Earlier this month, Microsoft said it would be submitting its Open XML document format, which will be the default file format in the next version of its Office suite, to standards body Ecma. The company hopes this will eventually mean Open XML will be approved by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) and approved as a global standard.
The move comes after the US State of Massachusetts in September said it would adopt OpenDocument as its default document standard because it wanted to move away from proprietary document formats.
In a research note published on Thursday, Gartner analysts Rita Knox and Michael Silver, said that by pushing Open XML as an open standard, Microsoft may have effectively hobbled the widespread take-up of OpenDocument.
"The OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee... has increasingly been seen as a serious competitor to the Microsoft specification. Microsoft's moves will likely stall that trend," the research note said.
Knox and Silver point out that the State of Massachusetts is now reconsidering its decision to adopt OpenDocument and ditch Microsoft's proprietary Office format, is an indication of the new trend.
"The Massachusetts state government, for example, had previously made a highly publicised decision to adopt OpenDocument and drop the Microsoft Office formats, but may now be considering a broader range of options in its approach to this issue," the analysts said.
The governor's office of Massachusetts earlier this week issued a statement saying that it was "optimistic" that Microsoft's Office Open XML document formats will meet the standard for an "open format".
"The Commonwealth is very pleased with Microsoft's progress in creating an open document format. If Microsoft follows through as planned, we are optimistic that Office Open XML will meet our new standards for acceptable open formats," the statement said.
However, Gartner recommends that enterprises looking for an open XML-based document format should adopt the OpenDocument format if they can exploit XML immediately because the Ecma specification is unlikely to appear for at least another year.
CNET News.com's Martin LaMonica contributed to this story.
From what I have read, the US State of Massachusetts was also looking at who has control of the specs. Just getting the Office Open XML standardized doesn't mean that mean that Microsoft will open up and share control of the specification in the future. Does it?
I followed the standardization of the OpenDocument format periodically. I read over the meeting notes from the technical committee from time to time. There was no need for me to follow the process closely; but the fact is that I, or anyone else, could have. Anyone with a relevant thought or idea at least stands a chance of having their voice heard. The power of peer-review is very far reaching. I somehow doubt that Microsoft will be that open with their format.
As I'm sure you all known, the OpenDocument stanardization process included all of big companies; basicly, all the relevant players were involved, except Microsoft. If Microsoft wanted to support an "open" format, then why didn't they join the technical committee from the beginning? And if the OpenDocument format was "technically inferior", then they could have contributed their own specs and started from there.