On the 29th of September I posted that MS had no intention of publishing its own document format. I guess I spoke too soon, or rather too soon and not with the right publisher. Seems like MS has decided to have ECMA International do the publishing of their Office formats -
Microsoft to Open up Office Formats from Slashdot. As noted in the comments, the spec won't be published until 18 months (best guess?) from whenever MS submits it to ECMAI, nor will it allow the
READING of the file formats - just the
WRITING of the file formats. There might be other conditions that apply to anyone looking to see/use the MS specification, but that is just conjecture at this point. However, it should be clear what MS is doing with this move.
- MS will seem to have a standard Office file format - the ECMA Internation says so - but nobody can review it for another 18 months (remember vaporware?). Thus anyone wanting to impliment this new format has to wait...
- MS appears to be opening up the Office file formats, yet this only covers the creation of files in the Office file format - you can't actually read those files, which makes any software besides MS Office (and perhaps an MS Office file reader) rather limited.
- MS would rather make it so everyone has to play the MS game with the MS file formats, than to adopt a true open standard - ODF - and take on the likes of OpenOffice, StarOffice, Abi Word, KWrite, etc. in a feature to feature shootout. Probably because these other office suites/word processors can beat MS Office in features per dollar (StarOffice being the most expensive of the alternatives at roughly $70 per seat retail).
It seems strange that MS was part of the ODF specification team, yet refuses to offer that format in their office products. Is it just because they are too proud to allow somebody else's standard in their products, or are the MS coders just too inept to be able to impliment the ODF standard? Probably neither. It just might be the fear that MS Office would have to compete with FOSS and other low-cost software, and MS wouldn't stand a chance to bring in the multi-millions of dollars that the MS Office products do now.
So when is a standard not a standard? When Microsoft says it is a standard. The only Microsoft standard is making money however they can get away with it.
