One of the latest most talked about “wars” in the software world is the office document formats war. Both formats are XML based, and both are used to describe the miscellaneous office documents like Word and Excel documents. The OpenDocument format was developed by a committee and is already an ISO standard. OOXML, on the other hand, was developed by Microsoft and isn’t yet an ISO standard. Microsoft has been pushing and lobbying OOXML (Open Office XML) very hard to become an ISO standard.
However, from a technical point of view, OOXML is barely manageable. The format contains in it the legacy of all Microsoft Office’s previous versions and is impossible to edit correctly by external tools despite the fact that it is so-called “open”. Stéphane Rodriguez wrote 10 technical points why OOXML is defective by design. In one of the points, Rodriguez quotes one of Bill Gates’ memos that was exposed because of a legal case:
From: Bill Gates
Sent: Saturday, December 5 1998
To: Bob Muglia, Jon DeVann, Steven SinofskySubject : Office rendering
One thing we have got to change in our strategy – allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of
the most destructive things we could do to the company.We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.
Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destroy Windows.
I would be glad to explain at a greater length.
Likewise this love of DAV in Office/Exchange is a huge problem. I would also like to make sure people understand this as well.
While making Office documents work only in Internet Explorer is a legal move by Microsoft (and I’m not even sure about that), obviously it’s an anti-consumer move that locks non-IE users out of the ability to view some documents online. Therefore there’s no surprise that Microsoft tries to appear to have an open document standard while in practice creating another proprietary format that can only be correctly used in Microsoft Office.