ODF/OpenXML, an update on the story...

Eric White's Blog - New Paper published by Peter O’Kelly – Revisiting Open Document Format and Office Open XML: The Quiet Revolution Continues

"Three years ago Peter O’Kelly wrote a paper titled, “What’s Up, .DOC? Open XML Formats, OpenDocument Format, and the Revolutionary Implications of XML in Productivity Applications.” That paper was a part of an industry-wide debate about Open XML and ODF. He has recently published a new paper that analyzes the current state of document formats.

This new paper, Revisiting Open Document Format and Office Open XML: The Quiet Revolution Continues [GD: click through for the actual link], discusses:

• The business value of standardized, XML based document formats
• A brief history of Open XML and ODF
• The 2008 Open XML ISO controversy, and the response to Peter’s “What’s Up, .DOC?” Paper
• An assessment of current Open XML and ODF market dynamics
• Current standards activity
• Projections into the future

..."

Here's a snip from the document;

"Synopsis
It has been several years since the lively and highly polarized market debate about the relative merits and standards significance of the Open Document Format (ODF) and Office Open XML (OOXML) file format standards. Although ODF and OOXML have since largely faded from the mainstream technology industry press and blogosphere radar, both standards have continued to evolve and gain market support, with significant benefits for all organizations seeking to optimize their use of information contained in documents created with productivity applications.

This document provides an overview of the status and significance of ODF and OOXML. It starts with a summary of the business value of open and XML-based document formats, along with a review of the ODF/OOXML historical debate, including a recap of a widely-discussed January 2008 Burton Groupi report which included what were, at that time, considered provocative conclusions and market projections.

The document continues with a summary of some of the most impactful ODF- and OOXML-related industry changes during recent years, including Microsoft’s (surprising, to many market observers) commitment to support and contribute to both ODF and OOXML, as well as Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and the acquisition’s ramifications for OpenOffice.org (which served as the starting point for ODF, in 2000).

The analysis concludes with some market projections about likely next steps, as both ODF and OOXML continue to evolve.

..."

The story of the battle has been pretty quite recently, with OpenXML seemly slowly making its way deeper into, and natively used by, the business world (think DocX, XlsX, etc)