Microsoft has been checkmated, for once, in India. Its Open-XML format has been voted out for now by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) in favour of the Open Document Format (ODF) backed by IBM, Sun Microsystems and others. Both ODF and OXML are formats for creating, saving and viewing documents containing texts, charts, presentations and spreadsheets. They can be downloaded free from the Internet.
ODF is already regarded as a national standard by BIS. Microsoft was pushing for its Open-XML to be also regarded as such. BIS, however, on Thursday decided by vote to not accept Microsoft’s claim. India did not want two standards that did the same job or might have interface problems.
This means that Microsoft’s Open-XML won’t bear the BIS stamp and, therefore, at least the large government sector will not use it. Microsoft stands to lose out on the massive computerisation and e-governance drive that the Union and state governments have undertaken. The drive includes setting up almost 600,000 Internet kiosks in villages across the country. Industry observers say, however, that Microsoft will eventually make a comeback because the government is otherwise working very closely with the company on various projects. At the voting at BIS’ IT committee, of the 19 members present, Nasscom, TCS, Wipro and Infosys along with Microsoft voted in favour of Open-XML. Three members were absent and hardware association MAIT abstained. The rest voted against Open-XML.
The ODF camp won the day with the argument that adoption of Open-XML would create multiple national standards, leading to complications. Microsoft, on the other hand, argued that Open-XML gave choice, flexibility and interoperability to IT users. Naturally, the decision has made the ODF camp happy. “We are in complete support of the BIS decision. We believe this will help in strengthening existing standards and help create new technically sound and royalty-free standards,” said Jaijit Bhattacharya of Sun Microsystems.