OOXML: decision time is nigh

By Sam Varghese
Thursday, 27 March 2008 20:42

Opinion and Analysis

In a few days the fate of Microsoft's Office Open XML will be known - whether it will be accepted as a second ISO standard for documents. Two years ago, the Open Document Format was ratified as a standard.
(UPDATE, March 30 AEDT: You can keep track of the voting here or here .)

Plenty of politicking has gone on over the past month or so and it makes for some interesting reading.

Some countries have started making their stance known - the US has indicated a yes vote, while India has indicated a no. Both countries voted the same way in the first vote in September 2007.

India's "no" vote is not surprising, given that the country is now looking to its technically educated population to help keep the country's foreign exchange coffers full. The country's academic institutions - the institutes of technology, management and science - other government bodies and Microsoft rivals such as IBM, Sun and Red Hat had enough votes to outnumber the Microsoft acolytes - Wipro, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Nasscom plus Microsoft of course.

There are 22 members on the committee which voted. The comments of one member indicate that Microsoft has already started whingeing ; Venkatesh Hariharan, Red Hat's man on the panel, writes that Microsoft lodged a complaint with the government about the constitution of the committee and tried to cast aspersions on the head of the panel.

Wipro, Infosys and TCS are the three big companies that accept business process outsourcing from the American and other markets, hence their vote for Microsoft is not a surprise at all. These are companies that maintain the status quo, conservative to the core and willing to do the bidding of the piper. Nasscom represents the interests of the bigger IT companies and it probably had no choice but to fall in line.

But when it comes to the academic institutions mentioned, many of them run by the federal government, there are other considerations involved. There was a time in the 1980s when India's foreign exchange reserves were kept at acceptable levels through the remittances made by its citizens working in the Arab Gulf states. During that time, reserves were generally at a parlous level. The country's economy was closed, the currency was non-convertible.