MS, IBM-Sun slug it out on standard text format
The fight between world’s biggest IT companies - Microsoft and IBM-Sun Microsystems combine has landed on Indian shores. India faces a deadline to vote for making Microsoft promoted Open Office Extensible Markup Language (OOXML) as an ISO standard for electronic documents or not along with 234 other countries, But the Bureau of Indian standards (BIS), which has to submit a vote on India’s behalf seems clueless, despite just less than a month to go for the deadline. Microsoft and rival ODF (Open Document Format) alliance lead by IBM & Sun Microsystems are hurling accusations over each other.
Jaijit Bhattacharya, country director, government strategy, Sun Microsystems said that about 160 technical issues had been identified with OOXML and did not seem to address its design goals. He said that no Indian organisation or institution was involved in the development of OOXML. He added that they did not see any standalone implementations of OOXML by an Indian firm unlike the ISO ODF standard.
A meeting has been called by the government in which members of both parties will meet. Microsoft India’s national technology offer Vijay Kapur counters Sun. He said OOXML was a completely open standard and its specifications were fully documented. He said there was no royalty charged and it works on a covenant of not to sue. He also said it did not recource to any proprietary information held by Microsoft.
ODF advocate IIT-Delhi assistant Prof P.Vigneshwara Ilavarasan clarifies the issue that the politics behind the battle was clear. Microsoft wanted to retain its hold over 95% market share in word processing documents in the garb of OOXML, but Sun Microsystems and IBM wanted to grab a pie of it and prevent Microsoft in its plans, he added.
