I think this article that I found in the Once More unto the Breach blog takes a very interesting view on the standards’ war between OpenDocument Format and Microsoft’s OpenXML format and their trips through the ISO standards process.
Patents and standards are orthogonal, but one can always use their combined influence in the sales pitch for the adoption of one format or the other (of course, I believe it should be used for pushing the adoption of ODF :)
Standards bodies are not organizations that should tell you that you can/should only use this or that (non)commercial implementation for your business; a standards body tells *vendors* that to be able to interact with each other’s products through the use of a standard interface or standard data format, they need to implement said interface or data format in this or that particular way. When a vendor is developing a product that they want to use to compete with X software, and X software implements Y standard for data, then the vendor’s new product can compete in aspects like quality and security while making sure both programs are interchangeable by implementing the Y data standard.
In this case, if both OO.o and MSOffice were to use the ODF standard as their data format, then they’d be able to open files produced with the other office program, and the competition wouldn’t be about the fact that you can or can’t open the files, but about stability, features, security and other things that are actually important.
Give Stephe’s article a read, it’s well worth it…it opened a new view about the whole ISO thing for me, it may do the same for you.
Technorati Tags: odf, microsoft, openxml, iso standards
Tags: Thoughts
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