IBM Sits out Office Document Standards Effort
 

IBM does not intend to participate in an Ecma International standards committee that is standardizing Microsoft Office document formats, an IBM company executive said on Tuesday.

As a member of the Geneva, Switzerland-based Ecma organization, IBM can participate in the committee, called Ecma 45, which is creating an internationally recognized standard from the XML-based document formats used in the forthcoming Microsoft Office 12 product. Microsoft submitted the 1,900-page Office Open XML specification to Ecma last week.

But IBM has decided sit on the sidelines, at least for now, according to Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of standards and open source. "We think there are just too many open switches on this right now for us to go in and do something there. Given the charter, it's not clear what anyone other than Microsoft is going to be doing on this committee," Sutor said on Tuesday.


News source: C|Net News.com
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