Let’s be clear: The Apache Software Foundation does NOT support OOXML.

OK, I’ll admit that nobody has claimed otherwise. Yet.

But in these days and age you are never too prudent. It wouldn’t surprise me to see this or other similar fancy claim being published eventually.

Indeed, in its desperate and last minute attempts to convince National Bodies around the world that OOXML is happening anyway so they might as well support it as an ISO standard, Microsoft is eager to claim support by as many companies and organizations as possible.

As evidence, in its latest OOXML propaganda open letter Microsoft lists IBM among other companies as having “already adopted (or announced adoption of) Open XML in their products”. This, despite a clear explanation of the contrary by Rob Weir, published two months ago! Does anyone believe they haven’t seen it or heard about this? I sure don’t. And if there was any room for misunderstanding Bob Sutor’s statement filled that in.

A colleague in a foreign country even reported that in a National Body meeting he had been confronted by a representative from Microsoft who was trying to silence him via intimidation and insistence that IBM supported OOXML contrary to what he was saying.

Microsoft’s oversight of IBM’s denials is clearly not accidental. It is part of a well crafted and continuous disingenuous plan to convince NBs at all cost. There is already so much evidence of Microsoft going far beyond what most would consider normal lobbying behavior it is sickening. For one, I’m not ready to forget the case of the NGOs in India. Talk about dirty practices.

But what really is at the bottom of Microsoft’s claims is that basically any software that handles XML supports OOXML. While technically this is true to a certain degree, such a bold claim without any further qualification is pure misinformation. Obviously, one of the advantages of using XML is to make your format, whatever it is, easier to handle, it’s one of the fundamental benefits of using XML. But as I previously touched on in my entry on XML vs Open, there is a big difference between being able to handle XML files at the XML level and truly supporting the particular format at hand.

Supporting OOXML. cannot be merely declared on the sole basis that a software can read OOXML files, or store OOXML files. If that were the case, then any XML parser could be said to support OOXML and the Apache Software Foundation could be said to support OOXML because its XML parser, Xerces, can read OOXML files (one would actually have to unzip them first but it’s not like Microsoft would stop at that kind of detail). But it takes much more than that to really support OOXML.

One has to understand the actual structure beyond the XML representation and the semantic associated to each and every piece of data found in an OOXML file. That’s what the 6000+ pages of the specification are supposed to define, unfortunately they do that extremely poorly.

The good news is that I don’t think Microsoft is fooling that many people. Based on my own observation of Microsoft representatives and the way they talk to people they seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that they appear as if they think the people they are talking to are too stupid to see through their tired arguments. I’ve got news for them: people aren’t that stupid. Thankfully. And I’m hopeful the results at the end of the month will make that clear.

The other good news is that whether OOXML gets approved or not, I believe Microsoft will pay a high price for all of its mischief and its image will come out of this badly damaged, something they can only blame themselves for.

In the meanwhile, don’t take for granted any claims of support for OOXML from Microsoft. The fact that Microsoft claims IBM has adopted OOXML can only make one wonder about all the other companies they list…

How many bad standards does one need in a given domain? Zero.

A lot of the debate around OOXML has focused on whether it is good to have competing standards or not. The debate started from the simple fact that Microsoft decided to create its own standard for office applications rather than adopt the established ISO standard for office applications: ODF.

While there is clearly a need for evolution and there are times when it makes sense to introduce a new standard to replace an old one there is no doubt in my mind that in general there is much more to lose from having multiple standards rather than a single one than there is to gain.

Interestingly enough I should point out that Microsoft defends that very point at times. In the case of XML for instance, when the W3C introduced XML 1.1 to address some internationalization limitations in XML 1.0, something important to many non-western countries, Microsoft voted against XML 1.1 arguing that the introduction of a new version of XML would be too disruptive!

Yet the tactic of introducing a competing standard to disrupt the status quo is common practice for the Redmond company. For instance, in the Web services management area, an area not so visible to the public as office applications but still very important to the IT industry, they did the same. Microsoft consistently refused to join the ongoing industry effort around Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) at OASIS for years. They kept claiming that they had no interest in this topic. Yet, in 2005. after WSDM became an OASIS standard supported by a large segment of the industry mind you, Microsoft introduced their own technology named WS-Management, with support from some well chosen partners. Three years later the industry is still trying to figure out what to do with the mess they thus created.

But all this debate around multiple standards is somewhat of a distraction from the real issue at hand. In the end what is really being asked to National Bodies (NB) around the world isn’t to choose between ODF and OOXML, or to choose between ODF alone and ODF and OOXML. The question that NBs are asked to answer is whether OOXML deserves to become an ISO standard in its own right.

The reality is that if the OOXML specification wasn’t of such a poor quality it most certainly would have had a much easier ride through the Fast Track process. If all that could be argued against it was that it was too big, the IP license has gaps, and multiple standards aren’t good, this may not even have made headlines, no matter how true it is.

What is appalling about OOXML is that it is fundamentally a VERY BAD specification and I just can’t understand what process would allow this garbage to even be presented as an ISO standard up for vote. OOXML is from a technical point of view just terrible. All I’ve seen from it and all I’ve read about it only confirms this. And I have yet to meet any technical person arguing in all honesty that OOXML is a good specification. The latest facts reported by Rob Weir speak for themselves.

So, again, the real question isn’t so much whether the world would benefit from having several competing standards or not. The real question is how many bad standards do we need? And the answer is zero.

OOXML must be voted down simply because it is a bad standard.