By the early 1980s, the chaos and incompatibility that was rife in the early microcomputer market had given way to a smaller number of de facto industry standards, including the S-100 bus, CP/M, the Apple II, Microsoft BASIC in read-only memory (ROM), and the 5+1⁄4 inch floppy drive.
No single firm controlled the industry, and fierce competition ensured
that innovation in both hardware and software was the rule rather than
the exception. Microsoft Windows and Intel processors gained ascendance and their ongoing alliance gave them market dominance.
Intel claimed that this partnership has enabled the two companies
to give customers the benefit of "a seemingly unending spiral of
falling prices and rising performance". In addition, they claim a "history of innovation" and "a shared vision of flexible computing for the agile business".
In 1981, IBM entered the microcomputer market. The IBM PC was created
by a small subdivision of the firm. It was unusual for an IBM product
because it was largely sourced from outside component suppliers and was
intended to run third-party operating systems and software. IBM
published the technical specifications and schematics of the PC, which
allowed third-party companies to produce compatible hardware, the
so-called open architecture. The IBM PC became one of the most successful computers of all time.
The key feature of the IBM PC was that it had IBM's enormous
public respect behind it. It was an accident of history that the IBM PC
happened to have an Intel CPU (instead of the technically superior Motorola 68000 that had been tipped for it, or an IBM in-house design), and that it shipped with IBM PC DOS (a licensed version of Microsoft's MS-DOS) rather than the CP/M-86 operating system, but these accidents were to have enormous significance in later years.
Because the IBM PC was an IBM product with the IBM badge,
personal computers became respectable. It became easier for a business
to justify buying a microcomputer than it had been even a year or two
before, and easiest of all to justify buying the IBM Personal Computer.
Since the PC architecture was well documented in IBM's manuals, and PC
DOS was designed to be similar to earlier CP/M operating system, the PC
soon had thousands of different third-party add-in cards and software
packages available. This made the PC the preferred option for many,
since the PC supported the hardware and software they needed.
Competitors
Industry competitors took one of several approaches to the changing market. Some (such as Apple, Amiga, Atari, and Acorn) persevered with their independent and quite different systems. Of those systems, Apple's Mac is the only one remaining on the market. Others (such as Digital, then the world's second-largest computer company, Hewlett-Packard, and Apricot)
concentrated on making similar but technically superior models. Other
early market leaders (such as Tandy-Radio Shack or Texas Instruments)
stayed with outdated architectures and proprietary operating systems for
some time before belatedly realizing which way market trends were going
and switching to the most successful long-term business strategy, which
was to build a machine that duplicated the IBM PC as closely as
possible and sell it for a slightly lower price, or with higher
performance. Given the very conservative engineering of the early IBM
personal computers and their higher than average prices, this was not a
terribly difficult task at first, bar only the great technical challenge
of crafting a BIOS that duplicated the function of the IBM BIOS exactly but did not infringe on copyrights.
The two early leaders in this last strategy were both start-up companies: Columbia Data Products and Compaq.
They were the first to achieve reputations for very close
compatibility with the IBM machines, which meant that they could run
software written for the IBM machine without recompilation. Before
long, IBM had the best-selling personal computer in the world and at
least two of the next-best sellers were, for practical purposes,
identical.
For the software industry, the effect was profound. First, it
meant that it was rational to write for the IBM PC and its clones as a
high priority, and port versions for less common systems at leisure.
Second (and even more importantly), when a software writer in
pre-IBM days had to be careful to use as plain a subset of the possible
techniques as practicable (so as to be able to run on any hardware that
ran CP/M), with a major part of the market now all using the same exact
hardware (or a very similar clone of it) it was practical to take
advantage of any and every hardware-specific feature offered by the IBM.
Independent BIOS companies like Award, Chips and Technologies, and Phoenix began to market a clean room
BIOS that was 100% compatible with IBM's, and from that time on any
competent computer manufacturer could achieve IBM compatibility as a
matter of routine.
From around 1984, the market was fast growing but relatively
stable. There was as yet no sign of the "Win" half of "Wintel," though
Microsoft was achieving enormous revenues from DOS sales both to IBM and
to an ever-growing list of other manufacturers who had agreed to buy an
MS-DOS license for every machine they made, even those that shipped
with competing products. As for Intel, every PC made either had an Intel
processor or one made by a second source supplier under license from
Intel. Intel and Microsoft had enormous revenues, Compaq and many other
makers between them made far more machines than IBM, but the power to
decide the shape of the personal computer rested firmly in IBM's hands.
In 1987, IBM introduced the PS/2 computer line. Although the open architecture
of the PC and its successors had been a great success for them, and
they were the biggest single manufacturer, most of the market was buying
faster and cheaper IBM-compatible machines made by other firms. The
PS/2s remained software compatible, but the hardware was quite
different. It introduced the technically superior Micro Channel architecture bus for higher speed communication within the system, but failed to maintain the open AT bus (later called the ISA bus),
which meant that none of the millions of existing add-in cards would
function. In other words, the new IBM machines were not IBM-compatible.
Further, IBM planned the PS/2 in such a way that for both
technical and legal reasons it would be very difficult to clone.
Instead, IBM offered to sell a PS/2 licence to anyone who could afford
the royalty. They would not only require a royalty for every
PS/2-compatible machine sold, but also a payment for every
IBM-compatible machine the particular maker had ever made in the past.
Many PC manufacturers signed up as PS/2 licensees. (Apricot, who
had lost badly by persevering with their "better PC than IBM" strategy
up until this time, was one of them, but there were many others.) Many
others decided to hold off before committing themselves. Some major
manufacturers, known as the Gang of Nine,
decided to group together and decide on a bus type that would be open
to all manufacturers, as fast as or faster than IBM's Microchannel, and
yet still retain backward compatibility with ISA.
This was the crucial turning point: the industry as a whole was
no longer content to let IBM make all the major decisions about
technical direction. In the event, the new EISA
bus was itself a commercial failure beyond the high end: By the time
the cost of implementing EISA was reduced to the extent that it would be
implemented in most desktop PCs, the much cheaper VESA Local Bus
had removed most of the need for it in desktop PCs (though it remained
common in servers due to for example the possibility of data corruption
on hard disk drives attached to VLB controllers), and Intel's PCI
bus was just around the corner. But although very few EISA systems were
sold, it had achieved its purpose: IBM no longer controlled the
computer industry. IBM would belatedly amend the PS/2 series with the PS/ValuePoint line, which tracked the features of the emerging ad hoc platform.
At around this same time, the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, Microsoft's Windows operating environment started to become popular, and Microsoft's competitor Digital Research started to recover a share of the DOS press and DOS market with DR-DOS. IBM planned to replace DOS with the vastly superior OS/2
(originally an IBM/Microsoft joint venture, and unlike the PS/2
hardware, highly backward compatible), but Microsoft preferred to push
the industry in the direction of its own product, Windows. With IBM
suffering its greatest ever public humiliation in the wake of the PS/2
disaster, massive financial losses, and a marked lack of company unity
or direction, Microsoft's combination of a soft marketing voice and a
big financial stick was effective: Windows became the de facto standard.
For the competing computer manufacturers, large or small, the
only common factors to provide joint technical leadership were operating
software from Microsoft, and CPUs from Intel.
Dominance
Over the following years, both firms in the Wintel partnership would
attempt to extend their monopolies. Intel made a successful major push
into the motherboard and chipset markets—becoming the largest
motherboard manufacturer in the world and, at one stage, almost the only
chipset manufacturer—but badly fumbled its attempt to move into the
graphics chip market, and (from 1991) faced sharp competition in its
core CPU territory from AMD, Cyrix, VIA and Transmeta.
Microsoft fared better. In 1990, Microsoft had two competitors in
its core market (Digital Research and IBM), Intel had none. By 1996,
Intel had two competitors in its core market (CPUs), while Microsoft had
none. Microsoft had pursued a policy of insisting on per-processor
royalties, thus making competing operating systems unattractive to
computer manufacturers and provoking regulatory scrutiny from the
European Commission and US authorities, leading to an undertaking by
Microsoft to cease such practices. However, the integration of DOS into Windows 95
was the masterstroke: not only were the other operating system vendors
frozen out, Microsoft could now require computer manufacturers to comply
with its demands on pain of higher prices (as when it required IBM to
stop actively marketing OS/2 or else pay more than twice as much for
Windows 95 as its competitor Compaq)
or by withholding "Designed for Windows 95" endorsement (which was
regarded as an essential hardware marketing tool). Microsoft was also
able to require that free publicity be given over to them by hardware
makers. (For example, the Windows key
advertising symbols on nearly all modern keyboards, or the strict
license restrictions on what may or may not be displayed during system
boot and on the Windows desktop.) Also, Microsoft was able to take over
most of the networking market (formerly the domain of Artisoft's LANtastic and Novell's NetWare) with Windows NT, and the business application market (formerly led by Lotus and WordPerfect) with Microsoft Office.
Although Microsoft is by far the dominant player in the Wintel
partnership now, Intel's continuing influence should not be
underestimated. Intel and Microsoft, once the closest of partners, have
operated at an uneasy distance from one another since their first major
dispute, which had to do with Intel's heavy investment in the 32-bit
optimized Pentium Pro
and Microsoft's delivery of an unexpectedly high proportion of 16-bit
code in Windows 95. Both firms talk with one another's competitors from
time to time, most notably with Microsoft's close relationship with AMD
and the development of Windows XP Professional x64 Edition utilizing AMD-designed 64-bit extensions to the x86 architecture, and Intel's decision to sell its processors to Apple Inc.
The Wintel platform is still the dominant desktop and laptop computer architecture.
There have been opinions that Microsoft Windows
by its natural software bloat has eaten up much of the "hardware
progress" that Intel processors gave to the "Wintel platform" via Moore's law. After the rise of smartphones and netbooks
some media outlets have speculated predicting a possible end of Wintel
dominance with more and more cheap devices employing other technologies.
In the strictest sense, "Wintel"
refers only to computers that run Windows on an Intel processor.
However, Wintel is now commonly used to refer to a system running a
modern Microsoft operating system on any modern x86 compatible CPU,
manufactured by either Intel or AMD. That is because the PC applications that can run on an x86Intel processor usually can run on an x86 AMD processor too.
In mid-October 2017, Microsoft announced that Windows 10 on Qualcomm Snapdragon is at the final stage of testing. That would not be considered as "Wintel". Systems running a Microsoft operating system using an Intel processor based on the Itanium or ARM architecture, despite the fact that the processor is manufactured by Intel, are also not considered to be a Wintel system.
The Office Open XML file formats, also known as OOXML, were standardised between December 2006 and November 2008, first by the Ecma International consortium (where they became ECMA-376), and subsequently, after a contentious standardization process, by the ISO/IEC's Joint Technical Committee 1 (where they became ISO/IEC 29500:2008).
During standardisation within Ecma the specification grew to
approximately 6,000 pages. It was approved as an Ecma standard
(ECMA-376) on December 7, 2006. The standard can be downloaded from Ecma free of charge.
International standardization
Using their entitlement as an ISO/IEC JTC 1
external Category A liaison, Ecma International submitted ECMA-376 to
the JTC 1 fast track standardization process. To meet the requirements
of this process,
they submitted the documents "Explanatory report on Office Open XML Standard (Ecma-376) submitted to JTC 1 for fast-track" and "Licensing conditions that Microsoft offers for Office Open XML". ISO and IEC classified the specification as DIS 29500 (Draft International Standard 29500) Information technology – Office Open XML file formats.
The fast track process consists of a contradictions phase, a ballot phase, and a ballot resolution phase.
During the contradictions phase, ISO and IEC members submitted
perceived contradictions to JTC 1. During the ballot phase the members
voted on the specification as it was submitted by Ecma and submitted
editorial and technical comments with their vote. In the ballot
resolution phase the submitted comments were addressed and members were
invited to reconsider their vote.
Interim ballot result
During the standardization of Office Open XML, Ecma International submitted its Office Open XML File Formats standard (ECMA-376) to the ISO
Fast Track process. After a comment period, the ISO held a ballot that
closed September 2007. This has been observed to be perhaps the most
controversial and unusual ISO ballot ever convened, both in the number
of comments in opposition, and in unusual actions during the voting
process. Various factions have strongly supported and opposed this fast
track process. On the supporting side were primarily Microsoft
affiliated companies; on the opposing side were free- or open-source
software organizations, IBM and affiliates, Sun Microsystems, and Google.
There have been reports of attempted vote buying,heated verbal confrontations, refusal to come to consensus and other very unusual behavior in national standards bodies.
This is said to be unprecedented for standards bodies, which usually act
together and have generally worked to resolve concerns amicably.
87 ISO member countries responded to the five-month ballot. There
were 51 votes of "approval", 18 votes of "disapproval" and 18
abstentions. For the measure to pass, 2⁄3 of "P" members (participating, as opposed to "O" members: observing) must approve and less than 1⁄4
of all voting national members (excluding members that abstain from
voting) must disapprove. The ballot shows 53% approval by "P" members
and 26% disapproval from the total votes.
The following table shows the results by member of the balloting that ended 2 September 2007:
Country
Standards Body
Membership
Vote
Argentina
IRAM
O Member
Abstention
Chile
INN
O Member
Abstention
Israel
SII
O Member
Abstention
Luxembourg
SEE
O Member
Abstention
Mexico
DGN
O Member
Abstention
Peru
INDECOPI
O Member
Abstention
Vietnam
TCVN
O Member
Abstention
Australia
SA
P Member
Abstention
Belgium
NBN
P Member
Abstention
Finland
SFS
P Member
Abstention
Italy
UNI
P Member
Abstention
Malaysia
DSM
P Member
Abstention
Netherlands
NEN
P Member
Abstention
Slovenia
SIST
P Member
Abstention
Spain
AENOR
P Member
Abstention
Trinidad and Tobago
TTBS
P Member
Abstention
Mauritius
MSB
Abstention
Zimbabwe
SAZ
Abstention
Armenia
SARM
O Member
Approval
Belarus
BELST
O Member
Approval
Costa Rica
INTECO
O Member
Approval
Croatia
HZN
O Member
Approval
Cuba
NC
O Member
Approval
Egypt
EOS
O Member
Approval
Morocco
IMANOR
O Member
Approval
Romania
ASRO
O Member
Approval
Russian Federation
GOST R
O Member
Approval
Serbia
ISS
O Member
Approval
Sri Lanka
SLSI
O Member
Approval
Ukraine
DSSU
O Member
Approval
Azerbaijan
AZSTAND
P Member
Approval
Côte-d'Ivoire
CODINORM
P Member
Approval
Cyprus
CYS
P Member
Approval
Jamaica
JBS
P Member
Approval
Kazakhstan
KAZMEMST
P Member
Approval
Lebanon
LIBNOR
P Member
Approval
Pakistan
PSQCA
P Member
Approval
Saudi Arabia
SASO
P Member
Approval
Bangladesh
BSTI
Approval
Barbados
BNSI
Approval
Bosnia and Herzegovina
BAS
Approval
Congo, The Democratic Republic of
OCC
Approval
Fiji
FTSQCO
Approval
Kuwait
KOWSMD
Approval
Nigeria
SON
Approval
Panama
COPANIT
Approval
Qatar
QS
Approval
Syrian Arab Republic
SASMO
Approval
Tanzania, United Rep. of
TBS
Approval
United Arab Emirates
ESMA
Approval
Uzbekistan
UZSTANDARD
Approval
Austria
ON
O Member
Approval with comments
Bulgaria
BDS
O Member
Approval with comments
Colombia
ICONTEC
O Member
Approval with comments
Greece
ELOT
O Member
Approval with comments
Poland
PKN
O Member
Approval with comments
Portugal
IPQ
O Member
Approval with comments
Tunisia
INNORPI
O Member
Approval with comments
Germany
DIN
P Member
Approval with comments
Kenya
KEBS
P Member
Approval with comments
Malta
MSA
P Member
Approval with comments
Singapore
SPRING SG
P Member
Approval with comments
Switzerland
SNV
P Member
Approval with comments
Turkey
TSE
P Member
Approval with comments
Uruguay
UNIT
P Member
Approval with comments
Venezuela
FONDONORMA
P Member
Approval with comments
USA
ANSI
Secretariat
Approval with comments
Ghana
GSB
Approval with comments
Jordan
JISM
Approval with comments
Brazil
ABNT
O Member
Disapproval
Philippines
BPS
O Member
Disapproval
Thailand
TISI
O Member
Disapproval
Canada
SCC
P Member
Disapproval
China
SAC
P Member
Disapproval
Czech Republic
CNI
P Member
Disapproval
Denmark
DS
P Member
Disapproval
Ecuador
INEN
P Member
Disapproval
France
AFNOR
P Member
Disapproval
India
BIS
P Member
Disapproval
Iran, Islamic Republic of
ISIRI
P Member
Disapproval
Ireland
NSAI
P Member
Disapproval
Japan
JISC
P Member
Disapproval
Korea, Republic of
KATS
P Member
Disapproval
New Zealand
SNZ
P Member
Disapproval
Norway
SN
P Member
Disapproval
South Africa
SABS
P Member
Disapproval
United Kingdom
BSI
P Member
Disapproval
On 25–29 February 2008, a Ballot Resolution Meeting was held in
Geneva, Switzerland, to consider revisions to the OOXML proposal. Under
ISO rules, national standards bodies have thirty days following the
Ballot Resolution Meeting to reconsider and possibly change their votes.
Belgium
The Belgian Bureau de Normalisation considered the revisions, but failed to reach a consensus on the proposal. Belgium's initial abstention therefore stood.
Czech Republic
The Český Normalizační Institut considered the revisions and changed its initial vote against the proposal to a vote in favour.
Germany
The Normenausschuss Informationstechnik und Anwendungen considered the revisions and reaffirmed Germany's initial vote for the proposal.
India
The Bureau of Indian Standards considered the revisions and reaffirmed India's initial vote against the proposal.
Netherlands
The Netherlands Standardization Institute (NEN) considered the revisions and reaffirmed the Netherlands' initial abstention.
Trinidad and Tobago
The Trinidad and Tobago Bureau of Standards announced that it will
change its initial abstention to a vote for the revised proposal.
In September 2007 eighty-seven ISO and IEC member countries had responded to the ballot.
There were 51 votes of "approval", 18 votes of "disapproval" and 18
abstentions. "P-members", who were required to vote, had to approve by
66.67% for the text to be approved. The P-members voted 17 in favour out
of 32, below the required threshold for approval. Also, no more than
25% of the total member votes may be negative for the text to be
approved, and this requirement was also not met since 26% of the total
votes were negative. The standardization process then entered its ballot
resolution phase, described below.
Response to ballot comments
Ecma
produced a draft "Disposition of Comments" document that addresses the
1,027 distinct "NB comments" (that is, comments by national bodies) that
had been submitted in the letter ballot phase. This document comprised
1,600 pages of commentary and proposed changes. The ISO and IEC members
had 6 weeks to review this draft, and had an opportunity to participate
in several informal conference call sessions with the Ecma TC45 to
discuss it before the BRM.
Ballot resolution process
A
Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) is an integral part of the ballot
resolution phase. The outcome of, and period following, this meeting
decided whether DIS 29500 succeeded or failed in its bid to become an
International Standard. The DIS 29500 BRM took place in late February
2008.
At the BRM, 873 proposed changes to the specification were
submitted by Ecma (of their 1,027 responses, 154 proposed no change). Of
these only 20% were discussed and modified in meeting sessions, given
the 5 day time limit of the meeting. The remaining 80% were not
discussed and were subject to a voting mechanism approved by the meeting
(see Resolution 37 of the meeting resolutions cited below). Using this
voting mechanism NBs could approve, disapprove or abstain on each and
every one of these proposed changes. This allowed a set of approved
changes to be decided upon without discussion.
With the original submitted draft used as the base, all the
agreed-upon changes were applied by the Project Editor to create a new
set of documents incorporating the changes agreed during the BRM. In
parallel with this, NBs had 30 days after the BRM in which to decide
whether to amend their votes of September 2, 2007.
Ballot result
A
number of JTC 1 members took the opportunity to amend their votes,
predominantly in favour of approval of DIS 29500. Thus, on April 2,
2008, ISO and IEC officially stated that the DIS 29500 had been approved
for acceptance as an ISO/IEC Standard, pending any appeals. They stated
that "75% of the JTC 1 participating member votes cast positive and 14%
of the total of national member body votes cast negative"
In accordance with the JTC 1 directives the Project Editor had created
a new version of the final text within a month of the BRM. After
review, corrections and the resolution of appeals, this text was
distributed to the members of SC34.
Appeals
Four JTC 1 members appealed the standardisation: the bodies of South Africa, Brazil, India and Venezuela.
Since the appeals system is designed to find a solution by consensus, it
was unlikely that the process would have resulted in ISO/IEC abandoning
progress of DIS 29500.
The CEOs of ISO and IEC advised the management board that these appeals
should no longer be processed any further: the Secretary General of ISO
is reported as stating: "[t]he processing of the ISO/IEC DIS 29500
project has been conducted in conformity with the ISO/IEC JTC 1
Directives, with decisions determined by the votes expressed by the
relevant ISO and IEC national bodies under their own responsibility, and
consequently, for the reasons mentioned above, the appeals should not
be processed further".
The main issue in the appeals was the BRM procedures.
The 3 appealing countries did not appeal during the BRM and even all
voted approval on the resolution that allowed for voting on each of the
resolutions that had not been discussed in the plenary meeting through
means of a form.
The three countries appealing used that form vote for a disapproval
vote of most of the responses (in total only 4 countries did that) but
failed to have a significant number of responses disapproved.
The appeals did not get sufficient support of the National Bodies
voting on the ISO and IEC management boards, and consequently the
go-ahead was given to publish ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology –
Office Open XML formats, as an ISO/IEC International Standard on August
15, 2008.
Publication
The International Standard ISO/IEC 29500:2008 was published in November 2008.
Maintenance regime
Following the standardization of ISO/IEC 29500, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34,
as the designated maintenance group for the standard, established two
ad hoc groups for deciding how the Standard would be maintained:
a group to collect comments on the newly approved standard, and a group
to decide what structures should be used for long-term maintenance. The
resulting recommendation was that ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 should assume full control of the maintenance work on ISO/IEC 29500. This decision was duly ratified at SC 34's September 2008 meeting on Jeju Island, Korea.
Ecma were invited as a liaison to provide individual experts to
contribute to the maintenance activity. This decision superseded an
earlier proposal from Ecma, in which Ecma itself proposed it was
responsible for maintenance.
On May 21, 2008, Microsoft announced that it would be "an active participant in the future evolution of ODF, Open XML, XPS and PDF standards".
ISO/IEC 29500 is maintained within Working Group 4 ("WG 4") of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 under the convenorship of MURATA Makoto of Japan.
Under this maintenance regime the JTC 1 Directives apply, and these stipulate that:
Proposals to amend the text, and acceptance of any such
amendments, are subject to normal JTC 1 voting processes (JTC 1
Directives clause 15.5)
The standard cannot be "stabilised" (no longer subject to periodic
maintenance) except through approval in a JTC 1 ballot (JTC 1
Directives, clause 15.6.2).
For the standard to be stabilised it must have passed through one review cycle (JTC 1 Directives,
clause 15.6.1). In this review cycle, the text would have to have been
re-written to comply with ISO's formatting and verbal requirements (JTC 1
Directives, clause 13.4).
WG 4 has a web site and open document register. Defect logs and statistics from WG 4 are available online.[50]
At the WG4 meeting in Copenhagen, June 22–24, 2009, there were 16
people listed as present; 5 of these were employed by Microsoft, 4 by
universities.
Reactions to standardization
Complaints about the national bodies process
Protest against OOXML ISO standardization in Oslo, Norway.Office Open XML ISO standardization protest in Bangalore, India.
There have been allegations that the ISO ballot process for Office
Open XML was marred with voting irregularities and heavy-handed tactics
by some stakeholders.
An Ars Technica article sources Groklaw stating that at Portugal's national body TC meeting, "representatives from Microsoft attempted to argue that Sun Microsystems, the creators and supporters of the competing OpenDocument format (ODF), could not be given a seat at the conference table because there was a lack of chairs."
In Sweden, Microsoft notified the Swedish Standards Institute
(SIS) that an employee sent a memo to two of its partners, requesting
them to join the SIS committee and vote in favor of Office Open XML in
return for "marketing contributions".
Jason Matusow, a Director in the Corporate Standards Strategy Team at
Microsoft, stated that the memo was the action of an individual employee
acting outside company policy, and that the memo was retracted as soon
as it was discovered. SIS have since changed its voting procedure so that a member has to actually participate before being allowed to vote.
Sweden invalidated its vote (80% was for approval) as one company cast more than one vote, which is against SIS policy.
Finnish IT journalists described that meeting as raising strong differences in opinions.
In Switzerland, SNV registered a vote of "approval with comments,"
and there was some criticism about a "conflict of interest" regarding
the chairman of the UK 14 sub-committee, who did not allow discussion of
licensing, economic and political arguments. In addition, the chairman of the relevant SNV parent committee is also the secretary general of Ecma International,
which approved OOXML as a standard. Further complaints regarded
"committee stuffing", which is however allowed by present SNV rules, and
non-adherence to SNV rules by the UK 14 chairman, which resulted in a
re-vote with the same result.
Australia's national standards body, Standards Australia, was criticized for its handling of the OOXML process by the New Zealand Open Source Society, the open source advisory firm Waugh Partners, Australian National University Professor Roger Clarke, OASIS lawyer Andrew Updegrove, IBMand Google. Standards Australia sent ISO SC 34 expert and XML and Schematron specialist Rick Jelliffe to the BRM, despite critics
alleging that Jelliffe would not represent the views of those opposing
the standardization. Jelliffe had previously been in the news after
being offered payment by Microsoft to improve incorrect Wikipedia
articles about Office Open XML.
Microsoft had bought a schema conversion tool from his company and he
had performed the initial conversion of the Office Open XML schemas from
XML Schemas to RELAX NG,
both schema languages he had been involved in standardizing. It was
alleged that Standards Australia had broken a previous public pledge to
send two internal employees to the BRM. However Standards Australia issued a press release denying this and
stating that the Computerworld article was "riddled with inaccuracies
and misrepresentations."
Norway's vote was decided by Standard Norge;
the mostly opposing viewpoints of the technical committee resulted in a
disapproval vote in the 2007 ballot. However, the administration of
Standard Norge changed Norway's vote to "approval" in 2008 even if the
majority of the committee argued in favor of keeping its "disapproval"
vote. Membership in the technical committee had risen from 6–7 to 30
members; all of the pre-OOXML members argued in favour of a "no" vote. In October 2008, 13 of the 23 members, 12 of which are associated with the open-source movement, resigned after OOXML was ratified by ISO and all appeals were rejected.
The IDABC community programme (which is managed by the European Commission) runs the "Open Source Observatory" which is "dedicated to Free/Libre/Open Source Software." Via its "Open Source News", it has reported on reports which criticize the standardization process.
It states that the German IT news site Heise reports that in Germany, two opponents of Office Open XML, Deutsche Telekom and Google, were not allowed to vote because they tried to join the committee last-minute. Open Source News says, "Participants described the process as ludicrous."
It relays a report from Michiel Leenaars (director of the Internet
Society Netherlands) that in the Netherlands, "the chair of the national
standardization committee deciding on OOXML, protested that the almost
unanimous conditional approval was blocked by Microsoft."
It reports on a report from Borys Musielak,
a member of Poland's Linux community, who wrote on the PolishLinux
website that Poland's technical committee KT 171 rejected Office Open
XML. The vote was invalidated and assigned to KT 182. A member of Poland's Linux
community believes this was due to "reorganisation in the Polish
standardisation body." KT 182 voted to approve Office Open XML.
It reports that in Andalucía, the director of Andalucía's Department for Innovation complained that Microsoft submitted misinformation to the Spanish National Body stating that it (Andalucía) supported the company's Office Open XML-proposal.
It reports that in Portugal, eleven companies (including IBM)
and open source advocacy groups requested that Portugal's Ministry of
Economy and Innovation investigate Portugal's vote on Office Open XML.
In June 2008, the High Court of Justice in the United Kingdom rejected a complaint by the UK Unix and Open Systems User Group (UKUUG), requesting a review of the British Standard Institution's
decision to vote in favour of DIS 29500. The judge commented that "this
application does not disclose any arguable breach of the procedures of
BSI or of rules of procedural fairness".
Other complaints
A further letter of protest was filed by Open Source Leverandørforeningen, a Danish open source vendor association although no appeal has been filed directly by Dansk Standard itself.
In September 2008, a joint letter known as the Consegi declaration
was issued and signed by 3 representatives for free software of the
countries that issued appeals (South Africa, Brazil and Venezuela) as
well as Ecuador, Cuba and Paraguay.
After the specification was officially accepted as an ISO standard, Red Hat and IBMclaimed the ISO is losing credibility, and
Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth commented "We're not going to invest in trying to implement a standard that is poorly defined."
IBM issued a press release stating: "IBM will continue to be an active
supporter of ODF. We look forward to being part of the community that
works to harmonize ODF and OOXML for the sake of consumers, companies
and governments, when OOXML control and maintenance is fully transferred
to JTC1."
Examination of fast track process
Deutsches Institut für Normung
(DIN, Germany) voted "yes" on DIS 29500, and stated that DIN as a whole
"recognised that there has been no serious breach of JTC 1 and ISO
rules", but that, "the conclusion has been reached that the rules for
the fast-track procedure need to be amended".
At the plenary meeting of JTC 1 in Nara,
Japan that took place in November 2008, a resolution was passed which
related to concerns expressed during the standardisation of ISO/IEC
29500.
Resolution 49 was entitled "Clarification on Consistency of Standards
vs Competing Specifications" and contained the following text:
JTC 1 recognizes its commitment to ISO's and IEC's "one
standard" principle; however, it recognizes that neither it nor its SCs
are in a position to mandate either the creation or the use of a single
standard, and that there are times when multiple standards make the most
sense in order to respond to the needs of the marketplace and of
society at large. It is not practical to define, a priori, criteria for
making these decisions. Therefore each standard must be judged by the
National Bodies, based on their markets, on its own merits.
At a companion meeting of the Special Working Group on Directives (SWG-Directives) in Osaka a recommendation was made
describing series of "concepts" that would in future be applied to the
Ballot Resolution process of future Fast Tracked standards. These
mirrored the process that had taken place for ISO/IEC 29500:
The purpose is to review and address ballot comments
The meeting must have a separate agenda and be convened as a
separate meeting even if it is in conjunction with/co-located with an
SC/WG meeting
The comments must be discussed within a single meeting and NOT distributed over a series of meetings
The meeting is open to the Fast track Submitter and to all National
Bodies regardless of whether or not the National Body has voted on the
document under review – no limitation on which National Body can
participate
The meeting participants represent their National Body and their National Body positions
All National Bodies have an equal say in any decisions made during the meeting
The Project Editor must prepare an Editor's proposed disposition of
ballot comments in sufficient time prior to the BRM to allow
consideration by National Bodies. This editor's proposed disposition of
comments document will be reviewed during the ballot resolution meeting
A disposition of ballot comments approved during the meeting must be
circulated following the meeting for the information of all National
Bodies
When all comments have been addressed and a disposition of comments
has been approved by the meeting, the BRM meeting criteria have been met
Standards lawyer Andy Updegrove (whose firm represents OASIS)
commented that he was "startled and dismayed" at these concepts, since
they "basically add up to a ratification of the conduct of the Geneva
BRM."
Investigation of Microsoft by the European Commission
In
January 2008, the European Commission started an antitrust
investigation into the interoperability of the Office Open XML format on
the request of European Committee for Interoperable Systems, described as "a coalition of Microsoft's largest competitors".
Anonymous source(s) of the Wall Street Journal claim that this
investigation also includes an investigation into whether Microsoft
violated antitrust laws in the course of the standardization process.
The Financial Times reports that European ISO members have confirmed
receipt of a letter by the European Commission "asking how they prepared
for votes [...] on acceptance of Microsoft's OOXML document format as a
worldwide standard."
Microsoft complaints about competitors
On February 14, 2007, Microsoft attacked IBM's opposition to the Office Open XML standardization process in an open letter, saying
On December 7, Ecma approved the adoption of Open XML as
an international open standard. The vote was nearly unanimous; of the 21
members, IBM's was the sole dissenting vote. IBM again was the lone
dissenter when Ecma also agreed to submit Open XML as a standard for
ratification by ISO/IEC JTC1.
IBM led a global campaign urging national bodies to demand that ISO/IEC
JTC1 not even consider Open XML, because ODF had made it through ISO/IEC
JTC1 first.
Nicos Tsilas, Microsoft's senior director of interoperability and
intellectual property policy, downplaying Microsoft's American and EU
conviction as abusers of monopoly power, expressed concern that IBM and
the Free Software Foundation have been lobbying governments to mandate the use of the rival OpenDocument format
(ODF) to the exclusion of other formats. In his opinion, they are
"using government intervention as a way to compete" as they "couldn't
compete technically."
IBM have asked governments to have an open-source, exclusive purchasing policy.
Arguments in support and criticism of Office Open XML standard
Support
Microsoft
believes its own format should be adopted. It has presented this
argument on its "community web site", a site owned and operated by
Microsoft.
Sun Microsystems initially voted against approval of DIS 29500 in the INCITS
V1 committee, but stated on the committee mailing list "We wish to make
it completely clear that we support DIS 29500 becoming an ISO Standard
and are in complete agreement with its stated purposes of enabling
interoperability among different implementations and providing
interoperable access to the legacy of Microsoft Office documents." and
that "We voted in the expectation that [...] changes will be made and
that a version of DIS 29500 capable of achieving its objectives would be
approved as an ISO Standard.".
ODF Alliance
India published an extensive technical report in 2007 containing
concrete issues by members of the association, as well as replies from
Microsoft.
In December 2007 Ecma International announced that many of reported issues will be taken into account in next edition of the standardisation proposal to ISO.
The British Library and the United States Library of Congress have participated in the work of Ecma TC45 and support the Office Open XML standard.
Former Gnome Foundation board member Miguel de Icaza, who started the GNOME and Mono projects, showed support for the Office Open XML document format, stating "OOXML is a superb standard and yet, it has been FUDed so badly by its competitors that serious people believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with it."
Patrick Durusau, the editor of the OpenDocument standard, has characterized OOXML as a "poster child for the open standards development process"
User base
The most widely used office productivity packages currently rely on various proprietary and reverse engineered binary file
formats such as those created by successive releases of Microsoft Word,
PowerPoint and Excel. However, OOXML is a new format which is not
backwards or forwards compatible with any of the old Microsoft Office
formats.
Policy arguments
With
regards to the alleged overlap in scope with the OpenDocument format,
Ecma has provided the following policy arguments in favor of
standardization: overlap in scope of ISO/IEC standards is common and can
serve a practical purpose; Office Open XML addresses distinct user
requirements; The OpenDocument Format and Office Open XML are structured
to meet different user requirements; and Office Open XML and
OpenDocument can serve as duo-standards.
Technical arguments
A study comparing IS 29500:2008 and IS 26300:2006 (ODF 1.0) by the German Fraunhofer Society found
It may be concluded that many of the functionalities,
especially those found in simpler documents, can be translated between
the standards, while the translation of other functionalities can prove
complex or even impossible.
Uses the ZIP format, making ZIP part of the standard. Due to compression, files are smaller than current binary formats.
It supports custom data elements for integration of data specific to
an application or an organisation that wants to use the format.
It defines spreadsheet formulas.
Office Open XML contains alternate representations for the XML
schemas and extensibility mechanisms using RELAX NG (ISO/IEC 19757-2)
and NVDL (ISO/IEC 19757-4.)
No restriction on image, audio or video types, Book 1 §14.2.12.
Embedded controls can be of any type, such as Java or ActiveX, Book 1 §15.2.8.
WordprocessingML font specifications can include font metrics and PANOSE information to assist in finding a substitution font if the original is not available, Book 3 §2.10.5.
In the situation where a consuming application might not be capable
of interpreting what a producing application wrote, Office Open XML
defines an Alternate Content Block which can represent said data in an
alternate format, such as an image. Book 3 §2.18.4.
Internationalization support. For example, date representation: In
WordprocessingML (Book 4 §2.18.7) and SpreadsheetML (Book 4 §3.18.5),
calendar dates after 1900 CE can be written using Gregorian (three variants), Hebrew, Hijri, Japanese (Emperor Era), Korean (Tangun Era), Saka, Taiwanese, and Thai formats. Also, there are several internationalization related spreadsheet conversion functions.
Custom XML schema extensibility allows the addition of features to
the format. This can, for instance, facilitate conversion from other
formats and future features that are not part of the official
specification.
Criticism
Technical
The
standard has been the subject of debate within the software industry.
At over 6,000 pages, the specification is difficult to evaluate quickly.
Objectors also claim that there could be user confusion regarding the
two standards because of the similarity of the "Office Open XML" name to
both "OpenDocument" and "OpenOffice". Objectors also argued that an ISO
standard for documents already exists and there is no need for a second
standard.
Google stated that "the ODF standard, which achieves the same goal, is only 867 pages" and that
If ISO were to give OOXML with its 6546 pages the same level of
review that other standards have seen, it would take 18 years (6576 days
for 6546 pages) to achieve comparable levels of review to the existing
ODF standard (871 days for 867 pages) which achieves the same purpose
and is thus a good comparison.
Considering that OOXML has only received about 5.5% of the review
that comparable standards have undergone, reports about
inconsistencies, contradictions and missing information are hardly
surprising.
Those who support the ODF standard include the FFII, ODF AllianceIBM, as well as South Africa, and other nations that voiced strong opposition to OOXML during standardization.
The ODF Alliance UK Action Group has stated that with OpenDocument an ISO standard for Office files already exists.
Further, they argue that the Office Open XML file-format is heavily based on Microsoft's own Office applications and is thus not vendor-neutral, and that it has inconsistencies with existing ISO standards such as time and date formats and color codes.
Process manipulation
In addition, the standardization process itself has been questioned,
including claims of balloting irregularities by some technical
committees, Microsoft representatives and Microsoft partners in trying
to get Office Open XML approved.
"The editorial group who actually produce the spec is referred to as
"ECMA", but in fact the work is mostly done by Microsoft people."
Post-adoption quotes
During a panel discussion on Red Hat Summit in Boston
in June 2008 Microsoft's national technology officer Stuart McKee said
that "ODF has clearly won". He also made the following statement:
We found ourselves so far down the path of the standardisation process
with no knowledge. We don't have a standards office. We didn't have a
standards department in the company. I think the one thing that we would
acknowledge and that we were frustrated with is that, by the time we
realised what was going on and the competitive environment that was
underway, we were late and there was a lot of catch-up. It was very
difficult to enter into conversations around the world where the debate
had already been framed.
On June 25, 2008, Gray Knowlton, a Group Product Manager for the
Microsoft Office system made the following statements regarding the
future of Open XML:
Microsoft will continue to support the development of the
specification and the adoption of the Open XML formats, in addition to
the other work we are driving around document formats in Office. [...]
In the end, Open XML is still the better choice for the compatibility
and line-of-business interoperability scenarios we have discussed
throughout its history. [...] while we are working on ODF moving
forward, we will remain committed to Open XML and believe that it will
be the format of choice for large parts of the global community.
Microsoft corrupted many members of ISO in order to win
approval for its phony 'open' document format, OOXML. This was so
governments that keep their documents in a Microsoft-only format can
pretend that they are using 'open standards.' The government of South
Africa has filed an appeal against the decision, citing the
irregularities in the process.
On March 31, 2010, Dr Alex Brown, who had been the Convener of the
February 2008 Ballot Resolution Meeting, posted an entry on his personal
blog
in which he complained of Microsoft's lack of progress in adapting
current and future versions of Microsoft Office to produce files in the
Strict (as opposed to the Transitional) ISO 29500 format:
On this count Microsoft seems set for failure. In its
pre-release form Office 2010 supports not the approved Strict variant of
OOXML, but the very format the global community rejected in September
2007, and subsequently marked as not for use in new documents—the
Transitional variant. Microsoft are behaving as if the JTC 1
standardisation process never happened...
Microsoft responded that the next release of Microsoft Office (version 15) would fully support ISO/IEC 29500 Strict.
Microsoft Office 2010 provides read support for ECMA-376, full support for ISO/IEC 29500 Transitional, and read support for ISO/IEC 29500 Strict. Microsoft Office 2013 and later fully support ISO/IEC 29500 Strict, but do not use it as the default file format because of backwards compatibility concerns.
Background
In 2000, Microsoft released an initial version of an XML-based format for Microsoft Excel, which was incorporated in Office XP. In 2002, a new file format for Microsoft Word followed. The Excel and Word formats—known as the Microsoft Office XML formats—were later incorporated into the 2003 release of Microsoft Office.
Microsoft announced in November 2005 that it would co-sponsor
standardization of the new version of their XML-based formats through Ecma International as "Office Open XML". The presentation was made to Ecma by Microsoft's Jean Paoli and Isabelle Valet-Harper.
Microsoft submitted initial material to Ecma International Technical Committee TC45, where it was standardized to become ECMA-376, approved in December 2006.
This standard was then fast-tracked in the Joint Technical Committee 1 of ISO and IEC. After initially failing to pass, an amended version of the format received the necessary votes for approval as an ISO/IEC Standard as the result of a JTC 1 fast-tracking standardization process that concluded in April 2008. The resulting four-part International Standard (designated ISO/IEC 29500:2008) was published in November 2008 and can be downloaded from the ITTF. A technically equivalent set of texts is published by Ecma as ECMA-376 Office Open XML File Formats—2nd edition (December 2008); they can be downloaded from their website.
The ISO/IEC standardization of Office Open XML was controversial and embittered, with much discussion both about the specification and about the standardization process. According to InfoWorld, "OOXML was opposed by many on grounds it was unneeded, as software makers could use OpenDocument Format (ODF), a less complicated office software format that was already an international standard." The same InfoWorld article reported that IBM (which supports the ODF
format) threatened to leave standards bodies that it said allow
dominant corporations like Microsoft to wield undue influence. The
article further says that Microsoft was accused of co-opting the
standardization process by leaning on countries to ensure that it got
enough votes at the ISO/IEC for Office Open XML to pass, although it
does not specify exactly who accused Microsoft.
Licensing
Under the Ecma International code of conduct in patent matters, participating and approving member organizations of ECMA are required to make their patent rights available on a reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) basis.
Holders of patents which concern ISO/IEC International Standards
may agree to a standardized license governing the terms under which such
patents may be licensed, in accord with the ISO/IEC/ITU common patent policy.
Microsoft, the main contributor to the standard, provided a covenant not to sue for its patent licensing. The covenant received a mixed reception, with some like the Groklawblog criticizing it, and others such as Lawrence Rosen, (an attorney and lecturer at Stanford Law School), endorsing it.
Microsoft irrevocably promises not to assert any
Microsoft Necessary Claims against you for making, using, selling,
offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation to the
extent it conforms to a Covered Specification […]
This is limited to applications which do not deviate from the ISO/IEC
29500:2008 or Ecma-376 standard and to parties that do not "file,
maintain or voluntarily participate in a patent infringement lawsuit
against a Microsoft implementation of such Covered Specification".
The Open Specification Promise was included in documents submitted to ISO/IEC in support of the ECMA-376 fast-track submission.
Ecma International asserted that, "The OSP enables both open source and commercial software to implement [the specification]".
Versions
The Office Open XML specification exists in several versions.
ECMA-376 1st edition (2006)
The ECMA standard is structured in five parts to meet the needs of different audiences.
Part 1. Fundamentals
Vocabulary, notational conventions and abbreviations
Summary of primary and supporting markup languages
Conformance conditions and interoperability guidelines
Constraints within the Open Packaging Conventions that apply to each document type
Part 2. Open Packaging Conventions
The Open Packaging Conventions
(OPC), for the package model and physical package, is defined and used
by various document types in various applications from multiple vendors.
It defines core properties, thumbnails, digital signatures, and
authorizations & encryption capabilities for parts or all of the
contents in the package.
XML schemas for the OPC are declared as XML Schema Definitions (XSD) and (non-normatively) using RELAX NG (ISO/IEC 19757-2)
Part 3. Primer
Informative (non-normative) introduction to WordprocessingML, SpreadsheetML, PresentationML, DrawingML, VML and Shared MLs, providing context and illustrating elements through examples and diagrams
Describes the custom XML data-storing facility within a package to support integration with business data
Part 4. Markup Language Reference
Contains the reference material for WordprocessingML,
SpreadsheetML, PresentationML, DrawingML, Shared MLs and Custom XML
Schema, defining every element and attribute including the element
hierarchy (parent/child relationships)
XML schemas for the markup languages are declared as XSD and (non-normatively) using RELAX NG
Defines the custom XML data-storing facility
Part 5. Markup Compatibility and Extensibility
Describes extension facilities of OpenXML documents and
specifies elements & attributes through which applications can
operate across different extensions.
Later versions of the ECMA-376 standard are aligned and technically equivalent to the corresponding ISO standard.
ISO/IEC 29500:2008
The ISO/IEC standard is structured into four parts: Parts 1, 2 and 3 are independent standards; for example, Part 2, specifying Open Packaging Conventions, is used by other file formats including XPS and Design Web Format. Part 4 is to be read as a modification to Part 1, which it requires.
A technically equivalent set of texts is also published by Ecma as ECMA-376 2nd edition (2008).
Part 1. Fundamentals & Markup Language Reference
Consisting of 5560 pages, this part contains:
Conformance definitions
Reference material for the XML document markup languages defined by the Standard
XML schemas for the document markup languages declared using XSD and (non-normatively) RELAX NG
Defines the foreign markup facilities
Part 2. Open Packaging Conventions
Consisting of 129 pages, this part contains:
A description of the Open Packaging Conventions (package model, physical package)
Legacy material such as compatibility settings and the graphics markup language VML
A list of syntactic differences between this text and ECMA-376 1st Edition
The standard specifies two levels of document & application conformance, strict and transitional, for each of WordprocessingML, PresentationML and SpreadsheetML, and also specifies applications' descriptions of base and full.
Compatibility between versions
The
intent of the changes from ECMA-376 1st Edition to ISO/IEC 29500:2008
was that a valid ECMA-376 document would also be a valid ISO 29500
Transitional document;
however, at least one change introduced at the BRM—refusing to allow
further values for xsd:boolean—had the effect of breaking
backwards-compatibility for most documents. A fix for this had been suggested to ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34/WG 4, and was approved in June 2009 as a recommendation for the first revision to Office Open XML.
Applications capable of reading documents compliant to ECMA-376
Edition 1 would regard ISO/IEC 29500-4 Transitional documents containing
ISO 8601 dates as corrupt.
Some older versions of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office are able to read and write .docx files after installation of the free compatibility pack provided by Microsoft, although some items, such as equations, are converted into images that cannot be edited.
Starting with Microsoft Office 2007, the Office Open XML file formats have become the default file format of Microsoft Office.
However, due to the changes introduced in the Office Open XML standard,
Office 2007 is not wholly in compliance with ISO/IEC 29500:2008.
Office 2010
includes support for opening documents of the ISO/IEC
29500:2008-compliant version of Office Open XML, but it can only save
documents conforming to the transitional, not the strict, schemas of the specification.Note that the intent of the ISO/IEC is to allow the removal of the transitional variant from the ISO/IEC 29500 standard.
The ability to read and write Office Open XML format is, however,
not limited to Microsoft Office; other office products are also able to
read & write this format:
Collabora Online for Online, Mobile and Desktop apps are able to open and save Office Open XML files.
SoftMaker Office 2010 is able to read and write DOCX and XLSX files in its word processor & spreadsheet applications.
LibreOffice is able to open and save Office Open XML files.
Apache OpenOffice from version 3.0 can import Office Open XML files but not save them. Version 3.2 improved this feature with read support even for password-protected Office Open XML files.
The Go-oo fork of OpenOffice could also write OOXML files.
KOffice from version 2.2 and later was able to import OOXML files.
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