If Microsoft wants to use ECMA standardisation as an argument for openstandardness (like open handedness, geddit), then it may have to cut the chilling effects that have so far held back Mono in production environments. The idea is put forward in…

I’m not competent to discuss the technical mapping or the licensing issues. All I’m taking issue with is the “reinvent the wheel” bit. My position is that there isn’t a REAL standard document format to reinvent; OASIS calling it a “standard” plants a flag in the sand but that’s all. There are so many purported standards on the Web that one needs real industry credibility and an organization’s imprimatur to make it so. ODF may well get that credibility before long when multiple real shipping products are interoperating smoothly with diverse real user data, but that hasn’t happened yet AFAIK.

I was as skeptical as you are about MS’s commitment to interoperability a few years ago. I remember having a nice rant along the lines of your comment at my then-boss in about 1997 when MS jumped on the XML bandwagon. His response was something like “Microsoft has all the same interoperability problems across platforms and applications and versions within its ecosystem as the rest of us do between their ecosystem and the rest of the world.” Everything I’ve seen since then has confirmed his analysis. Office 2003 was one of the things that finally changed that perception for me. Whatever the motivation, and whatever nits wants to pick with the format and licensing, Office 2003′s XML format is used by lots of customers to build real interoperability with other systems and applications.

I’ll guess (not having been at Microsoft at the time) that when the ODF activity started up, the MS Office people thought something like “yet another attempt to impose a standard from the outside rather than evolve interoperability from the inside … bozo_bit = TRUE.” I personally think that was shortsighted (in hindsight of course), but in my day job I have to worry about this kind of thing and it’s hard to do. There are way too many purported standards out there for even a big company that wanted to Do The Right Thing to take seriously. After all, the whole point of standardization is lost if there are so many “standards” that they don’t offer real stability and interoperability.

Another consideration is that one size simply does not fit all. Standardizing common denominator generic office app formats is fine and arguably hits an 80/20 point, but a major design consideration for Office 2003 is to support custom schemas / stylesheets tailored to the needs of individual customers. Until the whole issue became politicized, I suspect that the need for an official standard that covered the 80% case just wasn’t obvious to people paying more attention to the “interesting” 20%

Finally, many disagree, but there was a very strong sense when Office 2003 was announced and beta’d 3 years ago that the appropriate standards were XML, XML Schema, and XSLT. Office 2003 supported *those* standards, so it wasn’t obvious that more narrow application standards were needed. Of course that is XML geek-think … but Jean Paoli was an SGML/XML geek long before most of us had heard of it.

By going with their own standard, they are able to compete for those contracts, but they ensure that it will take a seriously long time for anybody competitors to implement their standard. It could be years. Plus if their standard maps to internal structures of MS Office more readily than ODF, then they could get an implementation out the door much faster.

Microsoft wants to claim to be playing nice with Open Standards as long as they control the standard.