GENEVA, Feb 25 (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp ramped upits fight to have its Office Open XML document format made intoan international standard on Monday as delegates from 37countries met to reconsider the proposal.
Their meeting hosted by the International Organisation forStandardisation (ISO) and International ElectrotechnicalCommission (IEC) in Geneva is meant to help broker consensusafter a preliminary vote on the standard failed six months ago.
There will be no ballot during the week-long talks, but the87 national standards bodies who previously voted will haveuntil March 29 to adjust their positions, giving the world’slargest software maker another shot at the two-thirds majorityit needs for approval.
"The ISO/IEC members who voted on the draft in Septemberwill have 30 days to change their votes if they wish," saidRoger Frost, a spokesman for the Geneva-based agency.
Microsoft won only 53 percent support in September.
Standardisation of Open XML, which is the defaultfile-saving format in Microsoft Office 2007, would allow othercompanies to build products using the file format and simplifyfile exchange between different software suites.
Opponents of the proposed ISO/IEC standard DIS 29500 arguethere is no need for a rival to the widely used Open DocumentFormat (ODF) that is already an international standard.
They say that the Microsoft product’s 6,000 pages of code,compared with ODF’s 860 pages, make it artificially complicatedand untranslatable. The productivity software suite OpenOfficeuses ODF, which is supported by International Business MachinesCorp. (IBM) and Sun Microsystems Inc..
"Microsoft could easily provide full support for ODF," saidRishab Ghosh, senior researcher at the United Nations Universityin Maastricht.
Ghosh said Microsoft’s drive for a competing standard waspart of its broader strategy to encourage consumers to use onlyMicrosoft products, as has been alleged in anti-trust cases inEurope and elsewhere.
"Because their software is used by so many people, you don’tswitch to anyone else’s software because you are worried thatyour files are going to be lost," he told Reuters by telephone.
"If you can save by default in ODF using a Microsoftproduct, that means your documents will be easily readable byusers of a competing software. And when your documents areeasily readable by others, maybe you can consider switching to adifferent software," he said.
Microsoft says multiple standards are normal in software andother industries, that competition makes for better products,and that its format has higher specifications and is more usefulthan ODF.
The company has collaborated with Novell to developa tool to translate Open XML documents into ODF and vice versa,though critics believe the tool cannot provide a completetranslation due to the complexity of the Microsoft product.
XML, short for Extensible Markup Language, is a standard fordescribing data in a way that allows it to be shared acrossvarious systems and applications. Microsoft has handed overcontrol of Open XML to the standards-making body Ecma, whichwould make it available even in the event of its demise.
Delegates submitted about 4,200 suggested modifications tothe Microsoft documents in the lead-up to last year’s ballot.Those have been whittled down to 1,100 comments forconsideration during this week’s meeting, the ISO said.(Editing by Jonathan Lynn and Jason Neely)
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