[Wylug-discuss] MS Office Open XML ISO standard fast track

[Jim Jackson]

[I held off from making these comments until after the friday deadline, so
I didn't put anyone off making comments to BSI. And it goes without saying
that I'm as appalled by this whole move as everyone else. But...]


OK let me play devil's advocate here a little.

Might not a crap, unimplementable, ISO standard be a good thing?

   - several companies will be (initially) keen to implement product
     based on it, and many more people will actually realise how
     bad the mess is. Interoperability, even to the standard will fail.
     It will be buggy, quirky, and a nightmare. Long term it will drive
     people to more sane solutions/standards.

   - it will actually lock in Microsoft to a mess that could ultimately
     be very damaging. Either that or they will will have to drop all
     pretense at being standards based and do there own thing anyway, and
     try and shrug off the ensuing damaging flack as people feel cheated.

What's so good about being a standard anyway?

There are lots of standards - there are lot's of ISO standards.

There is a whole raft of networking ones for ISO standard networking, that
in the early 90's were going to take over the world. Yeah, the world uses
an IEEE standard for lans (Ethernet) and IETF standards for networking
(TCP/IP). Why? because the ISO standards were long & complicated, while
the competition was pretty simple and worked. Remember the wonderfully
complicated and difficult X400 email standard? Lost out to something
simpler.

OK. So the above examples failed against an incumbant, and really didn't
have serious anal-aggressive pushing by the world's biggest software
company. But in the 80's, the world's biggest computer company (IBM) were
heavily pushing a proprietary solution (with, I think, patent
encumberances) against an "open" solution. They managed to get their
proprietary solution standardised - and it still lost out. This was the
whole Token Ring versus Ethernet stuff. Again Token Ring was the more
complicated of the two.

So, other than gut reaction hatred of the big bully in the playground
throwing his weight around, should we be too worried if the fast tracking
does go ahead?

cheers
Jim