First Public Draft of Open XML is Published (and it's bigger than ever)

The best source of information on it so far is Brian Jones' blog (Brian is a Microsoft Office Program Manager who has frequently provided public comments on the progress and purpose of Open XML). According to Jones, the specification is now 4,000 pages long, the result of an effort to describe everything that Office can produce - right down to 200 legacy border patterns. While that's good for interoperability, it's death to innovation, since it means that only clones will meet the spec. It's also death to competition, since no would-be competitor would ever expect to be able to catch up with Microsoft, much less compete on price. The result appears to be that the eventual Ecma standard may be fine (and even perhaps very good) for allowing external developers and end users to be able to do more with their Office documents, but useless when it comes to creating true competition in the marketplace - which presumably is exactly what is intended.

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