Microsoft announced today the intention to submit the Office Open XML file formats for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to the European standards body ECMA International. This follows an earlier announcement that the next version of Office will natively support PDF.
Robert Scoble interviewed Jean Paoli, co-inventor of XML, who now works for Microsoft. Here is an excerpt of that interview:
Q: Just what did we announce today?
Jean Paoli: Today is an incredible day that I have been waiting for over many years: we are offering the Office XML file format technology behind billions of documents to customers and the industry as an international standard. Together with Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, the British Library, Essilor, Intel, NextPage, StatOil and Toshiba, we are co-sponsoring the submission to Ecma, the international standards body, of the Microsoft Office Open XML document formats. We will work together to standardize the formats for approval as an Ecma standard. Our intention is also to submit the result of the Ecma work to ISO for approval as an international standard. This is our press release and a few other documents we published on the subject (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ — will be up soon )
Q: Are these formats really open?
Jean Paoli: Yes, and the Standardization process will make this even more clear as we work with the committee members. Ecma International is a very respected organization and is extremely serious about openness in the standards they create and support. The technical committee that will oversee it under Ecma International is open to anyone who is an Ecma member. By working with participating companies like Apple , Barclays Capital, BP, the British Library, Essilor, Intel, NextPage, StatOil and Toshiba and other Ecma members who would want to participate, we hope to create an open standard that will enable customers, technology providers and developers around the globe to work with the Office Open XML formats without barriers, with or without Microsoft products.
Brian Jones who works in the Office group provided details of the announcement in his blog. And ZDnet has a story on the announcement "Microsoft to standardize Office formats"
This is a major step for Microsoft. Opening Office documents to PDF and Open XML creates an open environment for competitors, partners, and users. This is a good thing. Moves like this usually stimulate innovation in new and existing products.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and some European cities have put pressure on Microsoft to open up the file formats, or adopt "open" standard formats. Microsoft has now done both by adopting native support of PDF, and submitting Office Open XML to standards committees.
This coupled with today's announcement of SSE Simple Sharing Extensions to RSS, which will be open and available under the Creative Commons license, is a major leap forward for open standards. Great news!
I repeat my comment from my blog, "Simple and Open" Always Wins.
http://itscout.blogspot.com/2005/11/simple-and-open-always-wins.html
"Microsoft should simply look at what it tried to do with Passport, and then do the exact opposite."
Posted by: Jeff Tash | November 22, 2005 at 12:06 AM