ODF is not the same as ODF?

There's rumble in the web during the last days. And the reason is something to celebrate, but regrettably only for the first look. Microsoft published Service Pack 2 for their Microsoft Office 2007 product and for the first time in history they decided to officially support saving and opening in Open Document Standard (ODF). Really, that's the right step towards a higher level of interoperability! Congratulations!

Taking a closer look shows some unpleasant details. In the end everyone who hoped that using one standard in many implementations will increase the interoperability must realize that the situation has not improved. Maybe the situation even has declined. Too bad, it was a great opportunity.

OK, here the details what I'm talking about:

Rob Weir, the Co-Chair of OASIS ODF TC did some testing on Microsoft's so called ODF support and summarizes, that e.g. a spreadsheet created and saved by Microsoft Office is not useable by any of the other ODF implementations. They just create an own namespace and don't use the same as the others. Yes, there are reasons for doing that. One is that formulas are not defined by ODF 1.1. But why not use the same way the others do? And he found more examples, I recommend his blog posts "update on ODF spreadsheets", "follow up on excel 2007 sp2s ODF" and "battle for ODF interoperability".

I try to list more links about this topic here.

We mustn't let them get away with this. They should realize, that interoperability is not made by them alone, but by interacting with others, by working together and by sharing experiences. Maybe it's time for an independent organization to test the usefulness of office documents?

Update: I summarized the situation from my point of view here.

What do you think about this? Share your opinion...

Thanks,

floschi