Revisiting Open Document Format and Office Open XML:

The Quiet Revolution Continues

By Peter O’Kelly

Copyright © 2011 by Peter O’Kelly. Reprinted with permission.

Copyright © 2011 by Peter O’Kelly. Reprinted with permission. 2

Table of Contents Synopsis ........................................................................................................................................................ 3

ODF and OOXML Context-Setting ................................................................................................................. 4

The Business Value of Open and XML-based Document Formats ............................................................ 4

The Significance of Standards ................................................................................................................... 5

A Brief History of ODF ............................................................................................................................... 6

A Brief History of OOXML.......................................................................................................................... 6

The 2008 OOXML ISO Controversy ........................................................................................................... 7

The 2008 Burton Group “What’s Up, .DOC?” Report ............................................................................... 8

Recent ODF and OOXML Market Dynamics .................................................................................................. 9

Overall Productivity Application Market Dynamics .................................................................................. 9

The Shift to SaaS Productivity Applications .......................................................................................... 9

Mobile Device Access to Productivity Application Documents .......................................................... 10

Acquisitions and Affiliations ................................................................................................................ 10

ODF Market Dynamics ............................................................................................................................ 10

ODF Standards Activities ..................................................................................................................... 10

An ODF Ecosystem Vitality Snapshot .................................................................................................. 11

OOXML Market Dynamics ....................................................................................................................... 13

OOXML Standards Activities ............................................................................................................... 13

An OOXML Ecosystem Vitality Snapshot ............................................................................................ 14

ODF and OOXML Projections ...................................................................................................................... 14

“OOXML Will be Successful” ................................................................................................................... 14

“Microsoft Will Aggressively Compete but Also Play Well with Others on OOXML” ............................. 15

“ODF Will Continue, Albeit in a Relatively Minor Role” .......................................................................... 15

“The W3C Model Will Prevail in Many Domains” ................................................................................... 15

“PDF Will Continue to Dominate Non-revisable Document Contexts” .................................................. 16

“New Vendor Challenges and Opportunities” ........................................................................................ 16

Standards Activities Will Remain Useful, Despite Inevitable Time Lags ................................................. 17

There Will be Three, Indefinitely ............................................................................................................ 18

Conclusion: The Quiet Revolution Continues ............................................................................................. 19

Copyright © 2011 by Peter O’Kelly. Reprinted with permission. 3

Synopsis It has been several years since the lively and highly polarized market debate about the relative merits

and standards significance of the Open Document Format (ODF) and Office Open XML (OOXML) file

format standards. Although ODF and OOXML have since largely faded from the mainstream technology

industry press and blogosphere radar, both standards have continued to evolve and gain market

support, with significant benefits for all organizations seeking to optimize their use of information

contained in documents created with productivity applications.

This document provides an overview of the status and significance of ODF and OOXML. It starts with a

summary of the business value of open and XML-based document formats, along with a review of the

ODF/OOXML historical debate, including a recap of a widely-discussed January 2008 Burton Groupi

report which included what were, at that time, considered provocative conclusions and market

projections.

The document continues with a summary of some of the most impactful ODF- and OOXML-related

industry changes during recent years, including Microsoft’s (surprising, to many market observers)

commitment to support and contribute to both ODF and OOXML, as well as Oracle’s acquisition of Sun

Microsystems, and the acquisition’s ramifications for OpenOffice.org (which served as the starting point

for ODF, in 2000).

The analysis concludes with some market projections about likely next steps, as both ODF and OOXML

continue to evolve.

Author Peter O’Kelly is well positioned to objectively analyze and project ODF and OOXML market

dynamics. As then the founding Research Director for Burton Group’s Collaboration and Content

Strategies service, he was the primary author of the 2008 Burton Group OOXML/ODF report, and he has

focused on topics at the intersection of information management and collaboration for nearly thirty

years. Having worked as an industry analyst for much of that time, and with extensive experience in

product planning and competitive strategy roles for vendors including Groove Networks, IBM, Lotus

Development Corp., Macromedia, and Microsoft, he is also an industry insider familiar with realities at

the intersection of vendor interests and standards initiatives.

Note that Peter O’Kelly has no ongoing relationship with Microsoft, although this document was funded

in part by a Microsoft consulting engagement. As an independent industry analyst/consultant, O’Kelly

has been privileged to routinely work with multiple vendors, including several of his former employers.

Copyright © 2011 by Peter O’Kelly. Reprinted with permission. 4

ODF and OOXML Context-Setting To establish context for reviewing ODF and OOXML, this section starts with a brief overview of the value

of open and XML-based document formats and standards. It next briefly summarizes the historical

events leading to the creation and standardization of ODF and OOXML, including the controversial 2008

OOXML standard debate.

The Business Value of Open and XML-based Document Formats While it may seem paradoxical to people who have not been working with productivity applications for several years, the document formats used by leading software vendors used to be closed (created and controlled by the vendors) and binary (stored using a low-level machine representation rather than human-readable formats). This approach caused considerable complexity for anyone seeking to use their productivity application-created documents – typically word processing documents, presentations, and spreadsheets – with any application other than the ones originally used to create the documents, and also created competitive barriers to entry for software vendors. Since 2000, there has been an industry-wide shift to open and XML-based document formats. “Open” is a widely-applied adjective these days, but for the purposes of this document, it refers to formats that are fully documented, unencumbered by intellectual property restrictions or license fees, and advanced through community-driven collaboration. The use of XML (instead of binary file formats) is pivotal because it produces well-structured and application-independent documents that can be processed by a wide variety of tools and programming frameworks. The shift has facilitated significant business benefits includingii:

“Document assembly (also known as document generation): Rather than using monolithic files, document assembly means dynamically composing documents, often from disparate sources. For example, a sales report may be generated from a document template and interactive queries into sales tracking systems such as Salesforce.com.

Content reuse: Improving content reusability entails a shift to managing content components (also known as information items and microformats) rather than monolithic files. Examples include the need to consistently use corporate branding and legal boilerplate text in business proposal documents.

Content query: To make productivity application content a more productive resource in broader information management (e.g., to easily find all information pertaining to a specific customer or research project, regardless of content type or location), organizations need to go beyond simple content indexing and exploit metadata ranging from basic fields and tagging/categorization to custom schemas.

Document inspection and sanitization: Requirements in this context include ensuring authors haven't inadvertently left reviewer comments or other remnants from work-in-process versions in productivity application files. Inspection and sanitization are also used to ensure that content complies with organizational policies (e.g., to automatically remove unacceptable or potentially offensive terms from documents before they are distributed).

Document archival: To integrate productivity application content with corporate systems of record for information management and record-keeping requirements.”

Application independence is another important advantage of using open and XML-based document formats, and it’s a benefit that is especially important in consideration of market dynamics such as the

Copyright © 2011 by Peter O’Kelly. Reprinted with permission. 5

growing use of software-as-a-service (SaaS, also known as cloud) productivity applications (e.g., Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365) and the use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets (e.g., the Apple iPad). Without open and XML-based document formats, it would be much more difficult for people to use their documents via SaaS services or non-PC mobile devices, and the industry would still be mired in the tightly-coupled programs-have-files constraints of the past, unable to embrace new opportunities to make productivity application documents useful in simpler, more seamless, and often service-oriented usage scenarios. Overall, the shift to open and XML-based document formats has been something of a quiet revolution in the sense that, with the exception of some lively standards-related debates (especially in 2008, which we’ll review momentarily), the transition hasn’t been broadly covered by the technology press and analyst communities.

The Significance of Standards The industry standards domain is complex, dynamic, and often politically charged. Despite related

challenges, productivity application document standards are important because they define the models

and rules by which software vendors can verify that documents produced with their offerings will be

interoperable with other offerings that support the same standards. Standards working groups also

provide important community settings in which vendors and other organizations can constructively

collaborate to refine and extend standards, as new innovations and customer requirements emerge.

Standards are not panaceas, however, and standards activities are perennially challenged by the

inherent conflict of trying to facilitate community-driven collaboration and consensus-building on often

complex and rapidly-changing domains in which community participants are likely to have different

priorities. Constructively contributing to standards activities is also an expensive commitment, entailing

the dedication of experts’ time and attention, along with administrative and other costs (e.g., travel

expenses) associated with regular meeting attendance.

As a result, most standards are perpetual works in progress, and there are usually significant time

delays, both between the introduction and approval of new proposals to extend or refine standards, and

between the time when a standard is approved and when it is broadly supported in software products

and services.

There are some exceptions to these standards patterns, but in broad and complex domains such as

productivity application document formats (e.g., ODF and OOXML) and query languages (e.g., SQL and

XQuery), international standards are, in practice, primarily valuable for establishing interoperability

baselines and creating opportunities for communities of experts to constructively work together.

Another standards-related consideration is the extent to which it’s useful to accommodate resources

that existed prior to the creation of related standards. In the case of productivity application document

formats, for example, few organizations are likely to reformat documents they have been collecting,

often for decades, simply to claim conformance to an international standard.

In most domains, there is a distinction between de facto and formal standards, with the former

generally determined by the most widely-used products in a given domain, and the latter established by

Copyright © 2011 by Peter O’Kelly. Reprinted with permission. 6

organizations such as Ecma International (originally known as the European Computer Manufacturers

Association, but known simply as “Ecma” since 1994), the International Organization for Standardization

(ISO), and Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).

In terms of de facto productivity application document formats, in the productivity application domain,

Microsoft Office has held commanding market share for many years. That has created challenges for

Microsoft competitors, and it has also resulted in the creation of a huge and global collection of

Microsoft Office-formatted documents.

A Brief History of ODF OpenDocument Format (ODF) was the first open, XML-based, and international standard for

productivity application document formats. It was created by a group of vendors, initially led by (and

arguably controlled by) Sun Microsystems, which collectively sought to establish OpenOffice.org, a

competitive alternative to Microsoft Office, as a leading open source productivity application suite.

Sun acquired StarDivision (the creators of StarOffice) in 1999 in order to promote a relatively low cost

and multi-platform productivity application suite that it and its customers could use instead of Microsoft

Office. Sun open-sourced large portions of the StarOffice code base in 2000, creating OpenOffice.org.

Sun also introduced new XML document formats for StarOffice that would serve as the starting point for

ODF (then known as “Open Office XML Format,” as referenced in related working group meeting notes).

ODF standards-related activities within OASIS began in late 2002, and OASIS OpenDocument Format for

Office Applications was approved as a standard in May 2005. OASIS OpenDocument was subsequently

submitted to the ISO/IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC

1) (considered by many people to be a more influential and global standards organization than OASIS),

by which it was approved as ISO/IEC 26300 in May 2006.

There is now some ambiguity with the term “ODF,” which may refer to the format as implemented in

productivity applications (such as OpenOffice.org), the related OASIS standard, or ISO/IEC 26300. Unless

otherwise noted, hereafter, in this document, “ODF” refers to the former (which may, in practice, differ

from the related formal standards).

The community organizations that created ODF shared a goal of document format simplicity, and one

consequence was an explicit non-goal to support interoperability with the then-dominant binary

Microsoft Office file formats. This policy obviously resulted in a dilemma for ODF advocates, due to the

need to work with “legacy” Microsoft Office document formats, and it also created competitive

challenges for Microsoft, as organizations that mandated the use of OASIS or ISO OpenDocument

standards could no longer, at that time, use Microsoft Office.

A Brief History of OOXML Open XML reflects a long-term Microsoft commitment to XML support in Microsoft Office. The first use

of XML in Office dates back to June 1999, when Office 2000 was released with the use of XML for

features within Office HTML formats. An XML markup option for Excel (spreadsheetML) was added in

the beta of Office XP in August 2000 (Office XP was released in March 2001), and an option for Word

Copyright © 2011 by Peter O’Kelly. Reprinted with permission. 7

(wordprocessingML) followed in Office 2003 (released in April 2003). In June 2005, Microsoft

announced that XML-based file formats for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, then collectively known as

Microsoft Office XML Open Formats, would be the default file format for Office 2007 (which was

released in November 2006). Microsoft also announced it would offer a free “patch” for use with Office

2000, Office XP, and Office 2003, to make those products compatible with the new formats.

The European Union asked Microsoft to submit its XML formats to a standards body in May 2004.

Microsoft announced in November 2005 that it, along with co-sponsors including Apple, Barclays

Capital, BP, the British Library, Essilor, Intel, NextPage, Statoil ASA, and Toshiba, was offering Microsoft

Office Open XML to Ecma for consideration as an international standard. OOXML was approved as an

Ecma standard (ECMA-376/OOXML) in December 2006. Ecma submitted OOXML to ISO/IEC JTC 1 for

consideration during the same month.

As was the case with ODF, one result of this activity was ambiguity about the term “OOXML,” which may

refer to Microsoft’s XML file formats, ECMA-376/OOXML, or the ISO/IEC standard (ISO/IEC 29500).

Unless otherwise noted, hereafter in this document, “OOXML” refers to the document formats as

implemented in Microsoft Office (which, as is the case with ODF product support, may differ from the

related standards).

The 2008 OOXML ISO Controversy The ODF community voiced several concerns about OOXML standardization, ranging from overall goals

(e.g., the ODF community opinion that interoperability with “legacy” Microsoft Office document formats

was a non-goal) to concerns about complexity (often noting, for example, that the ISO/IEC 26300

standard was approximately 700 pages long, while the draft ISO/IEC OOXML proposal was more than

5,400 pages). Part of the document length difference was a function of the ODF community building on

other standards (such as XForms), but it should also be noted that the ISO/IEC ODF standard was

arguably incomplete in several respects (initially lacking, for example, a spreadsheet formula language

and support for digital signatures).

Some observers believed it was oxymoronic to even consider two ISO/IEC standards for what they

perceived to be the same domain (productivity applications), but that perspective reflected a clear

difference of opinion about the strategic value of “legacy” Office documents and the need to

accommodate capabilities present in Office 2007 that could not be directly expressed in the ISO/IEC ODF

standard.

OOXML failed its initial JTC 1ballot resolution in September 2007, sending the Ecma OOXML working

group into a revision activity designed to address key issues that contributed to the ballot loss. Perhaps

the most significant change introduced during this period was a new distinction between “strict” and

“transitional” classes of OOXML, with the latter used to describe “legacy” capabilities from earlier

releases of Office (such as the graphics markup language VML).

Although there was considerable controversy about events during this period, ISO/IEC OOXML was

approved as an ISO/IEC standard during March 2008, causing significant consternation among ODF

advocates. IBM, for example, issued a new standards policy in September 2008 that, according to an

Copyright © 2011 by Peter O’Kelly. Reprinted with permission. 8

InformationWeek article, was “… a move that could lead to the company withdrawing from groups that

fail to meet its new criteria for ‘quality and openness’ in reviewing specifications for software and

computer system interoperability.”

Figure 1 is a Google Trends snapshot of searches for “OOXML” (although it is not exhaustive, due to the

naming inconsistent usage of terms including “OOXML,” “Open XML,” and “Microsoft Office Open

XML”). As depicted by the graph, there was a peak of “OOXML” Internet search and news traffic during

early 2008, and a dramatic drop in related searches thereafter, suggesting most of the industry had

moved beyond the standards debate (and, as we’ll review momentarily, into an implementation phase).

Figure 1: Google Trends Search for “OOXML” (captured 2011/07/27)

The 2008 Burton Group “What’s Up, .DOC?” Report

I had first-hand experience with the level of market polarization involved in the ODF and OOXML

controversy during this period, when Burton Group published the previously-mentioned (see endnote i)

“What’s Up, .DOC?” report. Although I continue to believe the report was thorough and objective, and

despite the fact that I had provided ample opportunities for the leading ODF vendors to constructively

provide detailed feedback on drafts of the report before the final version was published, I was attacked

by several ODF advocates in the blogosphere, an unprecedented experience in my career as an industry

analyst.

The “Study Touting OOXML Over ODF is Debunked” reference in Figure 1, for example, linked to an Ars

Technica post that asserted, among other things, that the Burton Group report was too generous to

Microsoft (in terms of its standards commitment and modus operandi) and too harsh on Sun

Microsystems and its strategy for OpenOffice.org and ODF. Many ODF advocates, during the ISO/IEC

OOXML debate period, apparently assumed Microsoft would invariably renege on its OOXML

commitment and seek to unilaterally seize control of OOXML (Microsoft was to be considered guilty

until proven innocent), and also assumed that Sun and other vendors in favor of ODF would, in contrast,

Copyright © 2011 by Peter O’Kelly. Reprinted with permission. 9

yield all control of OpenOffice.org and ODF, and follow the standards community’s leadership on ODF

(the ODF advocates were to be considered innocent until/unless proven guilty).

Overall, the ODF/OOXML debate had very significant implications for many leading vendors as well as

the open source community. I wasn’t surprised by the intensity of the debate, but I was disappointed by

what I considered to be personal and unsubstantiated blogosphere accusations.

We’ll revisit the 2008 Burton Group predictions later in this document.

Recent ODF and OOXML Market Dynamics This section provides an overview of ODF and OOXML market dynamics since the 2008 controversy. The

section starts with a review of some high-level productivity market trends since 2008. For both ODF and

OOXML, the section next briefly reviews standards activities since 2008 and provides a snapshot of the

related market ecosystems.

Overall Productivity Application Market Dynamics Three high-level productivity application market dynamics have been particularly influential since 2008:

the shift to SaaS productivity applications, rapid growth in the use of mobile devices to access

documents, and some vendor-related changes following major acquisitions.

The Shift to SaaS Productivity Applications

The advent of SaaS offerings such as Google Docs (which exited an extensive beta test period in July

2009) and the Microsoft Office Web Apps (released in conjunction with Office 2010 during June 2010,

and including service-centric options for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote) have introduced major

changes to the productivity application market landscape. While the earlier norm was to have locally-

installed productivity applications, the shift to SaaS means it’s possible, when appropriate, to work with

productivity application documents using browser clients.

Since SaaS productivity applications run as (intranet and/or Internet) Web services, there are fewer

client configuration challenges (such as the need to update versions of Microsoft Office prior to Office

2007 in order to work with OOXML files). When Google added support for OOXML document formats in

Google Docs, for example, all Google Docs users were immediately able to work with OOXML

documents.

It’s important to note that the SaaS shift is in many cases complementary to traditional productivity

applications. Microsoft Office 2010 has been broadly successful as a traditional, client-installed

productivity application suite, for example, with Microsoft announcing, a year after the Office 2010

release, that it had become the fastest-selling version of Microsoft Office. In other words, the shift to

hybrid traditional/SaaS productivity application deployments has not significantly altered the market

share picture for the traditional productivity application market.

Copyright © 2011 by Peter O’Kelly. Reprinted with permission. 10

Mobile Device Access to Productivity Application Documents

The worldwide use of smartphones has grown explosively since 2008, and the use of tablets such as the

Apple iPad is also growing rapidly. As people become accustomed to using their mobile devices for a

wide range of communication and computing tasks, the use of open and XML-based document formats

means they can work with resources created with productivity applications as they’re on the move, even

if they don’t have mobile versions of the related productivity applications installed.

Especially when combined with SaaS offerings such as Google Docs and Office Web Apps, the mobile

scenarios are not limited to read-only use of productivity application documents. The documents can be

edited and annotated, for example, directly from a wide range of mobile device types and platforms.

This sort of flexibility was much more complex and expensive to deliver, before the shift to open and

XML-based document formats.

Acquisitions and Affiliations

Another important productivity application market dynamic that has had significant ramifications for the

ODF and OOXML ecosystems is a series of vendor acquisitions. Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems

(announced in April 2009 and completed in January 2010) was by far the most impactful for the ODF

ecosystem. Oracle initially indicated it would continue to support OpenOffice.org (and renamed its

commercial version from Sun StarOffice to Oracle Open Office), and also suggested it would eventually

release a SaaS offering, called Oracle Cloud Office, that would build on OpenOffice.org and ODF. In April

2011 Oracle changed its strategy and announced that it was donating OpenOffice.org to Apache, and

would not be releasing any more commercial products based on OpenOffice.org (Oracle’s revised plan

for Oracle Cloud Office was not clear as of August 2011).

Attachmate’s acquisition of Novell (announced in November 2010 and completed in April 2011) was

another significant acquisition for the ODF ecosystem. Novell had, as an independent company, made

significant contributions to OpenOffice.org, and was a strong supporter of both OOXML and ODF, but it’s

likely that Attachmate will reduce or spin-off its productivity application standards-related investments,

much as it did with the Novell Mono project.

ODF Market Dynamics This section provides an update on ODF market dynamics since 2008.

ODF Standards Activities

There has been considerable ODF standards-related activity since 2008, in part reflecting the fact that

the initial ODF standard was arguably incomplete in several important respects. OASIS OpenDocument

1.1 was approved in early 2007, when work on ODF 1.2 (adding, e.g., a spreadsheet formula language

and support for digital signatures) was already underway. The 2007 OASIS ODF 1.1 was submitted to

JTC 1 but has not yet been approved, and OASIS continues to work on ODF 1.2, reportedly with the goal

of having it submitted to and approved by ISO/IEC by the end of 2012.

In other words, there has not been an update to the ISO/IEC OpenDocument standard since the original

version was approved in 2006, and there is unlikely to be a revision with significant changes until the

end of 2012 (at the earliest).

Copyright © 2011 by Peter O’Kelly. Reprinted with permission. 11

This situation has created a dilemma for vendors supporting ODF. Many have gone ahead and

implemented support for draft aspects of ODF 1.2, and there have been several ODF community

“plugfest” events, at which developers have been able to collaborate and work to foster interoperability

among their implementations, but there is clear ODF market fragmentation, with a de facto ODF

standard (as included in OpenOffice.org, for example) evolving more rapidly than the OASIS ODF

standard, which is in turn evolving more rapidly than the ISO/IEC ODF standard.

An ODF Ecosystem Vitality Snapshot

For a snapshot of applications and services that currently support ODF, see the Wikipedia article

“OpenDocument software.” The list includes several OpenOffice.org derivatives, some support from

Google (for word processing documents and spreadsheets but not presentations in Google Docs, for

example), and limited support from Apple (with ODF support in the Quick Look document preview tool

in Mac OS X, but no iOS applications from Apple support ODF).

Perhaps the biggest surprise, in terms of ODF-related product developments since early 2008, is the fact

that Microsoft announced in May 2008 that it would support ODF in Office 2007 (as of Office 2007

Service Pack 2), and would also collaborate with the open source community to create a translator

project to facilitate ODF support in earlier releases of Office (Office XP and Office 2003). Microsoft also

joined the OASIS technical committee working on ODF maintenance, along with an ISO/IEC working

group then being formed with the charter of improving interoperability between OOXML and other

formats. (For additional details, see the May 2008 announcement.) Since 2008, Microsoft has hosted

several Document Interoperability Initiative (DII) events, and also included ODF support in Office 2010

and other Microsoft editing tools such as the WordPad editor available for the Windows 7 operating

system.

Microsoft’s ODF support reflects a pragmatic business decision, following the OASIS and ISO/IEC ODF

standards, because Microsoft could have been excluded from some customer opportunities if it did not

support ODF. Some people in the ODF community assumed Microsoft’s commitment to support ODF

tacitly signaled capitulation on OOXML, but that obviously was not the case, as Microsoft’s commitment

to and investment in OOXML remains strong.

The work-in-progress nature of ODF standardization since 2006 has created a controversial challenge for

Microsoft. When faced with a choice of implementing the work-in-progress de facto ODF standard as

implemented by leading OpenOffice.org vendors or an official ODF standard, Microsoft elected to

implement ODF in accordance with the ISO/IEC standard. That means, for example, that Microsoft

Office 2010 does not currently (as of August 2011) support the OpenFormula formula language

proposed for ISO ODF 1.2.

The versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in Office 2007 and 2010 include extensive help system-

based guidance to explain Office application features that are not supported in Microsoft’s

implementation of ODF. Figure 2 is an excerpt from the Word 2010 help system explanation of ODF-

related considerations.

Copyright © 2011 by Peter O’Kelly. Reprinted with permission. 12

Figure 2: ODF-Related Word 2010 Help System Content

There is similar Office ODF support help system documentation in Excel and PowerPoint.

To exhaustively document its ODF 1.1 implementation, Microsoft has maintained implementer notes for

Office 2007 and Office 2010. The documents are very extensive; the June 2011 version of the Office

2010 ODF 1.1 implementation information document, for example, is a 1,236-page PDF document.

Another important ODF ecosystem change since 2008 was the introduction, in September 2010, of The

Document Foundation (TDF), an “independent self-governing meritocratic Foundation” (quoting from

the Foundation Web site) dedicated to continuing the work of the OpenOffice.org community. Due to

intellectual property and copyright constraints (e.g., the fact that Oracle owned the OpenOffice.org

Copyright © 2011 by Peter O’Kelly. Reprinted with permission. 13

copyright), TDF also introduced LibreOffice, representing a split in the OpenOffice.org ecosystem. As

noted in the LibreOffice Wikipedia article, TDF created LibreOffice “over concerns that Oracle

Corporation would either discontinue OpenOffice.org, or place restrictions on it as an open-source

project, as it had on OpenSolaris.”

As previously noted, Oracle, after the creation of TDF and LibreOffice, donated OpenOffice.org to

Apache in April 2011. There has been speculation that Oracle (and perhaps other long-term enterprise-

focused OpenOffice.org supports such as IBM) preferred the Apache open source licensing model to the

one used by TDF, as the former doesn’t require organizations that modify or extend the OpenOffice.org

code base to donate their contributions back to the community or provide source code for those

changes to their customers. IBM announced, in July 2011, that it was donating the standalone version

of IBM Lotus Symphony, its OpenOffice.org-based productivity application suite, to the Apache

incubation project created after Oracle’s OpenOffice.org donation.

As a result, although LibreOffice is likely to continue to be included in several open source distributions,

IBM and Microsoft are now the strongest enterprise-focused ODF vendors.

Overall, to recap, the state of the ODF ecosystem is in transition at this point. While there is uncertainty

about potential alignment between TDF and the Apache OpenOffice.org-related activity, and ongoing

debate about Microsoft’s ODF implementation strategy, a timely ODF ecosystem reality check can be

found in a January 2011 blog post by industry veteran and open source advocate Simon Phipps, who

noted:

“[…] I remain surprised that neither Apple nor Google are taking ODF support seriously. Apple

still don’t support ODF in their applications (despite it being available in their TextEdit gadget on

Mac OS X) or the iPhone or iPad, and the ODF support in Google Docs is so weak that documents

I try to upload from LibreOffice are routinely rejected in ODF and yet accepted if I save the

identical document in .doc format. It’s ironic that the best proprietary ODF support right now is

from Microsoft.”

OOXML Market Dynamics This section provides an update on OOXML market dynamics since 2008.

OOXML Standards Activities

As with ODF, OOXML standards activities have been relatively slow-moving. In contrast to ODF,

however, since OOXML started out as a relatively long and complete set of document format

specifications, much of the related standards work since 2008 has been focused on correcting errors and

ambiguities in the initial standard documentation. Because OOXML includes provisions for extensions, it

was possible for Microsoft to add new capabilities in Office 2010 (such as the sparklines feature in Excel

2010) without deviating from the OOXML standard.

Microsoft has published detailed implementer notes for its Ecma and ISO/IEC standard

implementations. It also routinely hosts Document Interoperability Initiative events to foster

collaboration and knowledge-sharing among OOXML (and ODF) community participants.

Copyright © 2011 by Peter O’Kelly. Reprinted with permission. 14

There is ongoing debate about the distinction between strict and transitional OOXML. A recent

Forrester Research report (“Market Update: Office Productivity Alternatives,” May 6, 2011, p. 13)

included a footnote, for example, noting “Although [IBM Lotus] Symphony reads the Office Open XML

format, it refuses to implement saving to the Microsoft format since it deviates from the strict ISO

standard. Microsoft has stated that the next release of Microsoft Office (version 15) will support both

read and write of ISO/IEC 29500 Strict.” This is an example of different norms, compared to the ODF

ecosystem (in which vendors -- including Microsoft -- are expected to implement capabilities well in

advance of OASIS and/or ISO standardization).

An OOXML Ecosystem Vitality Snapshot

For a snapshot of applications and services that currently support OOXML, see the Wikipedia article “List

of software that supports Office Open XML.” The list includes offerings from vendors including Apple,

Google, and IBM, although several of the offerings have view- or import-only support for OOXML.

Overall, since 2008, the OOXML ecosystem has experienced far less turmoil and transition than the ODF

ecosystem. OOXML has undergone relatively less change since 2008, and Microsoft has thoroughly

documented its implementations of the Ecma and ISO/IEC standards, so most of the OOXML ecosystem

focus is primarily centered on implementations and activities such as DII events, at which implementers

can compare notes and test interoperability. You can get a sense of the OOXML community focus by

reviewing related resources such as the Open XML Developer blog, which provides extensive

implementer-oriented references.

ODF and OOXML Projections This section includes several market projections about what’s likely to happen next for ODF, OOXML,

and related market dynamics. The first six revisit projections from the then-controversial 2008 Burton

Group report.

“OOXML Will be Successful” There is no question that OOXML has been successful since its introduction with Office 2007. OOXML is

supported by Microsoft and a long list of other vendors, including, significantly, SaaS and mobile device

market leaders such as Google and Apple. The extension mechanisms included with OOXML also ensure

that Microsoft and other vendors are able to add new capabilities to their productivity applications

while continuing to support interoperable OOXML-based documents.

I believe OOXML standards initiatives have also been broadly successful, in terms of building consensus

on related goals, improving OOXML, and fostering an open and transparent process. We should not,

however, expect to see products or services exclusively support ISO/IEC OOXML (especially the strict

version) as a document format, no more than we should anticipate database management systems that

exclusively support the latest SQL standard.

Copyright © 2011 by Peter O’Kelly. Reprinted with permission. 15

“Microsoft Will Aggressively Compete but Also Play Well with Others on

OOXML” Microsoft’s OOXML activities have been thoroughly scrutinized over the years, and, although there was

significant debate about the 2008 ISO OOXML vote, Microsoft’s OOXML track record, in terms of

meeting commitments and effectively collaborating with other vendors, is laudable. Microsoft

continues to aggressively compete with Office 2010, Office 365, and other product or service offerings,

but it has also continued to play well with others on OOXML.

These commitments and activities reflect significant ongoing investments on Microsoft’s part, including,

as previously noted, very extensive documentation on its implementations of both ODF and OOXML,

and DII activities that benefit both the ODF and OOXML communities. It is unlikely that any other single

vendor is investing (in ODF and/or OOXML) at comparable levels, especially since Oracle terminated its

OpenOffice.org and ODF investments.

“ODF Will Continue, Albeit in a Relatively Minor Role” While it’s clear that ODF has sustainable momentum overall, and has been embraced by several world

governments and other organizations, ODF does not have the same level of broad market support as

OOXML, especially in enterprise computing contexts in which full document format interoperability with

Microsoft Office documents is required.

The splintering of the OpenOffice.org community is a discouraging trend for ODF advocates, because

The Document Foundation and the Apache OpenOffice.org communities may follow different priorities

in the future. Ironically, on a more positive note, ODF is likely to help to facilitate ongoing

interoperability among the different communities (including Microsoft Office, with its ODF support).

Google’s limited support for ODF and Apple’s decision to not support ODF in its iOS platform and

applications are additional indications of how limited, from a customer-driven perspective, the role of

ODF is today, in enterprise computing domains.

“The W3C Model Will Prevail in Many Domains” One projection in the 2008 Burton Group report that did not play out as I anticipated involved World

Wide Web Consortium (W3C) activities in domains such as XForms and XQuery. I anticipated several

Web-focused standards would combine to create an alternative to OOXML and ODF for some

document-oriented domains, and that XForms, in particular, might play a significant role. However,

XForms has not been broadly successful, and the W3C XHTML2 Working Group, which, among other

things, sought to eventually replace HTML forms with XForms, was terminated at the end of 2009.

It’s possible that the combination of HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS will create a widely-deployed Web-

centric and browser-based runtime environment that will surpass the vision embodied in XHTML2, but

details and timing have yet to be determined. This type of interactive, dynamic, and compound

document-based client environment would also likely be more complementary with than competitive to

ODF and OOXML, e.g., with SaaS services used to dynamically render ODF and OOXML documents.

Copyright © 2011 by Peter O’Kelly. Reprinted with permission. 16

“PDF Will Continue to Dominate Non-revisable Document Contexts” The Portable Document Format (PDF), originally created by Adobe, is another important document

format standard (see, e.g., ISO 32000). PDF has dominated print-oriented document domains for many

years, and it is also used by several document workflow systems (i.e., PDF is not exclusively focused on

print-centric scenarios).

With the broad market shift to SaaS and increasing important of non-PC mobile devices, however, and

with a growing appreciation for the ability to take action in context with productivity application

documents and other types of information, I expect PDF will be relegated to a gradually reduced role

over time, especially as more products and services support the use of digital signatures with OOXML

and ODF documents.

“New Vendor Challenges and Opportunities” The market shift to open and XML-based document formats has created new challenges and

opportunities for a wide variety of vendor categories.

The related challenges include juggling multiple standards initiatives and variable support in different

products and services. Microsoft’s ODF policy, adhering to the official ODF standard rather than

implementing work-in-progress ODF extensions, reflects one such challenge.

New market opportunities in this context far outnumber the challenges, however, with business value

benefits such as the list in an earlier section of this document (The Business Value of Open and XML-

Based Document Formats), such as document assembly, content reuse, and content query.

Altova, a leading supplier of XML developer tools, has been able to provide customer value by using

OOXML for scenarios including:

Using OOXML to transform XML content into word processing documents, in Altova StyleVision

Mapping content between XML and OOXML, e.g., between spreadsheet documents and XBRL

(the eXtensible Business Reporting Language used, e.g., in the United States for financial

reporting) documents

By using OOXML, Altova helps its customers dramatically reduce the amount of custom programming

that would otherwise be required.

MarkLogic, a leading XML database management system vendor, provides a second example. MarkLogic

provides toolkits for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that use OOXML in conjunction with its MarkLogic

Server for granular search, dynamic assembly, transformation, and delivery.

Neither Altova nor MarkLogic had, as of August 2011, seen sufficient customer demand for ODF support

to warrant the creation of ODF-specific capabilities or toolkits.

A Research Director, Inc. (RDI) case study published by Microsoft provides another compelling example

of the benefits of open and XML-based document formats. RDI’s service provider PSC Group used

OOXML in conjunction with Microsoft PowerPoint to significantly simplify and streamline RDI’s customer

Copyright © 2011 by Peter O’Kelly. Reprinted with permission. 17

analytics. RDI’s case study is an example of an application scenario that would have required an

incredible amount of custom application design and development, if the company had not been able to

build on OOXML and PowerPoint.

I interviewed RDI Partner Marc Greenspan to learn more about his OOXML experience, and he shared

the following perspective:

“Since 1991, Research Director, Inc. has been providing radio broadcasters with tools to help

them understand their audiences and help them sell the value of those listeners to their

advertisers. Over that 20+ year period, the tools we’ve used to meet the needs of our clients

have evolved tremendously.

Our clients were demanding that we deliver output to them in a format that they could use in

PowerPoint and Word, because those were the tools they used to conduct their daily business.

When we began designing and contracting for development of this latest generation of our

system in early 2007, Open XML was just starting to become a reality. Looking around, we

couldn’t find anyone that had even begun to successfully implement that technology on the

scale we were looking at. So it was a quite leap of faith for us to head in that direction.

We faced numerous challenges during the initial development process. On our first project, PSC

(our developer) had to invent many of the tools they used to generate the XML scripts. They

needed to work closely with Microsoft to clarify the settings that controlled certain parts of our

output. It was time consuming and we were making compromises with the output because it

wasn’t clear how to get it exactly the way we wanted it to look. Fortunately, that product was

first released to our clients in early 2009 to rave reviews.

As we started on phase 2 of this project, the tools and technology were evolving to a point

where we could make more rapid progress and generate the output to look just as we wanted it.

In hindsight the decision to migrate to Open XML was absolutely the correct one for our

company. Now our clients are using their preferred software -- in most cases PowerPoint but in

some they are using other technology on tablet platforms. Our content generation technology

should continue to work with future versions of PowerPoint and other Open XML compatible

programs. And most importantly, we are providing a useful tool that better meets the needs of

our clients.”

Standards Activities Will Remain Useful, Despite Inevitable Time Lags (This and the next projection are not based on the 2008 Burton Group report.)

Some people may question whether the entire ODF and OOXML standardization history was productive,

since it’s clear that the official standards will continue to struggle to keep up with productivity

application market dynamics. Even with the dilemma of having to focus on de facto and/or official

standards, however, there is no question about the overall value of the standards process, in terms of

Copyright © 2011 by Peter O’Kelly. Reprinted with permission. 18

establishing a context in which global communities of organizations and individuals can constructively

collaborate to foster interoperability.

However, the challenges inherent in advancing standards in domains as deep and broad as productivity

application document formats also suggest there will not be many opportunities for ODF or OOXML

scope expansion in the foreseeable future (e.g., to address other application domains such as those

represented by Microsoft Visio or InfoPath). Fortunately, the general market expectation at this point is

that software and service vendors will use open and XML-based document formats by default, with or

without related standards.

There Will be Three, Indefinitely In an ideal world, it would be possible to have all productivity application product and service vendors

converge on a single document format standard. Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen at any point

in the foreseeable future, primarily because of the huge and global collection of files created with legacy

Microsoft Office document formats, and because ODF’s designers did not seek to facilitate

interoperability with the legacy Microsoft Office formats.

Considering the scope and depth differences between ODF and OOXML, and the fact that their

respective standards activities do not move quickly, it’s also unlikely there will ever be successful

ODF/OOXML format unification. Again, because the goals guiding the designs of ODF and OOXML vary,

that’s not a surprise.

Overall, as such, it’s likely there will continue to be, indefinitely, three productivity application document

formats, one a de facto standard (the legacy/binary Microsoft Office formats) and two formal and

international standards (ODF and OOXML). Fortunately, this situation does not create major problems,

because:

The Microsoft Office legacy formats, even though they aren’t defined in XML, are now open, as

part of Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise.

There are toolkits and other resources available for multiple programming languages and

frameworks, so very few developers need to be concerned with the low-level details involved in

the use of any of the document formats.

The shift to SaaS productivity applications further simplifies the need to support multiple

formats, as SaaS eliminates the need to, for example, install format adapters on client devices.

Many organizations will also continue to support other and more specialized document formats

indefinitely, such as PDF for print-centric needs, but, as previously noted, the role for PDF is likely to be

reduced over time.

Copyright © 2011 by Peter O’Kelly. Reprinted with permission. 19

Conclusion: The Quiet Revolution Continues It was not so long ago, relative to the overall history of information technology, when productivity

application document formats were closed and binary, creating significant challenges for

interoperability, and essentially locking organizations into tightly-coupled applications and documents.

The broad market shift to open and XML-based document formats has ushered in a quiet revolution

(albeit not always quiet, e.g., during the ISO/IEC OOXML debate period), and has served as something of

a document liberation act, making it possible for organizations to have much more flexibility in their use

of documents created with productivity applications and services.

The organizations and individuals who helped to facilitate the transition, by creating or contributing to

standards such as ODF and OOXML, have made a profound difference to the overall utility of

productivity applications. Although it is unlikely there will ever be market convergence toward a single

productivity application document format, the market embrace of open, XML-based, and (de facto or

formal) standards-based document formats has given customers more control of their documents, and

has also enabled new productivity application options such as the shift to SaaS and the ability to work in

context with productivity application documents when using mobile devices such as smartphones and

tablets.

The productivity application market is now poised for sustained and substantive innovation and the

quiet revolution made possible by advances including ODF and OOXML has had a central role in

advancing the state-of-the-art.

i Burton Group was acquired by Gartner in January 2010 ii As an example of content reuse, the bullet list in this section is excerpted from a Burton Group report I co-

authored in January 2008, “What’s Up, .DOC? ODF, OOXML, and the Revolutionary Implications of XML in Productivity Applications” (p. 12). The latest version of the report can be accessed by Gartner subscribers.