Why should the Indian government or Bureau of Indian Standards support OpenXML (OXML) as opposed to Open Document Format (ODF)?
This isn't about OXML versus ODF, but rather OXML and ODF. The ISO process isn't a zero sum game. ISO standards aren't mandatory standards but purely voluntary. They're like a library of standards, which users can choose from. The phenomenon of multiple standards is a common one in the IT industry. A research report by IDC shows that there's widespread support for OXML, and there's already a lot of adoption. OXML brings a set of capabilities to the table that are not present in other standards. This will be useful to governments and industries and will enable new business scenarios.
This is about ensuring that the government has a choice of the best technology options anywhere in the world, which it can use in a cost effective manner. Therefore, it would be in the national interest of India to cast a positive vote at the ISO. India, being an IT powerhouse, should be seen as a champion of multiple standards. This would safeguard interests of IT companies when they put forth new technologies for standardization in the future.
Multiple standards encourage innovation. Can you validate this claim?
Multiple standards aren't the only source of innovation. However, they're certainly an important step in supporting innovation. Mobile telephones are the biggest success story in India. Although initially, only GSM standard was permitted, the government later permitted CDMA as well, and the competition between these 2 technology platforms resulted in increasingly lower prices and deeper penetration. In fact, now the license is technology neutral and operators can use even Wimax and any other standard as they deem fit.
If a new technology doesn't have a chance to get standardized because a previous standard already exists, it'll naturally reduce the incentive to innovate. For example, graphics file formats - new innovations in this space - led to new JPEG standards like JPEG 2000. All of these have made an impact in the quality of digital imaging.
Are governments around the world supporting OXML as a standard?
OXML is an open standard and is already being deployed. Governments around the world - including Denmark, Switzerland, and the State of Massachusetts in the US - have accepted OXML as a standard alongside ODF. Solutions using OXML are already deployed in Florida to better manage amendments to legislative bills. In Austria, it's used in e-Government applications.
Why should customers opt for OXML?
OXML specification was designed to enable implementation on multiple operating systems involving many types of data processing applications. From a future perspective, OXML was designed to enable integration of customers' own XML data and formats within documents to address particular scenarios, such as vertical industry requirements or organization-specific requirements. Moreover, the key reasons customers and partners are adopting the Ecma OXML formats are the need for their own industry schemas, ease of deployment, optimization of costs, interoperability, and rich workflow scenarios. OXML formats are unique since they're capable of supporting hundreds/thousands of existing industry schema that organizations already use today. Around the world customers already have billions of existing documents that they want to keep using.
The new wave of computing driven by OXML will not happen overnight, but it's off to a strong start and there's every reason to be optimistic about the positive impact it'll have on computing in the future.
Why does Microsoft want another standard, what's the rationale?
There are at least 4 good reasons why:
*ODF started out and was completed as an XML format, specifically supporting OpenOffice with a tight scope around that product.
*It wasn't until 2005 that the spec was offered up as a general XML office document format and consequently renamed to ODF.
*No opportunity existed for Microsoft to actually participate in this full process - given the original scope, the 6 months between the re-naming of the spec to ODF, and its subsequent approval by OASIS as a standard.
*The scope of the ODF spec never included even the basic requirements that Microsoft required to support a fully open format, and nor did the OASIS technical committee want to include these requirements.
