Replies

Yea another big controversy involving Microsoft that is pretty much about nothing.

I was our company's representative to a standards committee for a number of years. Most standards start out as something that was developed in house by one company or a group of companies. Microsoft submitting their file format to become a standard doesn't represent something that hasn't been done time and time again in the past and won't be done time and time again in the future.

Companies take something they created, create a working group among a standards body, and then open up what they have done to others.

The vast majority of letter ballot votes are going to be fore or against, without comments. When a letter ballot takes place the work on the standard has already been done in a working group, and most technical issues should have been raised and addressed in that working group.

Technical comments on a letter ballot are typically done by people who couldn't be bothered to participate in the working group. Many of the comments are usually valid, others are worthless, occasionally some are put forth by people with opposing interests that are just trying to prevent the process from moving forward.

From what I have read the main objections were related to Microsoft including all of it's "proprietary" features in the standard. Well the whole point of a company opening up their own work to the standards process is to gain a broader market by having what was their proprietary features adopted by others.

People complained that some of the features were not covered in enough detail so that another company could implement them. This is a file format, not a tutorial on how to implement certain features. If the information is there to record the aspects of that feature, implementation is up to the company that implements it. It allows compatibility to be developed, but it doesn't need to show how to implement features.

The other argument seemed to be that there was already an existing document format that was standardized.

That's fine. However, that format may not have suited everyone's needs, and there is nothing wrong with competing standards. Companies are capable of choosing which standard suits their needs best.

If other companies don't want to use the standard that Microsoft basically put forth, they are free to not use it. However, they shouldn't try and stop Microsoft from standardizing their format unless there were serious technical issues with how the format was described in the standards document. Standards groups aren't supposed to be places where companies try and restrain other companies from their own standards efforts.