Let’s celebrate Microsoft’s OOXML setback

Despite rosy spin by its PR department, Microsoft has suffered a setback in its attempt to ram OOXML through the standards process. We should all celebrate (even Microsoft people should celebrate) that there’s still some amount of credibility in organizations like the ISO.

Microsoft’s Office Open XML specification – a 6,039-page document – has been denied fast-track approval from the ISO. OOXML was rubber-stamped by Ecma, a vendor-influenced body that unfortunately is taken seriously by the ISO. Microsoft has been lobbying hard to get the ISO to approve OOXML, because increasingly national governments (and also U.S. state governments like Massachusetts) are insisting that official documents must be stored in an open standard format, not a proprietary format that only a single vendor supports.

Here’s the history: Faced with two open standard formats for documents – the Portable Document Format (PDF/A-1) and the Oasis Open Document Format (ODF) – Microsoft created OOXML, which although being XML-based, is so incredibly complex that nobody but Microsoft could ever implement it in an interoperable way. Heck, even Microsoft hasn’t been able to completely implement OOXML in anything but Microsoft Office 2007. That’s why there’s no still way to write OOXML from Office 2004 for the Mac or from previous versions of Office for Windows.

Microsoft won easy approval of OOXML from Ecma late last year, where it is designated ECMA-376. Microsoft now only needs a sign-off from ISO to have it declared an open standard. (It is currently designated as draft ISO/IEC DIS 29500.)

Microsoft could then be free to pressure governments to store their documents in OOXML (using Microsoft Office) instead of PDF/A-1 or ODF because, then, this truly proprietary format would be allowable under the letter of the law as an open standard. Thus, ISO standardization would boost Microsoft’s Office monopoly by locking out competitors.

At the preliminary vote at the ISO, many countries voted no, despite significant lobbying by Microsoft. Microsoft is spinning this as a victory, predicting success at a later vote expected in March 2008. (Read SD Times’ coverage.)

By all accounts, this has been a shady business. With the ISO, votes for approval/disapproval of a standard are cast by the national standards bodies of participating countries. The process used to determine how each country votes varies from country by country, but in many cases companies are allowed to join their nation’s standards body… and then influence their country’s ISO vote on the standard.

As reported by ZDNet UK, the Free Software Foundation is accusing Microsoft of stuffing the national ballot boxes – by encouraging its resellers and partners to join standards bodies to vote for OOXML. The story says, “The attempt to influence the Swedish vote was publicised by the open-source community when a leaked memo emerged that gave the impression that not only had Microsoft asked partners to influence the vote but had also offered to pay them to do so.”

According to ZDNet UK, Microsoft has admitted that the memo was genuine – but insists that it was the action of a rogue employee, and goes against company policy.

Even giving Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here, we should all be happy that the ISO members have stood firm. Official standards approval should only be given to specifications that are truly open – and for whom passage of the standard is in the public interest. In the case of OOXML, we’re at the brink of having a formal technology standard that is not open, and which isn’t in the public interest. The only entities that will benefit from ISO approval of OOXML are Microsoft and its partners.

If OOXML passes in March 2008 (and I’m worried that it will pass), it will set a precedent for ISO becoming just like Ecma: an organization that helps companies gain competitive advantage by manipulating the standards process. This can work against any company; while it works for Microsoft with OOXML, it can work against Microsoft in the future. There are plenty of big companies with deep pockets who might seek to subvert the standards process.

I hope that ISO firmly rejects OOXML next time around… and further, I urge it to tighten up its rules (such as to deny fast-track approval processes to specifications passed up by vendor groups like Ecma) to prevent anything like this from happening again.