1. Amiens, France, Summer 2007 Office Format Wars a mid-term survey

2. Jean-Marie Gouarné CTO, Genicorp S.A. http://www.genicorp.fr Partner, Ars Aperta http://www.arsaperta.com/en Personal links http://search.cpan.org/dist/OpenOffice-OODoc http://jean.marie.gouarne.online.fr jean.marie.gouarne[at]online.fr

3. "The usual trouble with politics is that the people the process is supposed to defend are usually the ones to suffer most at the hands of those manipulating the political process. It looks as though this is the case in the arm-wrestling that is still going on between Microsoft and IBM and the standardization of Open XML and Open Document Format." Martin Banks, "On the Office format wars", 20 Apr 2007 http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/04/20/openxml-odf

4. historical background 1985: the Open Document Architecture (ODA), a good idea, an inappropriate design and an exemplary failure 1990-now: the network effect without the standard, as a way to user lock-in office formats: a record of user lock-in

5. historical background cont'd 1996: XML introduced 2000: the OpenOffice.org project 2000: some XML quietly appears in MS-Office products

6. ODF milestones 2001:OpenOffice.org, 1 st fully XML-based, fully specified office format, is published 2002/5: the 1 st OpenOffice.org operational software suite is released 2002/11: OASIS OpenOffice XML TC 2004/5: the "Valoris Report"; EU urges on the standardization

7. ODF milestones cont'd 2004/10: the OpenOffice.org format becomes the Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) 2005/5: ODF becomes an OASIS standard 2005/8: the office format war begins in Massachusetts

8. ODF milestones cont'd 2005/10: ODF is submitted to ISO 2006: significant moves to ODF are announced in a few large organizations

9. ODF milestones cont'd 2006/5: ODF 1.0 passes the ISO DIS ballot and becomes ISO/IEC 26300:2006 2006/10: ODF 1.1 approved as the current ODF OASIS standard 2006-2007: ODF 1.2 in progress

10. Open XML milestones 1999-2000: XML-based features appear in MS-Office 2000, through the Vector Markup Language (VML), SpreadsheetML (XML for Excel), smart tags, metadata representation and HTML 2002-2003: WordprocessingML (XML for Word) appears in MS-Office

11. Open XML milestones cont'd 2003/9: free licensing and public availability of Office 2003 XML schemas are announced 2005/11: the Office 2003 XML specs (with improvements) become the Office Open XML format; the format is submitted to ECMA (TC45)

12. Open XML milestones cont'd 2006/12: MS-Office 2007 begins to ship 2006/12: Open XML is approved as ECMA 376 (one vote against: IBM) 2006/12: Open XML is submitted to ISO 2007/4-2007/9: ISO "fast track" ballot in progress

13. the basic issues we got a standard; why a new one ? OpenDocument vs. Open XML: main design choices what should be a standard ? standardization and political willingness

14. the case for a dual standardization "the Open XML target is not the same as the ODF one" "multiple standards increase the users' freedom of choice" "the functional overlap is less significant than the functional differences" discussion

15. basic design choices ODF is document-centric ODF is designed, before all, to store the static content and layout of any kind of office document ODF is not connected to legacy formats

16. basic design choices cont'd " OpenXML was designed from the start to be capable of faithfully representing the pre- existing corpus of word-processing documents, presentations, and spreadsheets that are encoded in binary formats defined by Microsoft Corporation" Office Open XML Overview ECMA International, Dec. 2006

17. basic design choices cont'd Open XML includes custom business logic in the standard, ODF doesn't (Spreadsheet formulae are, maybe, to be included some day, but not Custom XML)

18. unofficial issues the design choices of Open XML directly reflect the basic architecture of the MS-Office suite, so MS can't become ODF-compliant overnight the basic architecture of the OOo software is not tightly linked with I/O issues and file formats

19. unofficial issues the "compatibility" with a lot of different legacy formats drives to many inconsistencies in the Open XML spec while the mostly used features of a typical office document can be represented in either ODF or Open XML, direct conversions are tricky, due to semantic divergences

20. but why a fully new standard ? an XML-tagged version of the legacy Microsoft Office formats is useful, but such an approach is probably not the best foundation for a standard improving ODF should be better for the users than competing with it

21. but why an fully new standard ? MS/ECMA assumption: ODF is poorer than Open XML and it's impossible, for design reasons, to fill the functional gap my question: show us the list, be technical, please !

22. standardization and political willingness the core MS's business it at stake, so MS will use all its available political firepower to block any large- scale ODF adoption project the stake is much less important for the other vendors so, the political pressure is not balanced

23. standardization and political willingness the decision makers are not technically aware IT decision makers, such as CIOs, are not really allowed to put their own future at risk for long term, strategic concerns

24. conclusion if you really need freedom and openness, require ISO/IEC 26300 instead of "any ISO standard" a standard doesn't make the market "many standards" is a politically correct synonym of "no standard"