Leadership By Numbers :: Maybe ODF and OOXML is Not Black and White

Category Open Source

1/21/2008: UPDATE

Groklaw.net has a much more comprehensive response that includes the ODF Alliance and others. It's going to be worth a careful read. Groklaw reader comments tend to be more substantive than those on Slashdot.org, and I'll be wading through them. In the meantime, I was very heartend to learn that IBM is publishing Lotus Symphony APIs for application integration.

1/15/2008: UPDATE

Ars Technica has countered the conclusions of The Burton Group report. Too bad Ars Technica hasn't dug into the meat of the debate, but limited its comments to rhetoric. I'd like to read a response from the Opendocument XML organization. I'm assuming that the complexity of ODF versus OOXML is beyond an analysis found in a few paragraphs, but O'Kelly's report is well written and his argument is clear and deserves to be addressed for the points it makes.

Within the larger market, OOXML will lead,” for three reasons. First, many enterprises are not that caught up in the standards debate; they just want to use what works for their needs. Microsoft Office 2007 defaults to storing documents in OOXML format, so, by migrating to Office 2007, many companies will let Microsoft make the decision for them. Second, OOXML is an extensible standard. It allows vendors and enterprises to extend the standard within an OOXML-defined framework. For example, the .XLSM file format, used to support a Microsoft Office 2007 Excel macro-enabled workbook, is not part of the base OOXML standard, but rather a Microsoft-created extension. This built-in ability to augment the OOXML standard is a safety valve for future innovation, allowing new features to be added without forcing vendors to invent yet another separate file format or wait for standards bodies to give their approval. While such extensions initially decrease interoperability, it's Burton Group's belief that this issue will resolve itself over time, as popular extensions are adopted by other vendors or eventually move into the baseline specification. Third, OOXML supports “overlay” custom schemas (not in ODF 1.0, promised in ODF 1.2), which can be used as views into the business information stored in documents. This separation of document and views allows enterprises to more easily perform tasks such as programmatically updating a “Stock Price” element or corporate logo within a document, compared to ODF's method of serially inspecting and updating the document itself. In short, because OOXML is more ecosystem- and application-oriented than ODF, most vendors and enterprises will see it as more useful than ODF.

Ouch. I've just read The Burton Group analysis of ODF/OOXML by Peter O'Kelly and Guy Creese. It's the clearest analysis, yet, of the trajectory for these two format standards. If you are like me, and leaning strongly towards ODF, then you'll find the report jarring and insightful. I have tremendous respect for O'Kelly and The Burton Group, which has given me pause. Maybe I've been too accepting of the definition of Free Open-Source Software as pure good and Monopolistic Proprietary Systems as vile. Many IT firms bridge these two shores, which can complicate the path for developing new standards.

For instance, the report sifts out the role of Sun Microsystems. Because Sun is the primary support for OpenOffice, and OpenOffice is the de facto implementation of ODF, Sun plays the lead for defining the direction of ODF development.

ODF is insufficient for complex real-world enterprise requirements, and it is indirectly controlled by Sun Microsystems, despite also being an ISO standard. It's possible that IBM, Novell, and other vendors may be able to put ODF on a more customer-oriented trajectory in the future and more completely integrate it with the W3C content model, but for now ODF should be seen as more of an anti-Microsoft political statement than an objective technology selection.

What? Hasn't Microsoft just deprecated some of their own formats, rendering older Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents inaccessible to Microsoft Office 2003? Isn't that the perfect real-world example for the significance to abandon Microsoft and embrace open standards? Apparently not. Maybe Microsoft is making the point that, yes, these decades-old documents need to be updated—which of course means into OOXML.

The report examines a simple “Hello World!” example, comparing the older Microsoft Word binary stream, to the newer OOXML layout.

Although the example in this section suggests that even simple Word documents result in very complex OOXML files, OOXML for the most part simply provides more accessible views of content that was also captured in the earlier binary file formats (i.e., the complexity was always there, because of the application domain and model concerns modern productivity applications must accommodate). Indeed, OOXML files are in most cases much smaller than their binary counterparts.

There is a hint, in the report, that the efforts by IBM's Lotus Symphony could assist in the wider adoption of ODF. But, the big money is going to be (1) on moving historical Microsoft-binary data into OOXML, and (2) working with XML documents, in general, whether they are OOXML, ODF or something newer.

There are a lot of issues to consider in the continuing drama of OOXML ISO acceptance, and in regards to ODF improvements. It's going to take years to build new systems and years to convert old data. I have time.

The report is free, and in PDF, so it's a highly recommended read.