Analysis: Open season on document standards

Open XML makes perfect sense from within Microsoft. The company owns the old binary formats; it can write new ones if it wishes. But from the outside world’s perspective, the binaries are a de facto standard that Microsoft has superseded unilaterally.

Companies and particularly government organisations, faced with having to re-engineer their systems around OpenXML, are asking whether it is advisable to rely on formats that could bind them to one company. And whether the new formats fit all their needs.

Most big IT systems have a mix of Wintel and other platforms; huge emerging economies like China and India see open-source as a short-cut to go their own way on software, and are less hooked into Microsoft; the EU by law has to use open-formats for international correspondence.

Then there is the increasing importance of mobile platforms, many of them coming from the telephony world to which Microsoft is a relative newcomer. All these platforms need to exchange structured information, preferably without needing to go through a format translation that could introduce errors.

From this perspective, given the fact that the old Microsoft binaries were due for replacement, it would surely have been better to have agreed a set of fundamental features that formats should support and then to have built a standard round them. Platform-specific features could be then bolted on, as they are with HTML.

That this has become a serious issue for Microsoft is evidenced by its rush to get OpenXML accepted as an ISO standard. ODF has already been endorsed as one, so we face the prospect of having two doing much the same thing, which rather defeats the object.

The battle, like mostly involving IT standards, is tainted by commercial and personal rivalries. Sun and IBM back ODF; Apple and Microsoft are unlikely partners over OpenXML.

It is further complicated for Microsoft by other interoperability issues that won’t go away. The EU claims that it has still not complied with an order to allow rivals free access to code allowing Windows clients to non-Microsoft servers.

Two Microsoft general managers with responsibility for interoperability, Tom Robertson and Jean Paoli, launched a charm offensive in Europe recently telling journalists how the company has cleaned up its act.

They pointed to a Microsoft ‘statement of principles’ which included a pledge that the entire Windows programming interface will be open. The statement says: “That means that anything that Microsoft’s products can do in terms of how they plug into Windows, competing products will be able to do as well.”

Robertson said OpenXML, with backing from the British Library, has already been accepted by the European body ECMA as a standard and was on track for acceptance by ISO. He pointed out that filters have already been developed to allow Office 2007 to export and read ODF. He added: “Standardisation means other companies can develop competing products using the OpenXML formats.”

He also echoed a point made by many Microsoft insiders that to have shackled the complex development of OpenXML to a tortuous standards process would have made the task near impossible.

There is a sense of the ground shifting under Microsoft. The time is past when the major concern was whether rival products could interoperate with Windows; now the boot is on the other foot and Microsoft has to demonstrate its interoperability with rivals.

OpenXML will probably emerge as a dominant force whatever happens in the standards process, though it is likely to be slow to take off. It will probably be endorsed as an ISO standard. But whether it is the optimum document standard for the emerging multi-platform world is an open question.