For Microsoft, there is more than one way to skin a standard

I don’t think de jure standards (so-called international Open Standards) of any type have any particular meaning in the real world. In information technology [IT] markets at least, most so-called international Open Standards (always upper case) are retroactive acknowledgements that some particular facet of a widget is already the most popular widget facet of that type in the market. For more detail, see my more than 30 years of IT market research on CORBA, 88 Open, Ethernet, OSF, the seven layers of the Open Systems Interconnection model, PARS, SQL, X-Open, HTML, blah blah blah, blah blah blah. The acronyms you recognize were popular first, then made standards.

Also in real-world IT markets at least, some smart guys come up with a workaround long before a standards body can find its gavel… if the market demand is there. So investors should note that whether or not the ECMA and Microsoft (MSFT) are again denied International Standards Organization (ISO) fast-track approval of their Office Open XML (OOXML) standard on March 29, the pair is just going to keep on trucking down the real-world popularity road to standardization. And they are going to use the king of open source organizations, the Apache Software Foundation, to help them do it.

Microsoft and Sourcesense, a European open-source-oriented systems integration consultancy, have announced that they will move Microsoft-Office-based open source solutions to market by contributing to the new version of Apache’s POI. According to Wikipedia, POI stands for "Poor Obfuscation Implementation" referring to the fact that the “old” Office file formats (.doc, .xls) seemed to be deliberately obfuscated, but so poorly that they were successfully and quickly reverse-engineered so that Java programs could talk to Office. Currently only a working copy of POI supports new Office (that is, OOXML) file formats but the POI community expects this support to make it into a full release by June-July 2008. To make that happen, Microsoft and Sourcesense are going to help. Sourcesense brings experience in catalyzing other Apache technologies and open source development practices. Microsoft obviously brings its knowledge of the 6000 pages of the OOXML spec.

By email, I asked Gianugo Rabellino, CEO of Sourcesense if he wasn't afraid he'd be set adrift in the middle of the Mediterranean in a rubber dinghy for consorting with the enemy, given that we're constantly told here in the U.S. that all of Europe is totally against OOXML. His kind response: "providing OOXML support for the same functionalities (as previously provided for earlier versions of Office) is a logical step and something that the POI community might have decided to add anyways at a certain point in the future: doing that in collaboration with Microsoft looks like a good step in the right direction, both for Microsoft and Open Source." Bravo!

So ISO standard or not, it will soon be as easy for Java software to move information to and from Microsoft Office 2007 as it is for the same software to move information to and from Office 2003 and earlier versions of Office. OOXML, although it has only been actively marketed for a little more than a year, is quickly becoming as popular—depending on how you measure such things—as the leading ISO standard document format, Adobe’s PDF (relative to when PDF was anointed an ISO standard). The POI relationship will only hasten that acceptance.

-- Dennis Byron