Open XML is now a ECMA standard.
At the General Assembly meeting on 7 December 2006, Ecma International approved Office Open XML as an Ecma standard (Ecma 376). The General Assembly also approved submitting the standard for adoption under the ISO/IEC JTC 1 process.
The work to standardize OpenXML has been carried out by Ecma International as part of an open, cross-industry collaboration via Technical Committee 45 (Ecma TC45), which includes representatives from Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and the United States Library of Congress.
There does not seem to be much opposition to existence of two standards for the same purpose. Only IBM did. Frankly, I see Microsoft coming up with Open XML because a lot of bodies, including government agencies, were switching to the ODF. Is there an answer to the question why Microsoft did not adopt ODF, or develop it further if it was found lacking? So yeah, now I can claim to comply to an open standard but still cannot guarantee interoperability, because someone else might comply to the other open standard! Is there any thought being given to the benefit to the end user out of these certifications? Or standards just for the sake of standards or for the sake of businesses? Either we need to answer these questions or start living with double standards!
February 17th, 2007 at 8:41 am
[...] I am learning lessons about how easily can we lose focus and corrupt discussions. A discussion that can probably help in identifying technical merits and let the better one stand is being driven in the direction of company politics. And I thought only politicians used distractions to avoid discussions! As a user I really do not care whether it is Microsoft or IBM. I do care about what standard do I have to use to make my document accessible by others. Since ODF existed before Open XML I would like to question the Open XML developers if they could have adopted ODF itself? If they had problems with it would it have been possible to better it instead of reinventing a whole new standard? I do not care much about the effort you have spent, but I do worry that in spite of supporting a standard there is no guarantee that the recipient of my documents might not be able to work with them. Why the double standards? [...]
April 22nd, 2007 at 8:13 pm
[...] guarantee of interoperability, which eliminates restriction of using a specific tools. Existence of double standards will not be able to guarantee [...]
August 25th, 2007 at 2:52 am
[...] OOXML. The people and companies behind ODF are already opposing it. I personally think, two standards for the same purpose hurt. They do not hurt companies and businesses, but they hurt the common man. [...]
September 16th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
[...] me crib for lack of standards or sometimes more of them, a friend, who is not a software professional, asked me to justify my anguish. I started with the [...]
September 27th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
[...] the long forgotten, simple yet versatile format – the text file. While we have been fighting over standardization of office documents, we have neglected it enough to make our lives difficult by hovering around resource-hogging [...]