All the posts we have dedicated to the OOXML format – and many of those we will dedicate to it in future – analyse the reasons why it is a proprietary format despite having been approved by ISO as a standard, open format. However, they do not address the reasons behind or the details of the standardisation process.
This is a gap we hope to fill with this post, which summarises the events that took place between the standardisation of the ODF format – a standard and open format – and the standardisation process for OOXML, as well as the process itself, which was completely broken in every respect, from methodology to procedure.
Microsoft had begun work on an XML-based document format around the year 2000, with the aim of modernising the obsolete DOC, XLS and PPT formats, which were simply the serialisation (writing) of memory content to disc, and as such were no longer in line with the evolution of Microsoft Office.
The aim was certainly not to develop a standard format, not least because the echo of Bill Gates’ internal memo – “allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other people’s browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company; we have to make sure that Office documents depend on proprietary capabilities” (slightly abridged version of the original memo) – had not yet died down.
Consequently, during the ODF standardisation process, Microsoft had stated that it would not support the ODF standard format, as it was not in its own interests.
In early 2006, however, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts – one of the historic states of the confederation – announced that it would adopt ODF for all public documents, so that they would be independent of software from a single vendor.
This decision provoked a reaction from Microsoft, which could not tolerate the fact that a US state was adopting a standard, open format developed outside its control, which benefited users rather than its own commercial interests.
The story of the ISO/IEC 29500 “standard”
The battle over the ISO/IEC 29500 “standard” – the ISO standardisation of Microsoft’s Office Open XML format between 2006 and 2008 – is a perfect example of a broken standardisation process.
It is not an exceptional case, but it has been thoroughly documented and offers important food for thought for all those who continue to maintain that the OOXML format is a standard.
The story began in December 2006, when Ecma International – whose Technical Committee 45, responsible for the project, at the time was chaired by two Microsoft employees – submitted the OOXML specification to the ISO/IEC JTC1 (Joint Technical Committee) of ISO/IEC for adoption as an international standard under the “fast-track” procedure, designed for tried-and-tested specifications requiring only administrative ratification.
The decision to submit a 6,000-page specification – one of the longest ever submitted to ISO – via a process designed for short and fairly well-established documents had a decisive impact on the nature of the review to which the standard was subjected.
In September 2007, the proposal was rejected by ISO members due to votes against it or substantial technical objections to its approval. Brazil raised more than sixty technical objections regarding the use of non-standard date formats and inadequate language support. India contested the incompatibility with the ISO ODF standard. France proposed splitting the specification into a “clean” core and a compatibility layer for pre-existing systems. Norway submitted twelve specific technical observations.
These concerns were not mere complaints but went to the heart of the matter: namely, whether the OOXML format specifications could meet the fundamental requirements of an international standard.
Issues at national standardisation committees
What followed this vote was the subject of appeals by numerous national standardisation bodies. In many countries, there were widely documented reports of serious irregularities in the composition and conduct of the national technical committees.
In Portugal, new members appeared, the majority of whom were identified as Microsoft business partners. In Italy, the number of members rose from 5 to over 80 in just a few months, and among them were one law firm and a PR agency working for Microsoft on topics that had no connection whatsoever with the document formats, and several Microsoft business partners.
In Norway, the committee chair resigned in protest.
Martin Bryan, coordinator of the ISO working group, stated publicly that the influx of these new members, whose sole interest was to speed up the OOXML approval process, had caused several important procedural votes to fail.
Microsoft sent an official letter to the Spanish national body claiming that the Andalusian regional government supported OOXML, a claim which was promptly denied by the Andalusian government itself, which also lodged a complaint.
As interested observers of the process, and as members of various national standardisation bodies, we can add that all this stemmed from the head-to-head competition between Microsoft and IBM, which at the time were focused solely on competing with one another on the basis of their financial strength and completely ignored the interests of users – a situation that is now penalising us at every level.
Had the two companies invested the same energy in developing a cross-platform standard format, building on what had already been approved – namely ODF – and improving those parts where it was not yet fully developed, instead of filling the committees with “relatives and friends”, we would be in a completely different situation today, and we would not have to fight for our digital sovereignty.
The Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva
In February 2008, the Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) was convened in Geneva, during which representatives of national bodies were expected to examine the thousands of proposed amendments to the 6,000-page document in just one week. An unachievable goal.
Many national bodies reported that they had been unable to examine the actual text on which they were supposed to vote, as the final version of the specification had not been submitted. The BRM coordinator, Dr Alex Brown, subsequently stated publicly that failing to make the final text available to national bodies during the appeal period had been irresponsible.
The standard was approved in April 2008, narrowly meeting the required threshold. Appeals lodged by South Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, India and other countries against procedural irregularities were rejected by the ISO Technical Committee. A post-approval analysis revealed that, during the BRM, Microsoft employees and “partners” outnumbered representatives from every other organisation by a ratio of approximately ten to one.
The OOXML format today
Microsoft launched Office 2010, implementing not the approved “Strict” variant of ISO 29500, but the earlier “Transitional” variant rejected by ISO in the September 2007 vote, which had been deemed unsuitable for use in new documents. Alex Brown, the BRM coordinator who had overseen the approval, publicly accused Microsoft of acting in bad faith.
The “Transitional” variant of the OOXML format is the one used by all users of Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365, as well as by clones of the two suites such as OnlyOffice, WPS Office and Euro-Office. The “Strict” variant has disappeared from discussions and is the last – and most obscure – option in the format menu.
The responsibilities of standardisation bodies
The case of the ISO 29500 standard demonstrates that standardisation processes, however well designed, can be manipulated by companies with sufficient resources and motivation.
The fast-track procedure was abused. The composition of the national committee was manipulated. The procedural rules were interpreted in such a way as to favour the proposer. The sheer volume of the specification made a genuine technical review by independent experts practically impossible within the available timeframe.
Following approval, a variant of the standard different from the one approved was implemented, without any consequences. Indeed, we can legitimately argue that the advantages the company derived from this failure to comply with the standard were actually rewarded by the market, and were not sanctioned by any authority at any level.
The conditions that allowed ISO 29500 to develop as it did – the concentration of resources, the decisive influence of commercial strategies and objectives, and the asymmetry in investment between large and small companies – were not addressed by the reform of the JTC1 “fast-track” procedure following the OOXML scandal.
Standards bodies are, nominally, neutral arbiters – forums where conflicting interests negotiate shared solutions – but in practice their neutrality is always contested and never guaranteed.
The companies that invest most heavily in the standardisation process – sending more representatives to meetings, funding the secretariats, and having the resources to comment exhaustively on every draft – are also those that exert the greatest influence over the processes.
This does not mean that standardisation bodies are subject to pressure or corrupt, as most operate with a sincere commitment to their mission.
It does, however, mean that the conditions underpinning good standards are not automatic, but require the active participation of various stakeholders – governments, civil society organisations and the academic community – whose interests are not aligned with those of commercial companies, as well as a set of rules that prevent any single company from dominating the process.
Above all, they require a culture within the standards community that takes the principles of reusability, transparency and genuine interoperability seriously as values, and not merely as rhetorical, superficial commitments, which conceal specific commercial strategies.