The news has widely reported that the fast-track vote for the acceptance of OOXML as an ISO standard has failed. So what is the next step? According to the complex ISO rules, there is going to be a comment resolution meeting in February, 2008 where all the standards bodies with skin in the game will meet and painfully go through all the technical comments and attempt to move the process forward in good faith.

Question: How is it possible to address all the technical comments in a document format that has already been implemented in Microsoft Office 2007 and is shipping or being pre-installed in millions of computers?

Even a casual observer would have to say that OOXML is not likely to change due to the outcome of the comment resolution meeting in February. Because the OOXML format is firmly entrenched in shipping Microsoft Office products, the most popular comment resolution statement is likely to be “it is a de-facto standard in shipping products”. Or…there will be promises made to make changes to a document format is already shipping in volume by the only market leader that could deliver products based on OOXML. If you think that OOXML will change in any significant way, I have some ocean view property in South Dakota that might be of interest to you.

Document management software vendors have made it clear that they do not want to support multiple open document formats. Document tool developers would like avoid the replicated work that comes with the support of multiple standards and they certainly do not want to suffer the pain and expense of document format incompatibilities and conversions.

Jeremy Allison, of SAMBA fame, recalled his experiences with CIFS and the standardization process in a blog entry called “The Definition of Insanity“. He warns that “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” While we don’t know if this quote originated from Ben Franklin, Al Eistein, or Mark Twain, the message is clear. We can’t afford to casually go down the path of comment resolution with OOXML. The results will not be satisfying and innovation will suffer if a second open document format is standardized. In the end, users will suffer as they continually have to choose which document format to use and then find the tools that will reasonably convert the format they chose to the format they want to exchange.

The acceptance and adoption of a single open document format will lead to a golden age of document processing.