a 'mooh' point

clearly an IBM drone

IBM: Thumbs up for OOXML!

16. April 2009 23:32 / jlundstocholm / Generel Comments (6)

Today news broke that ANSI (the US national standardisation guys) recently voted on the subject of approving OOXML as an "American National Standard".

The text of the ballot was:

Approval to Adopt the International Standards listed below as American National Standards:

  • ISO/IEC 29500-1:2008 (...) Part 1: Fundamentals and Markup Language Reference
  • ISO/IEC 29500-2:2008 (...) Part 2: Open Packaging Conventions
  • ISO/IEC 29500-3:2008 (...) Part 3: Markup Compatibility and Extensibility
  • ISO/IEC 29500-4:2008 (...) Part 4: Transitional Migration Features

A total of 20 organisations/entities voted and the result was

  • Approve: 12
  • No: 0
  • Abstain: 2
  • Not voted: 2

The details are here:

DateOrganizationYesNoAbstainNot Yet
TOTAL 12 0 2 4
03/16/2009 Adobe Systems       X
04/13/2009 Apple Inc X      
04/15/2009 Department of Homeland Security X      
03/16/2009 DMTF       X
04/09/2009 Electronic Industries Alliance X      
03/16/2009 EMC X      
03/16/2009 Farance, Incorporated       X
03/16/2009 Google       X
04/15/2009 GS1 US     X   Comments
04/13/2009 Hewlett Packard Co X      
03/24/2009 IBM Corp X      
04/15/2009 IEEE     X   Comments
04/08/2009 Intel X      
03/18/2009 Lexmark International X      
03/17/2009 Microsoft X      
03/16/2009 NIST X      
03/19/2009 Oracle X      
03/16/2009 US Department of Defense X      

An interesting vote here is naturally the vote of "International Business Machines Corp", otherwise known as IBM. It seems they now support OOXML - good for them.

I think it is an extremely positive move from IBM and I salute them for finally getting their act together and supporting OOXML. I also hope IBM will tread in the footsteps of Microsoft in terms of TC-participation and join us in SC34/WG4 to contribute to the work we do. I think it is positive for the industry that Microsoft finally joined OASIS ODF TC last summer, and I hope IBM will do the same with SC34/WG4 - we need other vendors besides Microsoft at the table. I also hope this means that IBM will speed up support for OOXML in either Lotus Symphony or OpenOffice.org. The support for OOXML in other applications than Microsoft Office 2007 is ridiculously low.

Thank you, IBM - you really made my day.

Smile

PS: I appologize for the colors of the table above

 

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