I don't know if anyone else has asked this about Microsoft and its
proposed OOXML standard, but what guarantee do we have that Microsoft's
own software implements it correctly? How do you know? What test
suites do they have to prove that they comply with the 'standard'? Given
that what I've seen of their standard includes the ability to have
arbitrary binary blobs of data which seem to allow the abilty to include
proprietary formatting outside the standard, and that these and many
other options (such as DoLineBreaksLineWord95 and so forth) are
deliberately left unimplementable, how do we know that Microsoft's own
software is using as much of the standard that can be implemented by
other vendors? For all we know, they could put the critical Office 2007
formatting in binary blobs and any other vendor implementing the standard
would look like they'd done it incorrectly, where it would simply be a
case of not being given all the information.
Microsoft have already said that they plan to not follow the standard
in the future, allegedly so that they can continue to innovate. So why
would they even bother to implement the standard now? This to me is as
compelling a reason for voting 'no' to OOXML as any other reason,
because it doesn't matter how good that standard is, if Microsoft choose
not to follow it it won't be worth the paper it's written on.