Why Open XML

Why should you support the approval of Open XML as an ISO/IEC standard? Here are three compelling reasons.

1. Open XML already is an international open standard.

Ecma Office Open XML File Formats ("Open XML") were approved as an open standard by Ecma International, a Geneva-based standards organization, and was developed as part of a cross-industry, cross-organization collaboration that included Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and the U.S. Library of Congress.
Governments and other customers requested that Open XML also be submitted to the International Organization for Standardization / International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC) for further approval. Formal consideration by a Joint Technical Committee (JTC1) of ISO/IEC has begun, and approval will enhance marketplace adoption, broaden choice, and is fully consistent with what has been done in other areas of technology (e.g., image formats, such as JPEG, TIFF; digital video formats, such as MPEG-2 and H.264; and document formats, such as HTML, ODF, and PDF/A), where overlapping standards (including multiple ISO/IEC standards) that address distinct user needs have been approved and have substantially benefited customers.

2. Open XML is platform independent and easily coexists with other document file formats, including Open Document Format (ODF).

While Microsoft initially developed the early predecessor to Open XML (just as IBM and Sun Microsystems initially developed ODF), Ecma participants, including Microsoft competitors, helped ensure that the final standard was fully open and vendor neutral. If the standard becomes an ISO/IEC JTC1 standard, maintenance is expected to be performed by Ecma in collaboration with ISO/IEC JTC1.
Open XML is also platform neutral, so that information and documents created by applications on one platform can be used by applications on other platforms. Indeed, Novell's OpenOffice already supports Open XML, and Corel announced support for it in WordPerfect.
The open source Translator for word processing documents that Microsoft funded (http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter) is available to anyone at no cost; it enables interoperability between the Open XML and ODF. Novell has released a document format translator for OpenOffice and is working with Microsoft on similar translators for presentation and spreadsheet formats.

3. Important features supporting long-term document retention, preservation, and accessibility.

Open XML has been designed to be backward compatible with the content and functionality in billions of existing documents. This enhances archiving capabilities, which is one of the key reasons the U.S. Library of Congress and The British Library participated in Ecma International in the creation of the OpenXML standard.
Under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (OSP), any required Microsoft patent rights are freely available to all developers to implement Open XML in either open source software or proprietary software.
As a truly international standard, Open XML supports multiple languages and scripts.
Open XML includes robust support for assistive technologies utilized by those with disabilities.