Open standards beat Microsoft 13 to 4 - Microsoft's plans of having its OOXML document format accepted as a national standard were thwarted by a conclusive vote against the move in a meeting yesterday.

The issue:
There are currently two emerging document formats battling it out for the title of the new industry standard format. Think of it as a fight to replace MSOffice's .doc format.
In the one corner, we have ODF, or Open Document Format backed by the technological community. ODF is a published ISO and IEC International Standard, and meets the common definitions of an open standard, meaning the specification is freely available and implementable by anyone.
In the other corner, we have OOXML, or Office Open XML, backed by the software behemoth, Microsoft. OOXML is currently, NOT an ISO standard, but Redmond is twisting arms left and right to gain ISO certification. Adverse criticism of OOXML by ODF proponents, is that OOXML is inherently closed in many respects,despite the name, and thus a poor candidate for a global standard.

So why do we need a new format?
MS Office is currently considered the defacto standard when it comes to document distribution. Microsoft knows this, and this is why we have to pay through our noses for MSOffice products. Switching to an open standard ensures that anybody can release office software compatible with the format, and that documentation will look the same in all office packages. More importantly, it ensures that all office packages in the future will be able to access documents written today, we will never again have the problem of incompatible document formats.

Where does South Africa come into the picture?
Microsoft knows that it will lose a very large portion of its revenue if its stranglehold on the desktop office publishing arena is released. Now, they are throwing around their considerable corporate weight trying to gain ISO certification for their OOXML standard. This involves having each country pass a vote on whether they would accept OOXML as a national standard.

When I read that such a vote was recently passed here in South Africa, I was greatly impressed by the outcome:
"Yvonne Ndhlovu of SABS, who acted as project leader for the local leg of the process, informed Tectonic that the votes amounted to 2 votes of yes, with comments; 2 votes of yes, without comments; and 13 votes of no, with comments.
"South Africa will vote no," she said, referring to the international voting to take place."

The outcome of the vote clearly shows that SABS is competent in making such decisions, and won't be dazzled by the shiny Redmond giant. Good work SABS, we are proud of you!

Read more about why OOXML is bad here: noooxml.org