A cathedral of formats or a castle of cards?
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| ECMA has strong ties with Microsoft, and the very philosophy of the
| ECMA is to acknowledge existing technologies and call them a
| standard. This view is quite opposed to the one of the OASIS
| consortium, because the consortium does try to design
| specifications based on consensus, plausible engineering
| decisions and not on the fait accompli.
|
| [...]
|
| Microsoft's Open XML file format may perhaps be one day an OSI
| standard (who knows, so many things are OSI certified, one day
| Microsoft may be able to certify its own business practices as
| the ISO standard for monopolistic position and anti-competitive
| behaviour) but it will never be an open standard.
|
| [...]
|
| By writing 6000 pages, something else strikes many, including myself:
| no human can implement that. In fact, nobody aside Microsoft will be
| able to rightly implement it because Microsoft is the only one can
| deal with the previously existing formats. For these 6000 pages are
| thousands of man/years of confusion, users' lock-in, con-formating
| of data, IP and jealously kept trade secrets. And you would expect
| that anybody might come up with something that works? Apple, by
| the way, will not. Because Microsoft Office for Mac will not be
| able to use Open XML for some years, as I have learned. So good
| for the great open file format of Microsoft. 6000 pages cannot
| be a standard. It is FUD. It is a scandal, and a digital wart
| in the industry. 6000 pages cannot be reputed conformant by
| anybody else than their author. And their author is Microsoft.
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http://www.libervis.com/blogs/5/charles/a_cathedral_of_formats_or_a_castle_of_cards
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