OpenXML wins ISO Standardisation and gets Better with Community

The FINAL verdict on ISO standardisation is out and OpenXML is now an ISO standard.

This standardisation process (that has consensus at its heart) has given an overwhelming endorsement (with 86% of voting national bodies) for ratification of OpenXML as an ISO standard.

The ISO standardisation process has strengthened the OpenXML standard making it much better than ever before. What is even better is that OpenXML is now in stewardship of the community and NOT “owned” by any company. The real motives  behind the protectionist “Open Source” (what a fallacy) lobby now stands exposed..

A lot of countries changed their votes from “No” to “Yes” after their comments were addressed during the Ballot Resolution Meeting process. While the LITD 15 Committee at the BIS didn’t endorse the OpenXML standard but the positive endorsement of various industry bodies and India’s leading IT companies prove that OpenXML has opened up a huge business opportunity for everybody! It has the potential to become the next Y2K goldmine that most of the Indian companies owe their fortunes to..

Another debate that gets settled is that we do need different standards as much as we need different products in the ecosystem.. the strongest standard would only gain widespread adoption and will survive! we don’t need to artificially create barriers for standards or products..

However, the work for Microsoft has only begun.. it needs to continue to work in an open & collaborative manner with various bodies and continue to bring more standards to marketplace.

And the community can reliably start building solutions using OpenXML standard. Here’s what one of my friends from community suggested someone should do - “Build a lightweight FREE application that people can use to author OpenXML documents on their PCs”.. now let the innovation begin!

Related Posts:

Witness the Academia - Industry divide!
OpenXML and ISO standardisation: Community contribution shines
OpenXML: Microsoft gets it right, will India too?
Use Java with OpenXML
ECMA approves Office Open XML as a standard - MS Office becomes standards compliant
Technorati tags: , ,

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Community Star Discussions and Future

Making Vista Search your PST Files

Technocratical Society