that if approved, OOXML would simply tap into the momentum behind Microsoft Office's earlier formats, and become the nominally “open” standard used by all. To prevent this, people around the open source world mobilised against OOXML at the ISO, and nearly succeeded in blocking its progress. Only Microsoft's huge resources enabled it to use the ISO machinery to get its seriously inadequate format approved.
But then a funny thing happened: nothing. As if exhausted by the effort of squeezing through proverbial eye of a needle, OOXML just fell off the radar. I've come across few references to it in the previous 12 months. Indeed, about the most important announcement I've seen is the following, from Microsoft itself:
Today the availability of Service Pack 2 (SP2) for the 2007 Microsoft Office system was announced. The service pack includes major performance enhancements for Office applications, most notably Microsoft Office Outlook, as well as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. One big benefit is SP2’s boost to interoperability — with this release, Office supports additional built-in file formats such as PDF and ODF.
There's also a very revealing reply to a question posed in the same Microsoft document:
PressPass: Why did Microsoft put so much effort into supporting those other formats?
Liles: Our customers have complex needs that no single vendor can address, so we need to be collaborative with the rest of the industry and make our products as interoperable as possible. At Microsoft, our approach includes open protocols, APIs, published documentation about our implementation of document-format standards, and built-in support for the widest set of document formats in the industry. This approach allows customers to choose the best document format for the job at hand.
In addition to the support for additional file formats, SP2 also includes the Open XML Format External File Converter. This allows developers to make any third-party document format a first-class citizen in Office. This means Office will support most government-preferred formats, and can easily be made to support any others that come along.
Interesting to note here the insistence on interoperability, open protocols and collaboration – words more often found in the open source world, but ones increasingly adopted by Microsoft in its attempt to harness all the good vibes they generate. Also significant is the mention of “government-preferred formats”; I think this shows that one of the primary reasons OOXML is not taking off – and ODF is – relates to the increasing number of governments that have adopted the latter.
This means that Microsoft cannot simply ignore ODF, because it runs the risk of cutting itself off from a significant and growing proportion of the public sector market. This also explains why it is adding ODF support with the new Service Pack, as described above.
All-in-all, I think things have gone much better in the office sector than I or many others feared when OOXML gained its "approval" from ISO. OOXML has not caught on, and there is every chance that ODF will become a widely-used national and international standard.
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About the author
Glyn Moody Glyn Moody's look at all levels of the enterprise open source stack. The blog will look at the organisations that are embracing open source, old and new alike (start-ups welcome), and the communities of users and developers that have formed around them (or not, as the case may be).
Comments received
annon-mouse said on Thursday, 30 April 2009
OOXML is Office Open XML, not Open Office XML (which uses ODF as its standard). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML please correct your article.
Thanks.
Glyn Moody said on Thursday, 30 April 2009
Thanks - I *knew* that, so why didn't I write it? Corrected, now.
AnonyDangerMouse said on Thursday, 30 April 2009
You're missing the fundamental reality that if OOXML is the default Save format, MSFT need do *nothing*, and OOXML will silently become a de facto entrenched format.
lamont Cranston said on Thursday, 30 April 2009
Standards committees are much like awards groups: the award not only gives an honor to the recipient, but the recipient's achievements bestow credibility on the award.
The ISO's actions have decreased their standing.
Glyn Moody said on Thursday, 30 April 2009
@AnonyDangerMouse: well, that presupposes it's a viable standard; it seems to me that OOXML is still unfinished in terms of pinning it down, and that may well mean that people stick with older versions.
petem said on Thursday, 30 April 2009
i agree with AnonyDangerMouse... MS need do nothing.. and it "IS" becoming the defacto standard.. how many people use office 2007 and make it a point to change the default format it saves to... i'd hazard to guess " maybe " 10% if your lucky...
another thing that you have to consider.. is how good the ODF support is that MS put into it's service pack.. i will take another guess that if you try it and then try to open it in open office there will be issues.. many point the finger at the standard and how it can be interpreted in any way so as to make any 2 implamentation incompatible.. but considering MS's track record i would put my money on them intentionally screwing it up..
petem said on Thursday, 30 April 2009
one last thing i did not mention.. sometime last week or the week before... i read somewhere that instead of MS "fixing" it's implamentation of OOXML in office.. MS or the standard organization that holds the standard.. OR BOTH.. want to "FIX" the standard to match what office does.. so much for all the lips service MS was giving about patching office to match the standard when they were forcing the standard thru..
Glyn Moody said on Thursday, 30 April 2009
@petem: well, the thing is Microsoft has joined in the open standards game, claiming that OOXML is open etc. You're right that it might try all kinds of tricks in terms of messing with that standard, but it'll get caught out eventually. Things have changed, and the increasing movement of governments towards open standards will be a problem if OOXML isn't fixed because it will soon become evident that it's not open in any meaningful way.
OOXML said on Thursday, 30 April 2009
Microsoft made this decision over a year ago that SP2 would offer ODF support, and that OOXML would be part of the next full version of Office.
Glyn Moody said on Thursday, 30 April 2009
My point is not that they're doing it, but that nothing much else seems to be happening around OOXML, unlike ODF which is being adopted increasingly widely.
raf said on Thursday, 30 April 2009
This is just the embrace part of embrace and extend.
Incompatible format (***.x) said on Thursday, 30 April 2009
Office 2007's formats are incompatible with previous office versions which most are still using. The other day my 2 students could not open their .pptx work on the lab's old Windows pc. My notebook running Ubuntu/Open Office- came the rescue opening their work without a hitch.
Jose_X said on Friday, 01 May 2009
Microsoft needs to control standards to control the patent picture.
Their closed source speaks much louder than all their talk of openness. You can't hope to interoperate seemlessly if your bugs and misimplementations and undocumented interfaces are not revealed to the world (ie, if all the source code is not accessible).
Since they are a closed source monopolist with a very strong profit motive to maintain monopoly profit margins made possible by monopolies, we can expect that a lack of interoperability (enabled by closed source) will continue to be an issue.
Longtime observer said on Friday, 01 May 2009
Expect a slap-dash, "check this one off the list so we can get the contract" implementation. Similar to the lame POSIX support in NT.
Expect MS-ODF implementation to be so frustrating that users will universally choose native OOXML, and importing correct ODF docuements will yield frustratingly inconsistent results.
sceptic said on Friday, 01 May 2009
MS is laying low with OOXML, trying to rebuild some govt. goodwill before launching more attacks on ODF. They've already become more active in maintenance and development of the ODF standard, and have already this year tried to block requirements for strict identification of documents and applications which do not conform 100% to the standard which would block their normal "embrace - extend - extinguish" strategy.
Jack Dausman said on Friday, 01 May 2009
Glyn, it *is* interesting, isn't it ? It's not what I expected, and the slide to ODF/PDF is almost a noiseless transition. Thanks for the astute observation !
maccam94 said on Friday, 01 May 2009
I'm a student at a medium-sized college. All students are given laptops preloaded with Office 2007, and all of the computer labs on campus run it as well. By default it saves files in OOXML formats. Almost no one changes this behavior, for several reasons:
-They don't know about it.
-They're lazy.
-There are compatibility issues with saving documents in other formats.
So yes, OOXML is slowly creeping into the market, just as originally feared.
David said on Friday, 01 May 2009
petem said on Thursday, 30 April 2009
i agree with AnonyDangerMouse... MS need do nothing.. and it "IS" becoming the defacto standard.. how many people use office 2007 and make it a point to change the default format it saves to... i'd hazard to guess " maybe " 10% if your lucky...
Well if they are sending them to anyone not using MS Office 2007, they are going to learn to change the default or the recipient won't be able to open it. The problem with being an early adapter.
Oxon Wombat said on Saturday, 02 May 2009
@Longtime Observer
Yes, the MS ODF implementation will be just crap enough to be cause problems in use, in MS's time-honoured style. But OO.o has experience in dealing with the legacy MS file formats, so I'm guessing that OO.o and friends using ODF will cope much better than MS expects.
Most importantly, though, any non-standardness in MS generated ODF can immediately be flagged as illegal - it either complies with the standard or it doesn't. This can be important user education, as well as being a concrete stick (so to speak) with which to keep MS in line.
One can be cynical, but also hopeful that things might not turn out too bad.