In light of today’s news indicating that ECMA’s Office Open XML (OOXML) standard will be approved, I recommend this ZDNet blog post on the lessons learned from the process.

In case you haven’t been following things, OOXML is up for approval before the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It’s been a wild and politicized process for what one would think would be a relatively objective task of evaluating a technical standard.

There’s already the Open Document Format, an ISO approved standard that was created by IBM and Sun. But should there only be one document format?  The idea that ODF represents the pinnacle of document standards achievement is a particularly awkward one.  

As anyone who lived through the early days of the Internet can recall, there were huge seismic debates as to the nature of the standard protocol for computer traffic across a network.  As Janet Abbate discusses in her book Inventing the Internet, there was immense pressure from IBM to standardize on their protocol package, other pressure to use the ISO approved X.25 framework, and yet other efforts to use a Eurocentric protocol.  Into that stepped TCP/IP – it was eventually moved into X.25 but not without considerable political machinations by the Darth Vader of the time, IBM.

To suggest that ODF is somehow the ultimate Rosetta Stone is short sighted and ultimately unproductive.  If IBM and Sun put out products that rely on ODF, it’s likely to find legs in the market and prosper – but ultimately it’s the applications that use ODF that validate its quality, not the spec itself.

What really matters is that OOXML will provide a relatively clear solution for implementing apps that support both formats.  Someone writes to you in NissusWriter with ODF output?  Great, MS Word supports it.  Your accountant uses MS Word?  No problem,  Apple Pages has it covered.

Indeed, standards setting shouldn’t play favorites in the marketplace. Nor should standards bodies take on the role of a competition authority. Just make sure the process works, and then the products will compete for developer and consumer adoption.

Regarding OOXML, we’ll probably be reading about the failings of the standards process, the power of Microsoft, etc., but it’s technology (particularly applications) that matters. Don’t believe the hype, believe the bytes.