IBM enjoys the sidelines at Ecma meeting
IBM has decided to sit out of an upcoming meeting of an Ecma committee focused on establishing international standards based on Microsoft’s file formats being developed for Office 12 products. IBM’s vice president of standards and open source, Bob Sutor says:
“We think there are just too many open switches on this right now for us to go in and do something there. Given the charter, it’s not clear what anyone other than Microsoft is going to be doing on this committee,” Sutor said on Tuesday.
Bob Sutor goes onto claim that IBM will be supporting the OpenDocument format. The Ecma committee is co-chaired by Microsoft employees, and therefore opinions from companies other than Microsoft aren’t viewed equally it seems.
Sutor goes on to state that he hopes the Ecma committee pursues the goal of a convergence between the Office Open XML formats and the OpenDocument formats. However, he states that that must be a push by the user-community at large, and that doesn’t seem to be taking place at the moment.
What are your thoughts? I would say there’s not a large amount of push towards convergence yet because the formats aren’t in wide usage yet. That would obviously change once Office 12 is released to the public, but until then I don’t see much action from the community. I think the convergence that Sutor desires is going to have to be pushed from within. If not pushed from within, the marketed from within more aggressively to the user-community for their awareness of the needs for convergence.
Will the average information worker care about the formats? It’s known that the new formats will make it easier to share and edit documents with people who do and don’t have Office, won’t that be seen as an already huge leap forward by the community and they will be pleased.
It’s Open Mic time folks, post your thoughts in the comments.
[Full article: IBM sits out Office document standards effort]
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POSTED IN: File Formats
1 opinion for IBM enjoys the sidelines at Ecma meeting
JW
Jan 3, 2006 at 7:11 pm
Great to see them sitting out… especially since they have no business being there in the first place. Their email product is a hangover from the 90s and severely out of date… both technicallyand especially from a usability standpoint. It looks and acts like the 16-bit OS/2 product it used to be. So unless they get serious about an office suite again (and lets hope they don’t waste our time), they should stay out of it - and that includes the snide remarks.
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