• What?
• Yes... you heard me.
• Are you sure?
• Yeah.
• No way... how?

That conversation made no sense. OOXML doesn't, by the way. I used to study a lot about MS, since the place where I studied in Chile had a lot to do with them, but I did never agree with their technologies.

Perhaps OOXML is a good idea... In fact, I tested it for more than a month, at the point that nobody noticed I gave a talk using the .pptx format instead of OpenDocument Presentations. I really don't care, since I don't have to share a lot of documentation, and probably PDF is right for documentation sharing.

What then? The way it became a standard. First, the name... Then, the rest. Some things I want to make clear:

The name is Office Open XML.

• Some employees at Microsoft used the "OpenOffice XML" to refer to its standard, making confusion about OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office.
• XML is not closed nor proprietary technology. So how can OpenXML be more open to the industry?

So, they sent someone called Michael Rowe to the court, because his web page "www.mikerowesoft.com" could make confusion... and they use the same tricks then?

They didn't do a new XMLish document

What is on the more than 6000 pages of the standard description is a serie of methods to process an XML in a different way. It's not a new kind of XML, so why they promote it as XML?.

So, they didn't reinvent the wheel (thankfully!). They tried to make XML (an open standard) proprietary in a different way. They wanted to have their names on XML adoption.

I know Microsoft is trying to make efforts on interoperability; why didn't they take the Open Document Format, added the stuff they wanted and started to use something that was already a standard?

They used the fast track

Have you ever tried to read 100 pages starting a friday to finish on sunday night, to go to exams at monday in the morning? If you could, congratulations!, me too, and I don't know very much people who can do it.

I don't think a technological standard which has 6000 pages or more can be discussed in three months; It's very hard to take notes, to comment what's OK and what's not and to create a consensus.

There is already a standard

The web developers probably remember the 1.0 version of RSS. It lacks many features and had many problems solved with RDF, which is basically the same but backwards-incompatible. Someone made Atom to unify the formats RSS and RDF.

The main problem is that when you do that, you don't have one unified standard from two: you have THREE standards. Same thing will probably happen here, and next time I send my CV, I will probably send it in doc, docx, odt, pdf, rtf and LaTeX; something like the Babel Tower will probably happen again...

Many users are happy with Office 2003, or even Office 97 (since they just require basic formatting for their documents), but the more demanding environment require Office 2007.

There is a new format probably not very much people uses, but how did Office 97 enter the market? Microsoft added some features like WordArt that didn't existed in previous versions of Office, so people who had Office 95 could not open the brand new Office 97 documents.

What is the problem? Ok, I can get Office 97 in two ways: One is buying it (it's really expensive here) and another is by committing piracy. Here in Chile, if you are a natural person, you can pirate something without legal problems, but what about enterprises? and I'm not talking about big ones, but small and middle-sized ones, which probably can't get or aren't interested in new technologies.

So the next time you receive a document, it will be probably a Microsoft OOXML format. Don't worry if you don't know it, because it's now an ISO standard... A standard that was proven to be a quick and dirty way to earn money, no matter if it's really useful or not.

What else can we expect from MS?