Two standards better than one, says Microsoft

Microsoft has defended its attempt to get its new Office 2007 formats accepted as a second global document standard and insisted the submission is still on track.

The comments, in a statement to PCW, follow news the British Standards Institution (BSI), which represents the UK at the International Standards Organisation (ISO), has issued what is called a "contradiction" to the application.

The BSI has not revealed the content of its contradiction, but it came at the end of the first phase of the ISO standardisation process which decides whether an application should be fast-tracked, or whether it goes forward at all.

Microsoft said the BSI contradiction was believed to be one of 19 from more than 100 national bodies represented at ISO.

The statement adds: "One should not assume that all the 19… actually contain substantive comments or contradictions. In fact, we expect that some are either statements of support or simple statements that the ISO member has no comments at this stage."

ISO has already approved the Open Document Format (ODF) as an international standard and ODF proponents say there is no point in having two standards.

The Microsoft statement said the "global effort by ODF supporters" to prevent ISO from even considering its submission was an attempt to limit choice.

It went on: "The standards process should not be used to limit… competition between document formats. Doing so conflicts with customer interests. Microsoft understood this when it didn’t oppose in any way the standardization of ODF."

Several local and national government organisations, particularly in Europe but also in the US, have called for standard formats that can be read without translation on any platform.

Microsoft executives have on more than one occasion exploded with exasperation at press briefings at any suggestion the new Open XML formats are some kind of plot to lock people into its software.

Software engineers working on the project told PCW trying to re-engineer the old binary formats into the new XML formats while trying to reconcile them with a tortuous standards process would have been near impossible.

Those binary formats were never formally made a standard but they were a de facto one by virtue of the fact everyone used them. The same thing could happen to Open XML, whatever ISO decides.

Microsoft said in its statement it is confident Open XML will be ratfied as a standard.

See the full Microsoft statement on Test Bed.