China says no to Microsoft's latest doc standard

Keywords: Microsoft doc standard  China software producers  international standard 

A Xinhua report reveals that as China's software producers, IT experts and netizens are lobbying against Microsoft's newest document standard, the OOXXML, urging the government to vote against it during the International Organization of Standardization (ISO) conference in September. The report quoted Co-Create Software (CCS) vice secretary general Yang Chuanyan, who pointed out that an international standard can't be built on the private technologies of a single company, obviously referring to Microsoft.

Microsoft responded, noting that it had developed a converter capable of translating between documents based on OOXML and documents based on Open Document Format (ODF), a standard promoted by Sun Microsystems, IBM and Oracle and approved as the international standard by the ISO. The company also maintained that multiple standards should co-exist and that it is working with its Chinese partners to develop a converter between OOXML documents and documents based on China's Unified Office document Format (UOF), which was developed by China's software producers and was tapped as the national standard last May.

The three new standards are designed to develop office software with more functions, including allowing users to write sophisticated mathematics, chemistry and physics formulas.