Tim Bray goes through a thought experiment on why we need, or rather don’t need, two open formats for Office documents. I’ve debated this issue with Sam Ruby before (Open Office Wars Pt. 6), but that was prior to ECMA. Microsoft’s position on open formats is obviously much better now than it was 6 months ago. Still, Tim’s question remains. Why would we need two formats? I’ll let the Office (as in MS) folks respond to that question, but I think that we do need to make this clear for customers on the technical merits. First, what’s the justification for another format? Second, why is it not feasible for us to change or merge our work with the OpenDocument format? While part of that answer is political, let’s put that aside and talk about the technical implications.

Note to Microsoft folks working on open formats and standards development processes- talk to the folks who worked on WS-* internally for so many years. We’ve been through this before (competing standards, defining the benefits to our customers) and we’ve weathered that pretty well. Let’s make sure that we do the same when it comes to Office document formats.