(Xinhua)
Updated: 2007-08-13 16:55

The OOXXML, Microsoft's newest document standard, is facing growing opposition as China's software producers, IT experts and netizens continue to urge the government to vote against it at the International Organization of Standardization (ISO) conference in September.

"An international standard can't be built on the private technologies of a single company. If something goes wrong with the company, nobody can open files based on its standard," said Co-Create Software (CCS) vice secretary general Yang Chuanyan.

"We appreciate the sophisticated technologies of the MS document, but doc standard has to be open to allow anybody, at anytime, to develop applications to operate on the saved files," Yang said.

Microsoft told Xinhua that it had developed a converter capable of translating between documents based on OOXML and documents based on Open Document Format (ODF), an standard promoted by Sun Microsystems, IBM and Oracle and approved as the international standard by the ISO.

Microsoft also held that multiple standards should co-exist and that it was working with its Chinese partners to develop a converter between OOXML documents and documents based on China's Unified Office document Format (UOF), which was developed by domestic software producers and adopted as the national standard this May.

The three newest standards are designed to develop office software with more functions, such as allowing users to write sophisticated mathematic, chemistry and physics formulae.

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"There are too many contradictions between the OOXML and the UOF, which means almost no converter can make a 100-percent-accurate translation while a lot of users, such as governments, require absolute similarity, not only in content but also in lines," said a well-known academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering Ni Guangnan.

"Microsoft is working on the converter but when will it be finished and how accurate can it be?" Ni questioned. "This leaves users no option but to choose the MS software."

"The MS doc standard contains too many MS patents, which we have to get round and re-develop new protocols for compatibility," said Beijing Redflag CH2000 Software Co. Ltd. manager Hu Caiyong.

"It took almost five years for Chinese software producers to develop software that is compatible with MS Office," Hu said.

Evermore Software vice president Zhang Lei is concerned that the approval of the OOXML may help Microsoft strengthen its monopoly, considering the huge amount of MS Office users.

"The MS will seize the entire market during our research and development period," Hu continued, "which means the fledging domestic producers will be destroyed and consumers will have few options."

Before 2004 when domestic Office software was not mature enough, MS Office was priced at between 2400 yuan and 2800 yuan for governmental procurement, said China Standard Software Executive Vice President Qin Yong, who has been through the bidding process.

But in 2004, when the domestic-made Office software was more competitive and priced at only 400 to 500 yuan, the MS lowered its price, immediately to 700 to 800 yuan, Qin said.

"The sky won't fall in since domestic applications are now as good as MS Office and maybe even better as they support more China's minority languages, such as Yi," Hu added, "and domestic UOF Office software, half or one third of the price of MS Office, will be on the market within a year."

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