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The Final OOXML Update: Part I

2009/10/01 By Rob 19 Comments

I have not written a blog post on OOXML for well over a year now. My last post on this topic was on August 17th, 2008 and covered the contentious appeals process which followed the DIS 29500 Fast Track ballot. So I hope that one more post, 14 months later, will not seem excessive to my critics. There is too much good stuff going on with ODF these days, with ODF 1.2 coming soon, inter-vendor work at plugfests, the ODF Toolkit, and continual national adoption, for me to waste much time on OOXML. “Let the dead bury their own dead” is my attitude here. That said, I have received several requests for an update on OOXML, so I will oblige with some quick observations in what (I hope) is my final update on this sad chapter in standardization.

I’ll structure this update over a handful of posts, each one looking at a single topic. In this post I’ll cover the tight control Microsoft maintains over the OOXML standard, despite their earlier assertions to the contrary.


From the beginning of the Fast Track procedure Microsoft encouraged NBs to approve OOXML with the promise that their approval of the specification would guarantee that it would be handed over to the “global community” for maintenance. Vote against the standard — because it was obviously flawed — and you would lose this unique opportunity to transfer control from proprietary interests at Microsoft to the benevolent and international meritocracy of ISO. This was one of the main “selling points” for OOXML and what Microsoft repeatedly sold.

For example, here was Jerry Fishenden, Microsoft’s National Technology Office in the UK:

There’s an easy question to consider here: would you prefer the Microsoft file formats to continue to be proprietary and under Microsoft’s exclusive control? Or would you prefer them to be under the control and maintenance of an independent, open standards organisation? I think for most users, customers and partners that’s a pretty easy question to answer: they’d prefer control and maintenance to be independent of Microsoft. And the good news is that the Open XML file formats are already precisely that: currently under the control of Ecma International (as Ecma-376) and, if the current voting process is positive, eventually under the control of ISO/IEC

Or Microsoft’s Jason Matusow:

I still hear patently untrue claims that MS controls Open XML – this wasn’t true following the adoption of Ecma 376, and is now permanently a moot argument.

Microsoft Australia said:

This is encouraging and should be a reminder to all that the Open XML standard will be controlled by the international community not by any commercial business or other organisation – including Microsoft.

Chris Capossela , Microsoft Senior VP said it thus:

If Open XML is approved as an ISO/IEC standard, the story would not end there – like any other standard, maintenance affords the opportunity for continually updating and improving the standard. In this case, the global community would be in control of the evolution of this standard going forward – a fitting result given that this format will be widely used around the world for years to come.
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Now, the global community has the opportunity to take control of the future of the specification by ratifying Ecma 376 as an ISO/IEC standard. We know that it will be in good hands when this happens based on the tremendous work and improvements that have been made to the specification during the ISO/IEC process over the past 14 months. We are committed to the healthy maintenance of the standard once ratification takes place so that it will continue to be useful and relevant to the rapidly growing number of implementers and users around the world.

(If you watched the video linked to from the letter, you will hear Chris say that Microsoft “has transferred stewardship of the file formats to the global community”.)

Well, that was what was promised. But how did it turn out in reality?

Let’s take a look at who actually attends meetings of SC34/WG4, the technical committee that should have made the question of OOXML control “moot” and puts it “under the control of ISO/IEC”.

If you look at the attendance records, summarized in the following table, you will find that the committee regulars consist primarily of Microsoft employees. In many of the meetings, Microsoft employees outnumber all other attendees combined. And then there is the “Microsoft Co-Prosperity Sphere”, the Microsoft consultants, Microsoft business partners and Microsoft-funded research institution, which further contribute to Microsoft’s effective domination of the meetings.

Person Employer NB 4/16 4/30 5/14 5/28 6/11 6/22 7/16 7/30
Makoto Murata Consultant Japan 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Doug Mahugh Microsoft Ecma 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Shawn Villaron Microsoft Ecma 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Dave Welsh Microsoft US 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Jirka Kosek Consultant Czech Rep 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Rex Jaeshcke Microsoft Consultant Ecma 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Gareth Horton Data Watch UK 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Jesper Lund Stocholm Ciber Denmark 1 1 1 1 1 1
Isabelle Valet-Harper Microsoft Ecma 1 1 1 1 1 1
Mohamed Zergaoui Innovimax France 1 1 1 1 1 1
Mario Wendt Microsoft Germany 1 1 1 1 1 1
Alex Brown Griffin Brown Digital Publishing UK 1 1 1 1 1 1
Florian Reuter Novell Ecma 1 1 1 1 1
Jaeho Lee University of Seoul Korea 1 1 1 1
Caroline Arms Library of Congress Ecma 1 1 1
Francis Cave Francis Cave Digital Publishing UK 1 1 1
Rick Jelliffe Consultant Unauthorized 1 1 1
Nasser Kettani Microsoft Côte d’Ivoire 1 1
Pia Lange Dansk Standard Denmark 1 1
Kimmo Bergius Microsoft Finland 1 1
Juha Vartiainen Finnish Standards Finland 1
Jean Paoli Microsoft Ecma 1
Sam Oh Sungkyunkwan University Korea 1
Klaus Peter Eckert Fraunhofer Fokus Germany 1
Jung-Jin Yang Catholic University of Korea Korea 1
Keld Simonsen RAP Norway 1
Amruta Gulinakar Microsoft Ecma 1

So is this really handing over control? Is it really independent? And is it really global?

Let’s look at it in graphical form. In this chart I tally up the participation from each entity (company, organization or unaffiliated individual) attending WG4 meetings. This takes account of all 8 published meeting minutes for WG4. It shows the total participation over those meetings. So if a company sent 8 people to one meeting, this is scored the same as if they sent 1 person to each of 8 meetings. It is the overall participation for an entity that is measured relative to the total participation of all entities at the meetings. Note also that the “Microsoft” tally is of Microsoft employees only. The rest of the Microsoft Co-Prosperity, for purposes of this chart I am all counting as “independent” entities. So this picture is the most complimentary view possible of the degree of concentration in WG4. Obviously, Microsoft’s control is much higher if we take account of these other inter-entity obligations.

I suppose this is “global” in a sense, in the same way one could stage an “International Food Festival” and then have McDonalds show up and contribute a Big Mac from the U.S., a Big Mac from Germany, a Big Mac from the Ivory Coast, a Big Mac from Finland and another Big Mac from Brazil and so on. Certainly, you could claim this was “international”, but you would be laughed right out of the festival if you did.

By way of comparison, here it the same analysis, plotted on the same scale, for the most recent 8 meetings of the OASIS ODF TC. As you can see it is much flatter. No company has more than 20% or so of the participation, and no two companies combined have control of the TC.

Now don’t get me wrong. There are certainly some independent people in WG4 and I would not want anyone to denigrate their efforts. They are not all Microsoft employees, consultants, business partners and research institutions that Microsoft is funding. But they are mostly so. Attend any OOXML meeting and look to your right, look to your left, and most likely one is a Microsoft employee and another is economically tightly tied to Microsoft.

Of course, I would not expect that Microsoft would be absent from this work either. After all, they authored the specification and have most of the relevant technical experts. But a glance over the attendance records shows that they are not gracing the committee with their file format gurus. Instead they are stuffing it with “program managers” and “technology directors” and other assorted non-experts. The problem appears to be that their file format experts are all cursed with American residency and so have little value in stuffing a committee that has one-country/one-vote rules. Thus the spectacle of a room filled with Microsoft employees wrapped in different colored flags.

So I don’t think one can truthfully say (in Jason’s words) that it is “patently untrue” that Microsoft controls OOXML. Or that OOXML “control and maintenance” is “independent of Microsoft” as Jerry promised it would be, or that the “global community would be in control” as Chris said. I don’t think those are accurate statements, given the evidence. I think the results fall far short of what was promised back when Microsoft were trying to secure a positive vote in ISO.

And this is not just me complaining. At the recent SC34 Plenary meeting in Seattle, delegates from several NBs approached me, voicing concerns at the domination Microsoft was asserting over the committee. (Perhaps this explains the substantial number of people who attended only one WG4 meeting and then never returned?) There is no easy solution here. Remember, we are dealing with a company that has demonstrated that it is willing to spend millions of dollars to protect its Office monopoly franchise from any pro-competition standards initiative.

The Former ISO Secretary-General, when interviewed about the OOXML farce, was asked about claims of Microsoft domination and admitted that he was powerless to stop this:

Companies have no direct vote on the International Standards, which are adopted according to voting by national member bodies, on the basis of one vote per country… As a stakeholder in the process, Microsoft and other interests certainly participated in the process to establish national positions. ISO and IEC national members are fully responsible for the way national votes are formed and relevant national interests consulted.

Evidently there is no one capable of fixing this. ISO says that domination by a single corporation is not their responsibility, because only NBs vote and each NB determines its own participation rules. But individual NBs also don’t see a problem, because any single one of them only has one Microsoft employee at the meeting. So the NB itself is not necessary stuffed (although that does happens occasionally as well). So by placing Microsoft employees in many NB delegations and putting the overflow into the Ecma delegation, Microsoft can still dominate the ISO committee and not trigger a rule violation in ISO or in any NB.

This is essentially how Microsoft hacked ISO. Now that the flaw has been demonstrated, any large international corporation with sufficient funds and interest can exploit it as well. So long as the rules remain as they are, ISO is vulnerable. ISO defends this criticism by pointing out what good work they’ve done in the past, and how they rarely have problems of this kind before. But this shows little appreciation for the nature of the problem which have been demonstrated. It is like arguing that a newly discovered (though long latent) security flaw in an operating system is insignificant because you’ve never had an attack before now. Of course, this misses the point entirely. Once the vulnerability is known and publicly exploited, you’re living on borrowed time until you can secure the system. Today ISO is living on borrowed time and is very close to becoming a Microsoft-infested zombie committee.


That is all for Part I of this update. In the next Part I’ll look at the maintenance of OOXML, and the most peculiar way in which the Microsoft-dominated committee is putting aside BRM decisions and making other breaking changes to the specification, in an bizarre attempt to make ISO OOXML conform to to the Microsoft Office standard.

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Filed Under: OOXML Tagged With: Ecma, ISO, JTC1/SC34, Microsoft

A Game of Zendo

2006/07/18 By Rob 11 Comments

It is the type of response that was crafted to end all debate and justify all sins: “Backward compatibility with billions of documents produced over decades”. Variations of this occur everywhere. Rather than cite them all, a simple Google query will bring up a representative sample.

Let’s take a deeper look at this argument.

There is a game called Zendo, where a player, called the “Master”, forms in his mind a secret rule which governs the selection and arrangement of objects (often small colored blocks). Arrangements which conform to the secret rule are said to have “Buddha nature”. The other players take turns selecting and arranging their own blocks to conform to what they think the secret rule is, to which the Master will acknowledge success or failure. The winner is the one who first guesses the secret rule, which might be something “an odd number of blocks, at least one of which must be red”.

Microsoft is playing Zendo with the OOXML specification. The Master has formed a secret rule. He calls it, “backwards compatibility with billions of office documents”. But since the file format documentation for the proprietary legacy binary formats has not been made public, the rule might as well just been called “Buddha nature”. It is just as opaque. We have no way of judging whether any specific requirement of OOXML is there to support backwards compatibility, or whether it is just there for the convenience of the Office development team. Or in fact whether it is there to raise barriers to non-Microsoft implementers. How could we know, since the solitary constraint on the creation of OOXML dependent on information that isn’t public? Does Ecma TC45 itself even have access to the binary format specifications? How are they able to properly judge what is done in the name of compatibility? Do we all just take Microsoft’s word for it?

The key point (in my opinion) is that legacy compatibility may be a constraining factor, but it need not be the sole determining factor.  There are many, perhaps an infinite number of possible markups which would be compatible with the legacy formats, meaning the legacy documents can be unambiguously transformed into the new XML format. The constraint should be that they are mappable, not that they must be identical. Among the set of such possible XML formats, some will be elegant, some sloppy, some bloated, some sparse, some which will be easy for others to implement, some designed to minimize conversion work for just one vendor, etc. In other words, this can be done well, or it can be done poorly. The constraint of compatibility does not justify everything.  Compatibility is one requirement, but it is not the only requirement.

An example may make things clear. Word has a feature called Art Page Borders. If you are like me, you’ve gone 15 years without seeing or using this feature. But it is there, under the Format/Borders and Shading menu, on the Page Border tab.

Art Borders dialog box in Microsoft Word

The markup needed to define these borders is covered in section 2.18.4 “ST_Border (Border Styles)” of the OOXML specification. Here we see descriptions and images of 200 hundred or so Art Page Borders. The images are heavily weighted to Western European, even Anglo-American celebratory icons, things like gingerbread men for Christmas, pumpkins for Halloween, or images of Cupid for St. Valentine’s day, or globes which are neatly centered on the United States. I think it is a legitimate concern that a document format with such obvious cultural biases is moving forward toward an international standard.

Further, I am concerned that the specification includes what can only be considered a clipart collection. What legal rights does the implementer have to reproduce this clipart? Keep in mind that Microsoft’s “Covenant Not to Sue” covers patents, not copyrights. I haven’t seen anything that would grant implementers of OOXML the rights to reproduce this clipart in their application. Is the specification hard-coded to use clipart which we cannot copy?

All of these problems (spec bloat, cultural bias, non-extensibility, copyright concerns) can be solved by one simple mechanism. Instead of having ST_Border be a fixed enumerated set of values, have it include only a small number of trivial values like the basic line styles, and have everything else (all of the Art Borders) be stored as a separate image file in the document archive.

So, if you load a Word XP document that uses the “candyCorn” Page Border, then when you write it out to OOXML, you would include a single frame of that art in the zip file and have the XML document reference that image for the border, tiling as necessary. This solution has several advantages:

  1. It removes some bloat from the spec. No need to document 100’s of page border clip art
  2. It lowers the barrier to implement. No one is required to implement 100’s of border styles. They are all generated on-the-fly based on images stored in the document.
  3. Copyright concerns are eliminated.
  4. Is an extensible approach. An implementation can include different or additional border styles according to their business and cultural requirements.
  5. It is compatible with legacy documents. Any existing Word binary or XML document can unambiguously be mapped into this scheme

Of course, this approach would require some minimal code changes in Microsoft Word to support this extensible mechanism. But remaining backwards compatible with the Microsoft Word product was never a stated constraint on OOXML. No one ever said that the goal of Ecma OOXML was to reduce the cost for Microsoft to implement it. It is all about the legacy documents, right?

So there it is, one example to illustrate a point that can be repeated over and over again. Among the potential universe of compatible XML formats for Office are those which are flexible, easy to use, easy to implement, as well as those which simply perpetuate the status quo and vendor lock in.

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Filed Under: OOXML Tagged With: Microsoft, OOXML, Zendo

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