Spinning out of control.
I’ve just been on the phone with a journalist. He disagreed when I said that a differentiator for OpenXML over ODF was the care being taken to ensure OpenXML will be able to faithfully represent the hundreds of millions, if not billions of existing documents saved in Microsoft Office’s binary formats. He pointed me to the
OpenDocument press release on
ISO's web site. I notice that it states (my emphasis):-
Billions of existing office documents will be able to be converted to the XML standard format with no loss of data, formatting, properties, or capabilities. This will facilitate document contents access, search, use, integration and development in new and innovative ways.
I wonder which “billions of existing office documents” can it be referring to? Of course they're documents saved in Microsoft's Office binary file formats (since they and PDF are the only formats that have been used for anything like such a number of documents). The problem is this claim is totally untrue. ODF cannot even approximate the claimed fidelity for even a fraction of these documents.
I've
posted previously on the politics behind ODF's standardisation, and I am planning to blog more soon about how the commercial interests that are promoting ODF continue to use politics behind the scenes against their own customers' interests. It's sad to see this kind of untruthful spin and manipulation happening. It is damaging the credibility of OASIS and its technical Committees, and ultimately ISO's too.