I think that the point you somehow missed is that if you strip down all the deprecated and additional bits in OOXML, then all your are left with is a more fundamental structure of a document. This already exists and it’s the international standard we know as ODF. What Microsoft has done here is akin to replacing a white car with a vanilla white car. This harms uniformity and it is only built to accommodate the needs of one single application. Why, for example, would Microsoft create DirectX to ‘replace’ OpenGL (they are no longer participating)? It is a similar situation. It creates fragmentation and increases workload for GPU engineers.

If Microsoft support ODF as its native format (which is what your blog post is about, since it supports it already through an open-source plug-in Microsoft sponsorts http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/ ) it would use ODF, and store anything that isn’t defined in the spec in MS-specific _extensions_. _Proprietary blocks_. Anything that you can create in Office 2007 that isn’t in the ODF spec would be in these blocks.

The _deprecated_ blocks in OOXML, are for features from OLD VERSIONS that you can NO LONGER CREATE in new documents. That’s why they are DEPRECATED in OOXML. It’s to tell other apps to not bother reading/creating these blocks, they are only for backward compatibility with the old .doc format.

A Native implementation of ODF in Office 2007 would contain extensions for things that are BOTH deprecated and NOT-deprecated. So it would be less specified than OOXML

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