Microsoft Tries For ECMA Open XML Standard
Poster: Aron Schatz
Posted on December 7, 2006 at 2:22:07 PM
ECMA Int will likely vote to approve Open XML as a standard on Thursday. Open XML is redundant due to OpenDoc being an ISO approved standard. While it is nice that Microsoft finally has an open standard, it is too little too late.
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These document format standards matter a great deal financially, because they can influence which software products companies choose to buy. Microsoft Office Open XML is the default document format for its Office 2007 suite, which was recently released to businesses and is set for consumer availability on January 30. Alternative OpenDocument is the default for the open-source suite OpenOffice.org and the preference of Microsoft rivals IBM, Novell and Sun Microsystems. The emergence of dueling standards has ratcheted up the competition in Microsoft's home turf--a situation that should benefit end users who care about accessing documents in the future, said Andrew Updegrove, an attorney at Gesmer Updegrove and author of a blog that follows international standards.