OOXML: the propaganda war has begun

By Sam Varghese
Thursday, 17 January 2008 19:45

Opinion and Analysis

The first salvo in the document standard war of 2008 has been fired - and, predictably, it favours the Microsoft camp. A study by the Burton Group, a firm of consultants, has come down hard on the side of Microsoft Office Open XML.


(You can read the whole 37-page document here, provided you are willing to register and wait for a username and password to be sent to you).

From February 25 to 29, a meeting will be held in Geneva to answer comments which the National Standard Boards of various countries have made about OOXML and resolve outstanding issues. The vote at this meeting can effectively kill off the acceptance of OOXML as an ISO standard.

Hence, the tide of "studies" by "consultants" is only bound to increase as the month wears on and we enter February. The only reason we have not had any such "studies" so far is because the US takes a long time to recover from the excesses of the silly season.

The arguments put forward by the Burton group do not hold much water - OOXML is not anti-competitive, it will become more widespread in use (due to the widespread use of Microsoft Office), ODF is driven by anti-Microsoft sentiment more than any technical merit, etc. Sun Microsystems comes in for quite a bit of bashing.

(The technology website Ars Technica has a fairly detailed refutation of the Burton study here .)

There is no indication that the study has been paid for by Microsoft - as has been the case numerous times in the past when so-called independent studies have fortuitously turned up at convenient moments to boost the claims which Redmond makes to something in the tech space.

But then there is no clear statement by Burton that the document has been put together with funding from its own purse either.

One of the arguments put forward by the two writers of the report - that OOXML will become the more widespread format in use because it is from Microsoft - is the same as that put forward by the GNOME project to justify its decision to participate in the ECMA committee which was examining the submitted OOXML specification.

While the Burton document lists the history of ODF v OOXML and also categorises the reasons why an XML format is the next logical step away from a binary format, the criticism it levels at Sun (and hence, by extension, ODF) is political, nothing else.

(In short, it's something similar to what the GNOME foundation uses as red herrings against anyone who levels criticism at it  - personal attacks, never studied refutation of charges which are levelled. In other words, play the man, not the ball.)