Blackmoor Vituperative

Microsoft Office program manager Brian Jones, whose work has centered around the Open XML document format, now says the “format war” with OASIS OpenDocument is officially over. The winner, he claims, is both.

Jones made the statement in a blog post over the weekend following the release by Novell of an Open XML translator for OpenOffice.

Personally, I think this reply in the blog’s comments sums it up nicely:

There never was a war between ODF and OOXML. To declare that the war is over is therefore disingenuous. ODF was designed to be a comprehensive standard for document interchange. To that end, it has been adopted as an ISO standard and mandated by a growing list of organizations and governments around the world.

OOXML, on the other hand, was designed to fit a particular niche. It does that reasonably well, although even a cursory reading of the spec will reveal its poor design and even poorer architecture. There is little likelihood that it will be adopted as an ISO standard.

(from MSDN Blogs, OpenOffice support for the OpenXML formats)