The Indian govt. has finally decided to vote against Microsoft’s OOXML proposal and will forward their final decision to ISO.
The 21-member technical committee received huge number of calls from both the camps, i.e. OOXML and ODF supporters.
The Microsoft camp complained that when ODF was being standardised by ISO, they did not oppose it and now the ODF camp refused to return the favour. ODF supporters said they would have no problems with OOXML if all the 200 technical issues were taken care of. [ET]
The ODF standard has been widely accepted by academia and corporates like Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, Sun and of course, Google.
The Indian companies that supported Microsoft were Infosys, HCL, Skelta, Sonata and CSI (any idea why? Was it ignorance or..?)
MS is gathering momentum to get as much countries to support OOXML, as the deadline (to submit the same to ISO) is September 2nd.
Of all the 123 countries that will participate in the voting process, Canada, Czech Republic, Iran, Japan, Libya, Cuba, New Zealand, UK will oppose the deal while US, Belgium, Finland, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Singapore, Korea, France and Australia are likely to abstain from voting.
Well, it is a business decision from the IT companies, not a technical decision. None of the India IT companies have the capability and competence to evaluate a standard on its technical merits.
IMHO, they should not have been part of the committee. In this case the key driver was just to maintain a good relationship with Microsoft.
Obviously, the Indian IT service providers have no clue on the tech side and these spineless companies will support MS.
Skelta, one of the cos. that supported MS’s OOXML just announced their BPM framework for MS’s SharePoint.
Why are these stupid companies even part of the process?
I am amazed to see the comments that Indian companies are spine less. The standards in the market cannot be limited as nothing is so sacroscant that there cannot be anything better than that. It is actualy good to have standard choices for the consumer and the better one will eventualy evolve as market leader.
The business environment today is collabrative and most of the companies use office suite of products . The open office XML would have given them an oppurtunity to leverage on their existing application to integrate with the business user . The business user uses mostly office suite to convey their business concept and process decision.
I belive the myopic vision of people in segregating every MS offering as bad has come as mental block in not suppporting the OOXML.
The most amazing fact is that instead of debating on OOXML based on its usefulness the debate often turns outr to be MS Vs. others.
The Indian companies supporting OOXML have done so in well thought of manner. Infosys is a services company and supports OOXML onmerits of it and not on the basis of who is offering standards? Skleta has BPM framework on .NET platform since last five years.HCL ,Sonata all this companies have taken well thought of decision of supporting OOXML for user cause.
I strongly advocate that we should debate on usefullness of OOXML first and then blame the market leaders in respective space of ignornace.
@Abhishek:
The basic qn is if Industry bodies want a seamless collaboration – OOXML is probably not suited (as opposed to ODF).
Regd your statement –
“The business environment today is collabrative and most of the companies use office suite of products..The open office XML would have given them an oppurtunity to leverage on their existing application to integrate with the business user . The business user uses mostly office suite to convey their business concept and process decision….” –
What about other office products? Why support only office (and not say Open Office?)
And if the decision to support OOXML is entirely based on service providers’ business users, isn’t that a selfish behavior? Is BUSINESS the only criteria to support OOXML?
If Infosys or others want to support only MS Office users, it’s their choice. But when it comes to formulating a policy – they need to look at other market players as well (i.e. beyond MS Office, beyond the customer usage) – and take a wider look at the industry.
Check out noooxml.org for tech. faults in ooxml.
@ Ashish: “technical faults in ooxml”
Let me summarize those faults.
1. It’s not “Open”. (eg. “auto space like Word 95″ !!)
2. It’s not valid “XML” either. (See http://www.noooxml.org/petition )
cheers
nilesh
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