Four countries have appealed against a decision to adopt Microsoft's Open XML as an international standard.
Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela are calling for more time to discuss improvements to the format which is used for spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents.
While it is fashionable to slate the world's most successful software company at every opportunity, could it possibly be that the objectors are actually making the situation worse?
When critics maintain that Open XML isn't compatible with other formats, they are indeed correct. It isn't. The reason for this is that there isn't an established standard, so every file format is non-standard.
All they are achieving is delaying the establishment of a standard, so are, in effect, making the situation worse. For every day that passes, millions of documents are stored in a wide variety of formats which will require conversion to the international standard when it finally becomes ratified.
It certainly appears to this cynical old hack that what motivates the objectors is the 'not invented here' syndrome. They aren't actually interested in the standard being implemented as quickly as possible, they are interested in having that awfully-clever little bit of code that their brother-in-law wrote incorporated into it.
Inherently evil
The knee-jerk reaction to anything Microsoft does as being inherently evil is patent nonsense, but it's been going on for years, perpetuated by people with a vested interest in flogging their own, less-popular software offerings. These people are not protecting your interests, they're trying to make money for themselves.
Unable to develop products that can compete with Microsoft on a level playing field, they choose to spend money on lawyers rather than programmers to drive sales. It's a purely business decision. They are not philanthropists.
And their job is easy - people naturally want to help the underdog, but choose to forget that Microsoft was once a two man and a dog operation itself. It didn't become the top software company in the world by suing its way to the top; it did it by making products that people actually wanted to buy.
When we read a trusted news source such as the BBC reporting that 'Microsoft has long been held to task for its failure to embrace open standards,' it is tempting to accept it as fact. But the truth is, the only people holding the company to task are those with their own products to sell.
This is, of course, sloppy reporting - unattributed opinion reported as fact - a position which the BBC now, sadly, seems determined to take at every opportunity.
The delay in establishing an open document standard will now take months, if not years to resolve. We need a standard and we need it now. Open XML does the job. No one would claim it is perfect, but it's the best we've got. Standards can evolve to adapt to developments in technology. What legitimate objection do Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela have to Open XML that makes further delay worthwhile?
But perhaps the daftest statement in the whole sorry affair comes from an organisation that should know better. The British Standards Institute voted in favour of adopting Open XML, but the UK's Unix and Open Systems User Group thinks it knows better.
Idiot savant
UKUUG chairman Alain Williams is on record as saying: 'The format used for storage of documents will affect our lives for decades to come, and it is imperative that standards such as OpenXML are given a rigorous review rather than being rubber-stamped by BSI. Where would we be if the original Magna Carta was unreadable ?'
I beg your pardon, Alain?
How on earth is Magna Carta relevant to open standards? Could 99% of people today understand it were it to be unrolled in front of them? No. It is written in a language centuries old. The parchment it is written on is irrelevant and Open XML is parchment, not content.
To say that Open XML could cause difficulties in reading documents in the future because it is written by Microsoft is nothing short of pathetic. It's a workable system, better and more complete than any of the alternatives and it should be ratified and adopted without delay. Any fine tuning can be carried out later.
Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela are acting disingenuously and against the very goal they claim to be working towards. My message to them is simple:
Grow up. X |