Universal Interoperability Council

When did IBM learn that Microsoft would not implement Excel spreadsheet formulas in OpenDocument Formats ("ODF") v. 1.1 the same way OpenOffice.org does? And why does that timing matter?

According to IBM vice president Bob Sutor, he learned about it at the October 9-10, 2008 Pretoria ODF Workshop:

Did you ever hear that the OpenDocument ("ODF") v. 1.0 specification lost as many as 7,192 mandatory interoperability requirements through the change in a single sentence? Tonight, I submitted the following comment on OASIS OpenDocument v. 1.2 Committee Draft 1. It documents how every mention of interoperability was stripped from the ODF specification at ISO/IEC JTC 1 on the road to ODF becoming an international standard.

The original comment can be found on the ODF TC's public comments mailing list reflector at http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-comment/200903/msg00129.html and an errata on a math error can be found at http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-comment/200903/msg00131.html. The comment is reprinted below with formatting added and the math error corrected.

For the data format cognoscenti, Rick Jelliffe has an interesting table comparing methods for packaging electronic documents specified by different Extensible Markup Language standards, Packaging Formats of Famous Application/*+zip (9 January 2009). He identifies emerging areas of apparent consensus that could lead to a convergence of methodology:

Circumstantial evidence is mounting of one or more private deals having been struck to approve DIS-29500 Office Open XML ("OOXML") as an international standard, a deal that may have played a role in several key national standardization bodies changing their voting position to approve OOXML.

If DIS-29500 ("OOXML") is approved by JTC 1, that is not the end of file format war; it is only the beginning.

In late 2007, an article by OASIS attorney Andy Updegrove claimed that W3C Compound Document Formats: [i] are non-editable formats; [ii] are not designed for conversions to other formats; and [iii] are therefore unsuitable as office formats. Updegrove could not have been more wrong.

UPDATE — I sent an email to Bob Sutor with a link to this article, which led to him posting my comment discussed below and explaining that my post was diverted by the Spam filter on his blog. We had a private email conversation about his new "real names" policy.