How to hire Guillaume Portes. Actually about technical standards, and actually about Microsoft Office "Open" XML.

The first comment on that article makes a good point that Microsoft Office's closed formats grew organically over a very long period of time, and so any published format that's completely compatible is going to be a huge mess. But that doesn't change the fact that OOXML fails to meet the definition of "open." Published is not open.

Not that merely published isn't valuable, but it's only really valuable for scraping your data out of the old format and slapping it into a more useful open data standard, using a single carefully implemented conversion layer. For day-to-day use of data, where new workflow logic that operates on documents new and old has to be implemented quickly, you need a real open format.