As Microsoft said recently, “Human Greed Has No Bounds” (it was also the title of an article). Nothing has changed.

Fair enough. I mentioned it before, but yes I can say it again. Microsoft is not a charity business. They are well versed in killing competitors. ODF is the next victim. Their distribution power (of whatever support of ODF will come with it) is what will kill it. Microsoft has no intention to genuinely support ODF.

What you did not mention is that Microsoft wants to have the cake and eat it too at the moment — pretending/faking niceties by ‘supporting’ both Closed XML *and* ODF (in vapour mode, on paper).

Microsoft won. They wanted the ISO timestamp. They got it. They needed it since governments want such thing for documents now.

OOXML? It’s just a rough specs, as it has always been. The share of undocumented stuff in that document is the same than in the past, and I don’t think that it is even intentional. To understand why this is the case, you only have to consider the fact that Microsoft was not prepared to go to ISO when they were working on Office 2007. They rushed it through with some of the internal documents they had. But it is important that those documents are handy when you have the source code with it, otherwise it’s just a puzzle and any implementer has to go through reverse engineering to really implement anything significant of it.

The delay on supporting OOXML? I think you did not get the memo. Most changes checked in through the BRM were just cosmetic ones. Those who blogged on the BRM made it very clear that Microsoft insisted that no change that would break Office 2007 documents would be accepted. Estimation of time needed to implement the changes : a few days. Remember that the Office team at Microsoft is a thousand people group.

The native (and naive) support of ODF in Office 2007? That is a trick to please governments so that Microsoft appears has a nice group of people, not the nazis that they are.

Future of OOXML? Frankly, who freaking cares the paper? This paper will ALWAYS be at odds with the actual Office implementation. We have a good example for the time being, but it has always been the case.

Conclusion : about time to move on guys.

“The final DIS 29500 text was meant to be submitted by Ecma, and then distributed to National Bodies by 29 March 2008. Ecma duly submitted a text on time but this text has remained with ITTF.”

So Tomas is right. Ecma is not at fault and are not responsible for the distribution of the standard; it’s the ITTF who are holding things up.

Why would they be waiting for a document from Ecma? Last time I checked IS29500 was an ISO standard. The only people that the IS29500 project editor would give a document to would be ISO/ITTF, Ecma are not involved at this point.

If you’re waiting for a document from Ecma then you’re going to have to wait until v2 of Ecma 376 appears. That won’t be IS29500 though, it will be Ecma 376 v2.

Sometimes your posts are just confused Roy.