In a move which caught a lot of people off guard Microsoft announced that they'll be providing support for the Open Document Format in Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (due for 1H 2009).

I'm not surprised following Microsoft's interoperability pledge a couple of months ago, this makes perfect sense. It sends a clear message to the EU to get off their backs as they're no longer supporting just one ISO standard but two. It halts all the criticism that Office 2007 doesn't support ODF - which means Office 2007 will be able to compete on a level playing ground with things like OpenOffice and StarOffice - an area where Office 2007 wins hands down.

I am somewhat annoyed that we'll have to wait until Office "14" to get Open XML up to the ISO specification. Sure most of the changes are minor like yes/no being replaced by true/false but it would of been nice to get it over and done with in SP2.

PDF and XPS support are also coming baked in. I am amused about the amount of talk in the blogosphere about how desperate Microsoft must be for Office to output PDF documents. Seemingly nobody remembers two years back when Adobe lawyers prevented Microsoft from doing just that with Adobe's so called "open" (ha!) standard, forcing Microsoft instead to have a downloadable add-on for Office. It's good to have it baked in now, but why are people so surprised?

Good move, now all the major office suits will support the same formats going forward.

Although I was meaning to post something back when the Office Open XML format was approved by the ISO despite lobbying by the likes of Sun and IBM, I never got around to it but it looks like the issue is back in the news.

I was some what amused to read that the Linux/Open Source aka anti-Microsoft crowd have been protesting, yes actually protesting outside the ISO committee meeting in Norway recently. This goes on top of a large amount of activity over the last few months, even to the point of these protesters tracking down which hotels people have been staying at for meetings.

Mitchell claims that opponents of OOXML have resorted to intimidation. "People have been trying to track down what hotels people have been staying at for the BRMs [Ballot Resolution Meetings]. Many voting decisions are not taken until the day. If you've had no sleep on the night before a vote [because of noisy protests], you might change your voting behaviour," he said.

Mitchell also attacked the 'no' voters who can't justify their actions. "If people vote no or yes you would really like to know why. I have spoken to some people who've voted no and asked them why and they said 'because we don't like it'. If people are representing their country they should be able to more clearly defend what their national technological position is."

The committee even released an open letter calling for an end to "personal attacks".

Of course this doesn't come as any surprise to me, these lunatics have been around for years, I say lunatics because they are almost entirely anti-Microsoft, they read and believe far too much Slashdot for their own good. A decade ago they were protesting because Microsoft wouldn't support international standards. Now that Microsoft do support, and submit specifications to international standards bodies, they still get attacked.

Seriously guys. I'm not one to attack people who are protesting, but this is a bloody document format for heaven's sake!