Microsoft's Doug Mahugh: Inside the real OOXML debate
The real center of activity
So has the online community and the development community grown so out of sync with one another's interests that one can't tell any more when the other is solving a problem rather than creating new ones? We asked Microsoft's Doug Mahugh about the rather curious perceptions about last week's ISO Ballot Resolution Meeting:
SCOTT FULTON, BetaNews: I got the impression that folks in the blogosphere might have preferred it if this were like "WWE Smackdown," or some similarly polarized form of thumb wrestling going on.
DOUG MAHUGH: Yea, let's face it, some of the details of something like the specification are not really exciting, flashy things. It's low-level, technical details, and if you have a blog and you want to drive traffic, that's not always the best strategy to talk about those little details in the standards process.
SCOTT FULTON: The debate over how to implement drop caps, when the drop cap is a graphic.
DOUG MAHUGH: Exactly, it's hard to spin that into a controversy. And that's what was cool about the BRM. There was just so much meaty, technical discussion. We just had such a cast of experts.
The standards process, Mahugh told us, is almost on a separate track from not only what tech media bloggers are talking about, but also from what everyday developers are focused on. Developers, he said, aren't even asking him about the ISO. They want to know when the next set of tools will be available. Part of that question was answered this morning, with the announcement that version 1 of the Office Open XML SDK would be released to developers next month, with the CTP for version 2 to follow as soon as this July.
DOUG MAHUGH: On a personal note, I've traveled a lot and done some of these developer workshops, and amongst the people who are really writing code around the formats, this news about the SDK is very positive news for those people. It's something I've fielded a lot of questions about over the last nine months since we released the CTP.
SCOTT FULTON: Assuming all goes well with the standards process, what does Microsoft do at this point to help foster a development community around this new standard, which then no really belongs to it exclusively?
DOUG MAHUGH: That's a great question...We have a few things that we're involved in: There's the Open XML Developer group Web site, and there, [you'll find] many code samples already, and we have some people we're working with who are going to put more code samples up there. In fact, in the next few days, we'll have some samples around the new SDK. That's the centerpiece of our strategy for building the developer community, and getting them the tools they want.
Then also, we have a few specific bloggers who have gone into quite a bit of technical detail in the recent past, and we'll be doing a lot more of that. Eric White in particular, also James Newton-King, and of course, Brian Jones' blog and my blog, after we get beyond the standards process here, I think we'll be able to get to more technical stuff as well. So a combination of blogging and the Open XML Developer site, is the main way that we're looking at driving that.
SCOTT FULTON: And if there's a negative outcome to the standards process, I take it that won't drive down momentum toward continuing this as an interoperability project? Don't you still have the leverage you need to drive an international community of developers for outside applications, line-of-business applications, OBAs around the OOXML format?
DOUG MAHUGH: At this point, so close to the end of the process, I don't really want to speculate about outcomes. But I would say in general terms that the work to be done to empower developers with tools to work with the Open XML format, and how we can educate the developer community on the benefits of the format, and how to work with them, that doesn't really change based on anything to do with the standards process. The same group of developers is going to be interested in building the same sorts of applications, regardless of how things play out on that side of the fence.
To me, that's something kinda fun about planning some of the developer awareness, developer education work that we have coming up: It's not really affected by some of these other things, it's very much an independent track, getting developers up to speed.