Alex Brown: "The entire OOXML project is now surely heading for failure"

Okay.....I am not a person involved in the standards codes, just a person who looked on from the sidelines. But when all the dust was being raised at the time when Microsoft forced OOXML through ISO (and tarnished that organisation horrifically by its actions over votes and political string pulling) I thought then that Microsoft had only one aim: to have an accepted competing standard against ODF ~ nothing else. Microsoft didn't really give a tinker's curse whether OOXML worked or not, only that it was a "standard", so that a perceived advantage for OpenOffice was removed.

Sure, my take may be simplistic and you can call me "Mr Cynical" if you like, but Andy's article on Alex' report seems to be confirming my original concept: once Microsoft had achieved its goal of being able to "say" it had a competing standard, the game was over as far as they were concerned. In my books Microsoft has made an utter mockery of ISO, irretrievably tarnished their reputation to the point where I have little respect for ISO standards, and finally says little for Alex; he, after all, was the boy who permitted the voting fiasco to occur. Amazing how the chickens have come home to roost, not that I think anything will change. And again, says nothing for the ISO process and its reputation. My belief is that the only way ahead would be to remove OOXML as an ISO standard, but I cannot see ISO taking such an open, honest and fair course. Sad.

Not all is lost. Even if an organisation would adopt OOXML as one if it's file formats because it went through ISO, you can quite easily point out that MS-Office does not support the ISO version of OOXML. I bet OpenOffice.prg has better OOXML support then MS-Office does ;-)

@ Sander_Marechal............with respect to the OOXML support in OpenOffice, would you believe I had never looked ? :-) . I am currently running OO ver 3.2.0, so I loaded a document followed by "Save As"........and found that in the options I can save it in Word 2003 as ".xml". Now I have NO idea if this is OOXML or not, but if it is, I would not be at all surprised to find that what you have said is correct. Given Andy's article however, one suspects OOXML is a dying format.....or even dead right now as far as Redmond is concerned. They got what they wanted after all......why waste more time, effort and money ?

Dang, I gave Bernie Madoff a couple grand last week, and now it appears I'm not going to get it back. Maybe I should have taken his past actions into account when he asked me for a loan.

> Sure, my take may be simplistic and you can call me "Mr Cynical" if you like,

I'd say your analysis is correct.

Ridcully,

Give it up, you will never be admitted to curmudgeonhood being so introspective about your ruminations. That alone.labels you as a rational thinker. You are not even ready to apply for novice status.

Remember, above be certain, show no visible doubts and above all make it ridiculous. Got it? Otherwise get a different alias and apply for a teaching/research position at a local university.

YBT

Just for TxtEdMacs............. :-D . Thanks. You must have read my earlier exchange with dinotrac on another item........No fair !!! 'Sides, even curmudgeons are allowed a little sense on their off-days. [Just for the record, I am unfamiliar with the expression "YBT"........give please.]

Ridcully,

Ok, just for you. YBT = a.k.a. "Your Buddy Txt."

As always,

YBT