“Microsoft needs our help,” the man with the megaphone exclaimed to the gathering of protesters. It was an unlikely refrain, but then, it was an unlikely occasion.

On 9 April, around 60 Norwegian information management experts and software developers took to the streets of Oslo to protest against the local chapter of the International Standards Organisation (ISO) for its complicity in the ratification of Microsoft’s Open Office XML document (OOXML) standard.

Steve Pepper had been chairman of Standards Norway until its members voted to support Microsoft’s bid to establish OOXML as a bona fide document standard. Pepper stepped down in disgust.

On 2 April 2008, the votes of all of the regional constituents were counted, and OOXML was granted official standard status. Pepper and his supporters voiced their dismay outside the Standards Norway HQ.

“We are here because we want to draw attention to the scandalous behaviour of the people in Standard Norway whose job it is to represent Norwegian users and software vendors,” Pepper said.

“We are not against OOXML itself,” he went on. “In fact, we thank Microsoft for finally, after 20 years of market dominance, documenting its format in an open-source specification. However, we are against ISO’s approval of OOXML.”

Pepper and a vociferous (if out-voted) group of document standards experts argue that OOXML exists only to aid Microsoft in retaining its influence over office document formats.

The Open Document Format (ODF), ratified two years ago and backed by IBM and Sun Microsystems, provides an independently developed XML schema for documents and is perfectly fit for its purpose, argue Microsoft’s critics. Microsoft insists that forthcoming editions of its Office software suite will require richer functionality than ODF permits, hence the necessary development of its own standard.

“Microsoft is the big bad wolf of standards, just as IBM was 20 years ago,” Pepper said. But, with the help of the standards community, he proposed, Microsoft can be rehabilitated.

“IBM has shown that it is possible to change,” Pepper concluded. “I hope that Microsoft too will now change.”

Photo: Per Inge Oestmoen, Electronic Frontier Norway

Further reading

Microsoft's OOXML format ratified

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