I received a pleading phone call at 2pm today from someone at our national standards body. The forum considering the proposed document format standard - Open XML - had descended (predictably) into the usual Opensource vs. Microsoft antipathy, with everyone talking past each other. My caller asked if I’d drop what I was doing to put in an urgent cameo appearance at the forum and put forward a business view. With some trepidation, I agreed to pop in for 15 minutes between other meetings.

Now, while I run an IT services business and we’re a Microsoft partner, we also do a lot of Opensource work. We specialise in business transaction systems rather than knowledge management, so we’re pretty neutral on the (technical merits of the) documents standard. But, reluctantly, I agreed to speak - not as a technical expert (which plainly I’m not), but as a CEO who’s run a product distribution business, an electricity utility, a hi-tech manufacturer, and as a director on a major government board.

My argument was essentially that the MS Office standard is the de facto standard, that we have billions of extant documents in this standard, and that any new standard must retain backwards compatibility. It is completely unreasonable to expect business, government and private individuals to translate all their historical documents, contracts, literature, etc. into some intellectually correct, but pragmatically inconvenient, new standard. It’ll never work. (And will the IT industry please learn this message).

The prevailing standard works, kind of, and Microsoft has agreed to make it an open standard, so let’s get on with it. It worked for Sun, Java, etc., and it can work for Microsoft too. Lose the zealotry, folks. We’ve got bigger fish to fry than non-value adding navel gazing technical debates.

Unfortunately it was clear, in the few minutes I was in the committee room, that neither side of the debate was prepared to compromise. I pity the standards bodies - they’ll lose this argument, whomsoever’s view succeeds. The debate on Rod Drury’s blog is typical.

Update: I have deleted the last sentence I wrote. It wasn’t fair to people in both camps who are doing their best and have good intentions.

Update 2: Don Christie has rightly chastised me for my remarks. I was only in the room for 10 minutes, had taken no part in the discussions beforehand, and had no basis for my comments on the conduct of the meeting, other than hearsay. I apologise unreservedly to the participants.

Update 3: Grant Thomas of SNZ has emailed that this article implies that “a Standards New Zealand staff member contacted you. I believe this is incorrect and I would appreciate it if you could update your blog accordingly. Standards New Zealand as the independent body that is assessing and representing NZ Inc’s view on this topic takes our role as an unbiased and neutral agency very seriously. Overwhelmingly feedback from workshop attendees has been that it was a very useful two days and we confident we now have a good basis for making a recommendation to our Council.”  Unfortunately I don’t recall who called me, but I assumed it was SNZ.  I’m happy to publish Grant’s comment.