[ubuntu-in] [Fwd: MS, IBM fight to own office docs heats up]]

[ramnarayan.k at gmail.com]

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-----Original Message-----
From: ganeshtk [mailto:ganeshtk at isec.ac.in]
Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2007 11:44 AM
To: lina
Subject: MS, IBM fight to own office docs heats up


MS, IBM fight to own office docs heats up
8 Aug, 2007, 0152 hrs IST,Harsimran Singh, TNN


  HYPERLINK
"http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-2263811,prtpage-1.
cms" \nPrint



NEW DELHI: The fight between world’s biggest IT companies — Microsoft
and IBM-Sun Microsystems combine — has landed on Indian shores. Come
September 2 and India faces a deadline: to vote for making Microsoft’s
Open Office Extensible Markup Language (OOXML) as an ISO standard for
electronic documents or not along with 123 other countries.

But the Bureau of Indian Standards, which has to submit a vote on
India’s behalf seems clueless, despite less than a month to go for the
deadline. Microsoft and rival ODF (Open Document Format) alliance led by
IBM & Sun Microsystems are hurling accusations at each other. A meeting
on the issue has been called on Wednesday by BIS.

Sun Microsystems country director (government strategy) Jaijit
Bhattacharya said, “About 160 technical issues have been identified with
OOXML. OOXML does not seem to address its design goals. Moreover, no
Indian organisation or institution was involved in the development of
OOXML. If we do not have any say in the development of a standard, we
lose out on the technological sovereignty. We do not see any standalone
implementations of OOXML by an Indian firm unlike the ISO ODF standard.”


Microsoft, however, counters Sun’s claims. A meeting has been called on
Thursday by the government in which both parties will meet. Microsoft
India’s national technology officer Vijay Kapur counters Sun, “OOXML is
an open standard and its specifications are fully documented. There is
no royalty charged and it works on a covenant of not to sue. It does not
recourse to any proprietary information held by Microsoft.”

“OOXML’s design principles are based on the old binary format which is
known only to a selective few, decided by Microsoft. There is no clarity
by Microsoft on the same. OOXML is also not fully interoperable as the
full fidelity of an Open Office (ODF) document is not maintained in MS
Word or other OOXML based word processors,” adds Mr Bhattacharya.

ODF advocate IIT-Delhi assistant Prof P Vigneshwara IIavarasan clarifies
the issue, “The politics behind the battle is clear. Microsoft wants to
retain its over 95% market share in word processing documents in the
garb of OOXML. But Sun Micro and IBM want to grab a pie of it and
prevent Microsoft in its plans.”

He, however, confirms Sun Microsystems claims that a MS Word document is
not fully interoperable with Open Office (by ODF) and hence not an open
standard. A converter or translator has to be downloaded to convert one
format to another. Experts say that adopting OOXML will make India
locked into a particular vendor.


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