I had a good chuckle over the new content at Microsoft’s Open XML Community web site. Please take a look. What it lacks in accuracy it makes up for in the use of shiny graphics and stock photos of shiny people, the kind of eye candy that years of shiny PowerPoint presentations have numbed us into believing is an adequate substitute for thought.
What especially caught my eye was this claim:
Global support for Open XML is growing exponentially. Thousands of organizations have joined OpenXMLCommunity.org, hundreds of ISVs are developing solutions on Open XML, and more and more governments are opting for Choice in standards policies. Additionally, more than 10 million compatibility packs that allow users of earlier versions of Microsoft Office to work with Open XML have been downloaded around the world. The momentum is growing, the adoption is real.
Exponential growth is quite a claim. But what is the evidence? Microsoft provides this chart further down on the page, showing the growth in their “community”:

Years ago, when I was a student, we had a technical term for curves like this. We called them “lines” and referred to this type of growth as “linear.” We did not call it “exponential growth”
Let’s take a look at the growth in document usage, instead of community membership. Here’s an update of a chart I showed a couple of months ago:

In this chart you see two series, one for ODF (blue) and one for OOXML (red). The horizontal axis shows the number of days since each standard was published, namely May 2005 for ODF and December 2006 for OOXML. The vertical axis shows the number of documents in that format on the web, according to Google, by doing “filetype” searches. For example, a query of “filetype:ods” gives you all of the ODS (ODF spreadsheet) documents on the web.
(Ben Langhinrichs also has some updated numbers and analysis on this topic.)
Is this what you would call exponential growth? Eight months after Office 2007 shipped, and despite the claim of “10 million compatibility packs” downloaded, the OOXML line is only slowing and linearly rising (R-squared=0.943). ODF remains 100-times more prevalent on the web today and is growing 20-times faster than OOXML.
So “Global support for Open XML is growing exponentially”? Uh. I don’t think so. Maybe something is growing exponentially, like the hype. But the users, the documents and the “community” — these appear to be only slowly and linearly growing.
But lest you leave without some dramatic growth to think about, let me share some with you. If you recall, back in April I brought your attention to the fact that two scientific journals, Science and Nature, were both rejecting submissions from authors in OOXML format. I’ve been looking around and found an embarrassingly large number of additional journals which explicitly disallow OOXML.
The Optical Society of America’s journal, Optics Letters, will not accept Word 2007 format. The American Phytopathological Society’s Plant Disease warns in bright red print [pdf], “This journal does not accept Microsoft Word 2007 documents at this time.” The American Institute of Physics, tells their authors “Word 2007 and the new Word docx format should not be used. Docx files will currently cause problems for reviewers and complicate many existing preproduction and production routines.” Vandose Zone Journal warns submitters that they cannot use the new equation editor in Word 2007 and should use MathML instead. “Word 2007 .docx format is not accepted” according to The Journal of Nutrition.
But wait, there’s more!
Wiley InterScience tells authors for almost 200 of its journals that “This journal does not accept Microsoft WORD 2007 documents at this time,” ruling out OOXML for authors of these journals:
- Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
- International Journal of Quantum Chemistry
- Software Process: Improvement and Practice
- Pediatric Blood & Cancer
- Lasers in Surgery and Medicine
- Medicinal Research Reviews
- American Journal of Physical Anthropology
- Journal of Mass Spectrometry
- Journal of Polymer Science Part B: Polymer Physics
- Developmental Dynamics
- Journal of Applied Polymer Science
- Magnetic Resonance in Medicine
- Synapse
- Genes, Chromosomes and Cancer
- Journal of Medical Virology
- Flavour and Fragrance Journal
- Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefining
- Clinical Anatomy
- Hepatology
- Advances in Polymer Technology
- Journal of Orthopaedic Research
- Molecular Carcinogenesis
- Environmental Progress
- Infant Mental Health Journal
- Annals of Neurology
- International Journal of Imaging Systems and Technology
- Developmental Neurobiology
- AIChE Journal
- Journal of Traumatic Stress
- genesis
- Meteorological Applications
- Process Safety Progress
- Atmospheric Science Letters
- Systems Research and Behavioral Science
- Journal of Community Psychology
- Diagnostic Cytopathology
- Birth Defects Research Part B
- Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution
- International Journal of Climatology
- The Chemical Record
- Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing
- International Journal of Intelligent Systems
- Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds
- Statistics in Medicine
- Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience
- Developmental Psychobiology
- Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry
- The Prostate
- Journal of Computational Chemistry
- X-Ray Spectrometry
- Peditric Blood & Cancer
- Random Structures and Algorithms
- Microwave and Optical Technology Letters
- Lasers in Surgery and Medicine
- Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry
- Weather
- Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews
- International Journal of Finance & Economics
- Psycho-Oncology
- Chirality
- Applied Cognitive Psychology
- American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B:
- Medicinal Research Reviews
- Biopharmaceutics & Drug Disposition
- Zoo Biology
- Catheterization and Cardiovascular Interventions
- Plus 103 more journals!
Oxford Journals, part of Oxford University Press, tells submitters, “This journal does not accept Microsoft Word 2007 documents at this time.” Journals directly effected by this policy include:
- Bioinformatics
- Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy
- American Journal of Epidemiology
- PEDS
- Briefings in Functional Genomics & Proteomics
- The Computer Journal
- Health Policy and Planning
- Journal of Environmental Law
- Review of English Studies
- Behavioral Ecology
- ELT Journal
- Molecular Biology and Evolution
- CESifo Economic Studies
- Journal of Pediatric Psychology
- Cerebral Cortex
- Literary and Linguistic Computing
- Molecular Human Reproduction
- Enterprise & Society
- Age and Ageing
- European Journal of Public Health
- Publius
- Integrative and Comparative Biology
- Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation
- Rheumatology
- Glycobiology
- And 35 more journals!
Blackwell Publishing, publisher of over 800 journals, rejects OOXML submissions telling authors, “Will authors please note that Word 2007 is not yet compatible with journal production systems.” This adds to our list of journals where OOXML cannot be used:
- Psychophysiology
- Acta Anaesthesiologica Scandinavica
- Transfusion Alternatives in Transfusion Medicine
- Acta Neuropsychiatrica
- Nursing Forum: An Independent Voice for Nursing
- Experimental Techniques: A Publication for the Practicing Engineer
- Cytopathology
- Asian Journal of Social Psychology
- Journal of Anatomy
- Annals of Applied Biology
- Lethaia: An International Journal of Palaeontology
- Journal of the American Water Resources Association
- Clinical Physiology and Functional Imaging
- Ibis: The International Journal of Avian Science
- Basin Research
- Digestive Endoscopy
- Journal of Empirical Legal Studies
- European Journal of Neurology
- Surgical Practice: Formerly Annals of the College of Surgeons
- FEMS Yeast Research
- FEMS Microbiology Reviews
- FEMS Microbiology Ecology
- FEMS Microbiology Letters
- Regulation & Governance
- FEMS Immunology & Medical Microbiology
- Clinical and Experimental Optometry
- Journal of Food Process Engineering
- The Journal of Cardiovascular Electrophysiology
- Medical Education
- European Journal of Clinical Investigation
- Diseases of the Esophagus
- Sleep and Biological Rhythms
- International Migration Review
- Computational Intelligence
- Asia Pacific Viewpoint
- Seminars in Dialysis
- Peace & Change: A Journal of Peace Research
- Journal of Applied Social Psychology
- Basic & Clinical Pharmacology & Toxicology
- Dermatologic Therapy
- WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society
- Journal of Travel Medicine
- Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography
- Australasian Radiology
- Genes to Cells
- The Clinical Respiratory Journal
- Echocardiography
- The American Journal of Gastroenterology
- Histopathology
- Personal Relationships
- Clinical and Experimental Dermatology
- Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research
- Experimental Dermatology
- Journal of Social Philosophy
- The Journal of Popular Culture
- Pathology International
- Pain Practice
- The Journal of American Culture
- Clinical & Experimental Immunology
- Religious Studies Review
- Entomological Science
- Plus 107 more journals!
I won’t claim it is exponential, but I will suggest that the most impressive growth occurring around OOXML is the number of journals that will not accept it.