After having played hard-to-get over XML formats in Office, Microsoft submitted its Open Office XML File Formats as part of a developing standard.
Even though Massachusetts CIO Peter Quinn apparently resigned while battling to replace Microsoft Office in state offices, his efforts may have helped compel Microsoft into contributing XML formats to Ecma International.
Microsoft made those formats available to Ecma in November. The company chose to contribute to a new standard rather than embrace the OpenDocument format favored by Quinn and many others.
Office program manager Brian Jones reported on a December meeting in Brussels, where Microsoft and several other tech notables like Apple, Intel, and Toshiba gathered to discuss the initial draft. He noted one goal of Microsoft’s participation:
(T)his is going to be some really large documentation as one of the main goals of the formats was to be backwards compatible with all of the existing Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents out there. We want to make sure that you don’t lose anything, and that the average end user (who doesn’t care about XML) isn’t impacted.
With a switch to OpenDocument format, Microsoft faced the prospect of angering an existing customer base of millions of users who have created documents in Office versions like 2000 or even 97. It’s a market the company can’t afford to push aside, despite the expense of maintaining backward compatibility.
XML figures in the forthcoming Vista operating system and in the next versions of Internet Explorer and Outlook as well. The integration of RSS feed support in those products means accepting the standard XML formats those feeds use.
If Microsoft can drive the growth of the RSS feed audience through ease-of-use functionality, it could make the market for more XML-standards based products expand well beyond where it is today.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
