Saturday 22 March 2008

India to vote against OOXML, how feel you now TTBS?

For those who don't know,,India is THE powerhouse of IT outsourcing and have probably the largest base of knowledge workers in the world who could give proper technical opinions on whether Open Office XML or OOXML should be made an international standard for electronic documents format.
I am not saying the Trinidad knowledge worker community could not do the same analysis given enough time and adequate dedicated resources. I just was not satisfied that it would be done before the voting deadline.
Recently the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) has decided to vote against the proposal to have OOXML as a standard alongside the Open Document Format (ODF).

The fact that the Trinidad and Tobago Bureau of Standards (TTBS) intends to take an opposing stance to India on the OOXML debate now gives it the responsibility to be prepared to defend this position adequately if there is a serious debate about it and they are called out by India or any other opponent. Failure to do so would hinder seriously firstly our credibility as an independent decision maker and secondly our maturity and readiness to hold our current voting status.
This is something I strongly believe we were not prepared to do and why I believed the abstain recommendation of the TTCS was in fact the correct position to take. Countries like the United States, who intend to vote in favour of making OOXML an ISO/IEC standard can do so because they are in the position to engage in healthy, intelligent and facts-based debate about the topic.

I hope the TTBS board's advisory members who made happen the OOXML change of vote from "abstain" to "in favour of" are ready to ante up with more than Microsoft-given facts, facts which have an even heavier list of counter-arguments against.