Red Hat Summit panel: Who ‘won’ OO_xml_ battle?
by T. Colin Dodd

Red Hat Summit panel: Who ‘won’ OO_xml_ battle? | InfoWorld | News | 2008-06-19 | By Chris Kanaracus, IDG News Service

ODF (Open Document Format) has benefited from the two-year battle over the ratification of Microsoft’s rival OO_xml_ (Open Office _xml_) standard, which is native to its Office 2007 suite, Microsoft’s national technology officer said Thursday during a panel discussion at the Red Hat Summit in Boston.

“ODF has clearly won,” said Stuart McKee, referring to Microsoft’s recent announcement that it would begin natively supporting ODF in Office next year and join the technical committee overseeing the next version of the format.

“We sell software for a living. The ability to implement ODF in the middle of our ship cycle was just not possible,” he said. “We couldn’t do that during the release of Office 2007. We’re looking forward and committed to doing more than [ODF-to-OO_xml_] translators.”

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) ratified OO_xml_ in April. ODF backers, including major vendors like IBM and Sun, long decried it as too proprietary to be declared a standard.