In a blog entry on Wednesday, Jason Matusow complains about IBM’s behaviour in submitting 191 comments on OpenXML at INCITS/V1, the US technical body charged with recommending how the US NB should vote - thanks to Andy Updegrove for drawing Jason’s piece to my attention. Jason ends up:
IBM is welcome to their opinion of the standardization of Open XML. They are working in more than 100 countries to oppose its adoption and will push as hard as they can to achieve this goal. They are advocates for the technologies that best fit their products and business model – their actions regarding Open XML are in their best interests…not that of their customers. If they don’t want to support the Open XML standard in their products, they are not obliged to do so. Working to defeat the standard is 100% an industry competitive play and not about customer benefit.
I have not really said much so far on this blog about IBM, or indeed the Open Source movement, both prominent critics of OpenXML becoming an ISO/IEC standard. Perhaps, I should in a future post. I have no connection with either and no real love for either, so I do not regard them as allies, merely as people who happen to agree with me on this specific topic, often for quite different reasons.
Clearly, it has been an important MS tactic to dismiss all opposition as simply IBM or IBM-funded or IBM-related. In other words, O Ye Who May Have Just Noticed This Spat, forget it, it is just a typical argument between rival vendors each pushing their own corner.
It is always wise to be wary of such blatant ad hominem argument. Good people often put forward bad arguments or silly opinions, and bad people often put forward excellent arguments or sensible opinions. If you have any serious interest, you have to probe beyond who said something and look at what they said.
What is bizarre about the comment above is that OpenXML is already an international standard. Ecma has already adopted it. Yet it is absolutely riddled with silly minor errors, presumably because the process was too rushed. IBM has done MS and Ecma a huge favour by pointing out a substantial number of these errors. So you might expect MS to be grateful. Ecma can now fix these errors, which its own procedures failed to catch, thus improving the Ecma standard and benefiting the customers. So IBM is not working to “defeat the standard” but improving it, which MS and its supporters seem curiously uninterested in doing - a sad comment on how they evidently regard their customers.
Of course, IBM is opposing the standard’s adoption by ISO/IEC, but that is an entirely different point, which I have discussed extensively in previous posts. In a nutshell, there is already an ISO/IEC standard for the exact same thing, and the whole point of standardisation is to have a single standard in a given area.
[Oh, Andy focussed on a different piece of Matusow nonsense, but so eloquently that there is no need to repeat it here!]
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