Microsoft recently received an award that I am sure they will just love. The FFII (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure) has awarded Microsoft the "Best Campaigner Against OOXML" distinction. Apparently this is part of a larger campaign on the part of FFII against the ratification of OOXML as an ISO/IEC standard. I guess it is an attempt to put some humor, at Microsoft’s expense, into a rather serious issue.
This is a serious issue because it is all about competition in a market that produces critical revenue for Microsoft in the 10's of billions of dollars. How would you like to be the Microsoft executive held responsible for allowing competition to take 10% or 20% of that revenue away. The irony is that the people that are threatening to do that are open source advocates; supposedly most of the money not going to Microsoft would be going to the customers.
But all of this make me nervous. As I posted earlier, I am the technical personn and the technical lead in handing the PDF standard off to ISO. I do not want Adobe to get the next FFII award. I wrote a previous blog about this and especially about fast tracking standards which I think is where the big difference between what Microsoft has done and what Adobe is doing. Check it out.
Selling the Adobe products that depend upon PDF is also big business for Adobe. But I am also very confident that the character of Adobe employees and especially of our executives is strong enough to make the right choices between big money pressures and doing the right thing. Moving PDF down the ISO fast track is the right thing. -- Jim King
There is of course a huge difference between fasttracking PDF and OOXML. PDF is a proven interoperable format, with dozens of independent consumer and producer implementations, from different vendors.
As far as I know, there is no complete or even nearly complete non-microsoft OOXML consumer or producer in existance.