Andrew Shebanow: Is Office Open XML a One-Way Standard? Ask Microsoft

The Mac Office team has decided that rather than implement their own code to read and write the new Office 2007 “open” XML standard file formats, they would instead wrap the Windows Office code. I.e. they concluded that it’d be easier to port the Windows code to Mac OS X than to write their own code to parse the formats.

These formats are “open” in that they’ve published specs for the formats, but the truth is that there’s likely only ever going to be a single actual implementation to fully support them — the one that Microsoft wrote for Windows.

★ Friday, 15 December 2006