Oliver Bell’s Weblog

It is almost 2am in Singapore, I’m tired, a little jet-lagged and desperately in need of sleep. Of course my week in Europe last week is still lingering and I’m wide awake at the worst possible time.

Trying to find something interesting to do I have been reading various blogs. Stephen McGibbon has a post that I thought would be worth sharing, he is pointing to a further text by Patrick Durusau.

Patrick is the the editor of the ISO/IEC 26300 (ODF) and the OASIS 1.2 (ODF) specification, and is now recommending approval of DIS 29500 as an ISO standard.

Patrick’s article “On being heard” explains this change in his position:-

On The Importance Of Being Heard
As a non-attendee to the BRM on DIS 29500, I have been trying to sort out fact from fiction in the highly imaginative accounts of the meeting. I have been able to isolate only one common point of agreement in all the published and unpublished reports that I have seen.

That point of agreement is that everyone at the table was heard. That may not seem like a lot to an Oracle or IBM, but name the last time Microsoft was listening to everyone in a public and international forum? At a table where a standard for a future product was being debated by non-Microsoft groups?

So, now that Microsoft is listening (something we should encourage), in an international and public forum, what are our options?

• Reject DIS 29500? The cost of rejection is that ordinary users, governments, smaller interests, all lose a seat at the table where the next version of the Office standard is being written.
• Approve an admittedly rough DIS 29500? That gives all of us a seat at the table for the next Office standard. Granting that I wince at parts of DIS 29500, it is hard for me to argue with that rationale.

Because approval of DIS 29500 insures an effective international and public forum whose members will be heard by Microsoft I recommend approval of DIS 29500 as an ISO standard.*

5 March 2008

Patrick Durusau

*This is a change in my prior position on DIS 29500. Different behavior has led to a different DIS 29500 and hence a different position on my part.

This is both a significant change in position for Patrick, and also a testament to how far we have come over the last year.

Regardless of where the process to standardize OpenXML ends it can’t be denied that these are exciting times for Microsoft, for our customers and for all the folks I work with…