We’ve all run into them from time to time. They go by many names for many purposes. A few that I can name, right off hand are the National Electric Code, ANSI, ASTM and, of course, ISO.

But when is a standard NOT a standard. Well, there are a number of them, and they are called de facto standards. These are things, ways of doing things, ways of storing things (like file formats) that have attained the status of substantially being standards without ever going through a rigorous standards process. Simply because something is used by a large number of people doesn’t mean it’s a standard. In fact, it can be just the reverse. It may be used by a large number of people because of market pressures, or because nothing has come along to be competition to it, or because of political pressures. Examples of this, in the computer industry, are the way some file formats are considered standards. And not just file formats, but the applications that were first to create the file formats. But though they are de facto standards, they have never achieved actual standard status.

An example of this is the .doc format of Microsoft Word. “But everybody uses it!” Do you remember your mother saying, “if everybody jumped off a bridge, would you do it?” The childish cry of “everybody uses it” doesn’t work now any more than it did when you tried it on your mother. Yet .doc format has, for years, been the de facto standard. Why? Because nobody had successfully come along and challenged it, and been in competition with it. Microsoft had created a format and an application that only ran on it’s operating system, and it’s operating system was being forcefully established as the “only” operating system by being tied to hardware manufacturers through various monetary manipulations.

Now, however, competition has reared it’s ugly head in the form of Open Document Format (ODF). ODF is an actual standard, having gone through a rigorous procedure to attain the status of ISO/IEC 26300-2006. ODF has challenged Microsoft’s .doc format directly in the marketplace. Governments, organizations, business are beginning to mandate that ONLY a standard file format may be used within them. And this terrifies Microsoft. This means that Microsoft may lose important and lucrative contracts. Large ones. Being a business, and being accustomed to getting a certain amount of money per year, plus increases, from Microsoft Word, Microsoft cannot allow such a situation to continue without using everything it knows how to do to stop it.

So, now we come to the present day, and an ongoing battle about which relatively few people, compared to the world population, know or understand. The battle lines were drawn, the positions chosen, and the war began. Microsoft can’t stop ODF from being a standard – ODF has already achieved the status. But Microsoft can attempt to confuse the issue by having a format of their own made into a standard. That format is OOXML (usually noted in the groups that I frequent as MSOOXML, so that there is no confusion). Microsoft submitted a 6000 page document supposedly describing MSOOXML. But various people were suspicious of it, and examined it. They discovered that MSOOXML included a number of undefined and patent encumbered binary blobs. Not only that, but it was discovered that the proposed MSOOXML wasn’t able to be implemented by any other document application simply because those binary blobs were not defined.

Now, the National Bodies that make up ISO have voted. And the world awaits the results. You’ll hear more about this, I’m sure. One source of information about this ongoing saga of “As The Stomach Churns” can be seen at http://www.groklaw.net. I encourage you to take a look at what has been happening.