Standardization is usually seen as something good so whenever it comes to standardize something many people are in favor but apparently these are not usually the right people and for this simple reason standardization rarely occurs. In the commercially driven world we live in standardization means death to the competitive advantages many companies have over their competitors and therefore are doing everything in their power to ruin every attempt to standardize something.

A lot of people don't realize the advantages standardization would bring into their lives so they don't really do anything about it but the big corporations are constantly fighting against any sort of movement that would standardize anything they produce and are even trying to market against it. The sad part is when people start realizing that they don't have much choice but obey the flow of the world and only hope for good times to come.

Best example is Microsoft with the ooxml which came out literally out of the blue to fight against the open source odt standard that is in every ones heart, at least as far as digital documents go. The .odt format is an open source format for text documents that is stable and very adaptable, its very easy to read or configure software to read it since its completely open source. There has been initiatives to move the odt format as a standard since some time ago but the breaking point came when some government offices in California migrated to Microsoft Office 2007, they had huge disk drives filled with documents in older office formats, the new version of office was not programmed very well to be compatible with its older versions so as a flaw it tends to corrupt some of this files. After the government office in California lost a great amount of data they decided to move away from the Microsoft Office suite to the open source alternative Open Office and after working happily with it even helped to push the odt standard which Open Office works with towards standardization.

Standardizing the odt format as the format for text processors means that the next versions of Microsoft Word will have to work with it, meaning Word will have to be compatible with its free competitor and therefore have more reasons for people to install its competitor rather than Word since its already free. Now a days its the other way around, Open Office is the one that is doing its best to be compatible with Word but unfortunately they doc format is very unstable and changes very frequently so its hard for Open Office to see the format properly and ends up displaying only an approximation that you can edit, so it still has some serious compatibility problems, which means if you grab a file in the word format and open it up in open office and the file has a lot of formatting with pictures and tables and margins, they will not show up in the same place when you open it up in open office. Whats even worst is that when you save something in open office's odt format word has no idea what it is or how to deal with it so it will simply no open it at all. But standardizing a format would force both programs and any other out there to support the standardized format in a way that the exact formatting options that you set in word are displayed in open office.

A lot of advantages come with the standardization of the format, for instance there is no such thing as Microsoft Word for Linux while there is on the other hand Open Office for Mac, Windows and Linux so for somebody using Linux its very difficult to work with somebody using Word. The same thing happens with design oriented programs. Adobe leads the standards, specially after buying Macromedia who where their main competitor. So Illustrator is now the standard program for design but again there is no such thing as Illustrator for Linux, this is even worst since you end up with the sad reality that many printing companies don't have anything but illustrator and freehand installed and therefore unless you send them a file in any of those formats or a lousy jpg they simply cant print it. The open source alternative in this case is Inkscape and the format it uses is svg which illustrator supposedly supports. But what happens is that they simply don't support it entirely so that if you save a svg file from illustrator and then open it up in inkscape and then you edit it and save it again illustrator doesn't see the changes made because it only reads the data that illustrator saved not the svg part of the file.

The problem for file standardization is everywhere since a lot of companies like Microsoft with faulty products would go out of business if their software was 100% compatible with a free, open source software that does exactly the same. So the fight for standardization continues but unfortunately the open source or small companies that offer interesting solutions to the digital world don't have enough money to fight against the lousy formats backed up by multi million dollar giants like Microsoft.

In February 2008 the final voting will occur on the ooxml format, you can track its progress and do something about it in www.noooxml.com.  In the meanwhile for those of us who have to fight daily against compatibility problems we can only hope for a better world.

People even tell me why bother using Linux with so many compatibility problems, but the truth is once you've tried an operating system that's as efficient, stable and fast its hard to go back to windows.