A lot of people (myself included) have been closely following OOXML’s progress to becoming an international standard and speculating on its chances of success. I suspect, however, that standardization will not decide OOXML’s death or life, instead the decision will already be clear by the time the ISO finally gets around to voting on it again.

This post makes a very good point about the state of OOXML. As it says, it is simply not safe to save your files in the OOXML format, since it is still being changed and has not yet been adopted (officially or unofficially.) Right now, there is no good reason to save documents in the OOXML format and unless this somehow dramatically changes in the next months, OOXML will already be on the way to death by the time it has another chance at becoming a standard. In short, the OOXML war, much like the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD war, will eventually come down to how many people use each format, not which format becomes the standard. In this respect, OOXML is fighting an uphill battle. Formats already exist that people are (for the most part) happy with, so why should anyone go to the effort of converting everything into OOXML?

For me, the only remaining question is could standardization create a significant boost to OOXML’s adoption to pull it back from death? It is hard to say what the answer to this question is. If it did make a significant enough impact, it would be through governments, whose documents must remain accessible for tens or hundreds of years. Only time will tell the answer to this question, if time does ever tell the answer. It is quite possible OOXML will not receive ISO standardization anyway.

It may be too early to say if OOXML will be adopted or not, but I think it is fair to say that international standards will only be a small part of the picture.

For anyone not familiar with the OOXML standardization process that has been going on, OOXML is Microsoft’s new office document format and the ISO is the International Standards Organization. Previous, OOXML was rejected by the ISO, but it will be voted on again in the future.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 11:18 pm and is filed under Open Standards, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.