Microsoft makes last-gasp OOXML push

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Weeks away from a crucial International Organization for Standardization vote in Geneva on the ratification of Microsoft's proposed Office Open XML standard, the software giant is engaged in a last-ditch campaign to convince the wider industry that its endeavors are in the best interests of users.

After its first attempt to have Office Open XML (OOXML) approved as an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard failed in September, the software giant has spared no expense to ensure that it succeeds at the ballot resolution meeting in February. Microsoft has hosted four conference calls a week with national standards bodies, and recently invited international press to a conference close to its Redmond, Wash., headquarters to set the record straight on the OOXML issue.

A stream of Microsoft executives consecutively took to the floor at the press conference to defend the company against its growing army of critics.

Several themes were reiterated.

The first was debunking the notion that there is no need for a second XML standard in the market. Advocates of the OpenDocument Format (ODF), an ISO-approved open standard XML file format developed by a consortium led by IBM and Sun Microsystems, have argued that a second standard is "redundant."

Microsoft said that there is nothing wrong with having multiple file formats. The company cannot adopt ODF in its own Office suite, it said, because it cannot migrate the legacy of billions of documents in older Microsoft formats onto it. But it does allow users to export their file in ODF format.

"Any investment we make in the future of information work has to take into account what has been done in the past," said Microsoft Office project manager Gray Knowlton. "It's very important when migrating to open file formats that we take older documents into account."

"ODF was designed to omit the functionality of existing documents," Knowlton said. "We, on the other hand, cannot start from scratch. Our customers would never accept that."

Pitching OOXML virtues
It was also argued, on several fronts, that OOXML is a superior standard to ODF.

"Many customers tell us that ODF doesn't meet their needs," said Tom Robertson, general manager of interoperability and standards at Microsoft. "It doesn't provide backwards-compatibility, nor does it reflect the rich feature set of Office 2007."

Present at the briefing was Burton Group research director Peter O'Kelly, who, in the week prior, had authored a controversial report that recommended enterprise users adopt OOXML in preference to ODF.

O'Kelly described ODF as "simplistic," while OOXML was described as "more powerful and expressive."

The Microsoft alternative, O'Kelly said, scores points for its ability to incorporate custom schemas, its wider variety of table options and its spreadsheet formula language.

"It is not that there is anything wrong with OpenOffice.org, it's just that, in large organizations, the types of things you are working with are more akin to what (Microsoft) Office can handle," O'Kelly said. "ODF is a fine open-source offering and it's a capable product but, put it side by side with the things you can do with Office 2007, and it's a very different user experience. There are things you might take for granted within Office that simply aren't there."

O'Kelly said he was "unpleasantly surprised" at the vitriol directed at his research organization since he backed Microsoft's argument.

"This is not a Microsoft-sponsored report," O'Kelly said. "We don't do any sponsored writing at all--no white papers."

Further, he said that it was "coincidental" that the report was released three working days before Microsoft's press briefing and only a few weeks away from the crucial vote.

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