Why have another document standard?
There are a number of great reasons for this - but the first and most important point to make is that Ecma Office Open XML is already a standard today ratified by Ecma. The current discussion is whether it should be ratified as an international (ISO/IEC) standard. Not to mention there are many ISO approved document standard out there today but more on that in a later post.
The top four reasons from our point of view to have this as an international standard are:
- PROTECTING OUR HERITAGE - enabling and guaranteeing ongoing access to valuable legacy documents. It provides freedom from dependence on specific applications, vendors or platforms in order to exchange documents.
- SECURING OUR FUTURE - providing choice and encouraging competition in the marketplace – facilitating interoperability and platform independence.
- FOSTERING INNOVATION - enabling the New Zealand IT industry to provide new and innovative solutions for sale locally and worldwide.
- CREATING A PUBLIC GOOD - stewardship and ownership of the standard has been moved from the vendor (Microsoft) to a neutral, internationally-recognised standards organisation (Ecma).
Open XML can and will co-exist with existing and future open document standards.
Ecma also supports this point of view and a summary of their document (with link to original) is here: https://www.openxmlcommunity.org/summary.aspx
It's really interesting to look at the Ecma members here are a couple of screens grabs from their site - not the typical Microsoft fraternity but a good industry cross section.
https://www.ecma-international.org/memento/members.htm
Just looking at the Ordinary members alone...
https://www.ecma-international.org/memento/ordinary.htm
Microsoft has passed this document format onto Ecma for it's stewardship - we have also done this in the past and it's been a positive thing for the industry.