News sources are starting to leak the news that Microsoft is about to announce support for Open Document Format (ODF) in MS-Office 2007, and will participate in the ongoing development of ODF through OASIS, the industry body for XML standards. This fairly arcane announcement has the potential to revolutionise the way we use office documents – the spreadsheets, word processing documents, presentations etc that are churned out in their billions every day.

Traditionally, office software users put a price on their assets by counting up the number of MS-Office licences they had bought. Then people began to realise their real investment – their intellectual property – was in the documents they had created with the software. But the only way they could access their intellectual property was by buying software licences from a monopoly vendor – Microsoft. This didn’t feel right?

In response to this, the industry standards body OASIS started to draft an open standard for office documents that any software developer could use. Despite being a member of OASIS, Microsoft ignored this activity, even when the resulting Open Document Format (ODF) was adopted by ISO – the highest level of standards.

However, market pressures – especially from public administrations – continued to demand the standard. Microsoft responded in predictable fashion by trying to create its own rival standard, OOXML, and used its considerable influence to get this adopted by ISO. This commercial pressure to adopt a hasty and ill-conceived private standard has nearly broken the international standards process.

However, the pressure for ODF has continued to grow. There was a certain inevitability that Microsoft would be forced to bow to market pressures and announce its acceptance of ODF. However, Microsoft’s traditional approach to standards has been characterised as Embrace, Extend, Extinguish – i.e. attempt to claim ownership and take control of a standard through abuse of its near monopoly position.

Proponents of ODF need to defend against this by setting up independent testing for software conformance with the standard. The testing needs to be accessible not just to the Suns and IBMs of this world – but also the KOffices.

While proponents of ODF are celebrating that a victory has been won, it is more likely that the real battle is only just beginning.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 10:12 pm and is filed under OpenDocument, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.