Apparently Microsoft has issued an open letter which blames IBM for opposing Open XML as a standard. For the uninitiated, OpenDocument Format (ODF) was led by the OpenOffice project which has considerable contributions from IBM and Open XML comes out of Office 2007 by Microsoft.
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?
If the answer is on the lines of corporate rivalry or licenses or trying to showoff, I thought standards were all about users. They existed to make life easy for the users. Existence of these two standards for the same purpose is going to be be a lot of trouble, in spite of translators. Or is it going to be about business models? Probably! And I thought software was being developed for users.
