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The key breakthrough of the revision process was the splitting of the specification into two variant versions, called “Strict” and “Transitional”. The National Bodies confined all the technologies they found unacceptable to the Transitional format and dictated text to be included in the standard intended to prohibit its further use. … I was convinced at the time, and remain convinced today, that the division of OOXML into Strict and Transitional variants was the innovation which allowed the Standard to pass. Enough National Bodies could then vote in good conscience for OOXML knowing that their preferred, Strict, variant would be under their control into the future while the Transitional variant (which – remember – they had effectively rejected in 2007) would remain purely for the purpose of accurately specifying old documents: a useful aim in itself.
But that approach was predicated on one central assumption: that Microsoft would update its products to support the Strict variant that was approved by ISO. Here's Brown again:
In its pre-release form Office 2010 supports not the approved Strict variant of OOXML, but the very format the global community rejected in September 2007, and subsequently marked as not for use in new documents – the Transitional variant. Microsoft are behaving as if the JTC 1 standardisation process never happened, and using technologies (like VML) in a new product which even the text of the Standard itself describes as “deprecated” and “included […] for legacy reasons only” (see ISO/IEC 29500-1:2008, clause M.5.1).
In other words, Office 2010 does *not* support the ISO standard, whatever Microsoft might have us believe.
This is truly staggering – not so much that Microsoft should so publicly thumb its nose at the ISO and the entire standards-making community, but that in doing so, it confirms all the worst predictions that many made at the time. It suggests a level of arrogance that is breathtaking – that having obtained the coveted and presumably irrevocable ISO approval, having won its little game, it just doesn't care what anyone thinks.
For me, the puzzle of it is that in many respects, Microsoft does appear to get it. Senior management seems to want standards conformance, as Mr Capossela’s letter demonstrates – indeed strategically playing fair by standards has always seemed like the most obvious way for the corporation to extract itself from the regulatory thickets that have entangled it over the past decade. Microsoft employs many eminent and standards-aware people of unimpeachable record – they also obviously “get it”. And on the ground in the standards committees there are many delightful, talented and diligent people who seem fully-signed up to a standards-aware (dare I say “non-evil”?) approach—as the SC 34 meetings in Stockholm again recently evidenced.
And if we look elsewhere within Microsoft we can see – for example from their engagement with HTML 5 and work on MSIE – that they can move in the right direction when the will is there.
So why – given the awareness Microsoft has at the top, at the bottom, and round the edges – does it still manage to behave as it does? Something, perhaps, is wrong at the centre — some kind of corporate dysfunction caused by a failure of executive oversight.
