Do you love Microsoft?

I noticed that when Brian Jones, a MS employee who blogs on Office, got back from his vacation he posted a link to a “great presentation” by Adam Farquhar of the British Library which explains “why Open XML is so important”. Out of curiosity, I downloaded the .pdf. To my surprise it turned out that it was on the BSI Wiki News page, and was the presentation that Adam had given to the BSI at the meeting on 10 May 2007. Looking at it again, I realized why it had annoyed me so much at the time.

First, there was the obvious point that BL’s needs are highly specialized and different from those of 99% of those who use office documents. So saying that the standard suits a highly untypical user is really completely irrelevant.

Then there was the lavish praise for the Ecma process. Since Adam did not appear to have been involved in the standards process before, one clearly needed to be a little cautious about his opinions on the Ecma process. Looking closely his praise was items like “very professional organization”, “clear timeline”, “dedicated editor, support staff”. Well, I guess it is encouraging that such things were done well, but they say nothing about the quality of the standards process at Ecma.

But the thing that really annoyed me came late in the presentation: a whole slide devoted to “The Highlander myth”. “Some say they [sic] can be only one (The Highlander Principle) - as sensible as the movie!”. This was so transparently silly - the whole purpose of standardization is to have just one standard in a given area - that I started laughing and asked him if that was intended as a joke.

Apparently not. He really meant it. Well maybe he did. It was hard to tell. I was left unclear whether he believed that “competition between standards” was a good thing, or whether he believed that OpenXML addressed a different area from ODF.

If the area was different, the only differentiating factor was apparently that OpenXML could better represent the billions of legacy documents in MS binary formats. I pointed out that that was essentially a question of fact - you should be able to test to see if it was true, so where was the evidence? It turned out that he had not seen any evidence and simply trusted MS on that point.

I still find it irritating that a public sector employee puts the British Library behind a commercial standard for confused, ill-considered reasons, and with negligible due diligence. To decide that the BL should get into bed with MS is one thing, but to get out on stage to convince everyone else to do so is something quite different.