Organizations all over the world have asked Microsoft to help ensure that their valuable investments in the multitude of documents created are protected and are made even more valuable by enabling conversion to modern open XML-based formats.

By taking this approach to standardization with industry participation and support at Ecma International, organizations around the world will have the immediate benefit of both backward compatibile design for existing documents and the long-term benefit of a forward-looking open industry consensus standards process.

Microsoft chose to submit the most current version of the formats to Ecma International for standardization in order to provide the most value to the industry.

Microsoft chose to make available the document formats for the 2007 Microsoft Office release to ensure that the foundation for the Open XML document formats is considered to be complete. The standardization process required months of input and documentation, so Microsoft chose to look forward to align our document formats standardization with the latest shipping product functionality. On December 8, 2006 Ecma International ratified the Open XML formats by an overwhelming vote of 20 to 1. The formats are now known as the Ecma Office Open XML file formats (Ecma 376).

The OpenDocument Format (ODF) does not meet the requirements of backward compatibility, forward compatibility, or for performance, that many Microsoft customers tell us they require.

Sun submitted the OpenOffice formats to a small committee in the OASIS organization. The record shows that there were almost no material changes to the OpenOffice specification from the time it was submitted to the time it was approved by the working group at OASIS. Sun timed the release of the OpenDocument standard in conjunction with the OpenOffice 2.0 release. The OASIS committee did not appear to focus on the requirements, constraints, and experiences of Microsoft customers.

Ecma 376 has a number of unique design requirements, including the following:

• Backward compatibility with billions of documents produced over decades.
• Intrinsic support for integrating customer-defined XML data. This enables new levels of innovation as documents generate and transport information in unique XML styles not defined by Microsoft or the document standard, but defined by the business processes of an organization.
• High performance. Ecma 376 puts a high priority on the speed of opening, closing, and working with documents, to roughly reflect or improve upon the performance of the past binary formats, rather than degrade the performance due to parsing XML.
• Robust Testing. The development of XML support in Microsoft Office started in various forms with Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003. The Open XML formats have undergone extensive real-world testing and usage by customers and developers and this experience has helped validate the Open XML formats ratified by Ecma.

In conclusion, the formats are significantly different, with different design points and strengths.

• The Ecma process was completely open under the organization's rules and procedures.
• Ecma International is a well-recognized international standards organization with a track record of producing high-quality standards for over 40 years. The Ecma 376 effort had a startup process that was similar to many other standards efforts in that it began with specific baseline requirements to set a well-understood and supported foundation. Virtually all standards committees are subject to a delineated scope or set of parameters for their work. Ecma focused on fully documenting the formats to enable further standards work, to insure cross-platform and multiple tool support, and to meet widespread industry requirements and utility. Beyond this startup mode the standard will be under the stewardship of Ecma member organizations working on the technical committee. As stated above, Ecma 376 was ratified as a standard by Ecma International on December 8, 2006 by an overwhelming vote of 20 to 1. Because of such an overwhelming vote, we expect competitors, partners, and customers to embrace the Ecma 376 standard.

Microsoft took this approach because it was a simple, clear way to reassure a broad audience of developers and customers, within a rapidly changing licensing environment, that the formats could be used without constraint forever.

We looked at many different types of licensing approaches that would recognize the legitimacy of intellectual property but would make it clear that the intellectual property in the Open XML document formats would be available freely, now and forever. Given that this is a rapidly changing area and lay people sometimes have difficulty understanding terms, we wanted to create something simple and clear. We looked at Sun's recent approach with the ODF format and the positive feedback about the approach. With minor changes to this for clarification, we felt that it was a simple, clear approach that would reassure customers, governments, and developers that there would never be a barrier to working with the formats.

Many leading OSS legal advocates have made positive public comments regarding the acceptability of the OSP approach. We hope that this approach will continue to get close scrutiny and will gain positive long-term confidence across the industry as a way to insure that document formats are usable by all types of developers with different intellectual property licensing philosophies.

The frequently asked questions on the Microsoft Open Specification Promise Web page provide detailed questions and answers about our approach.

The OSP currently applies to the Ecma 376 standard (which covers the 2007 Microsoft Office release) , and to the ISO/IEC Draft International Standards submitted by Ecma to ISO/IEC JTC1, and to the Office 2003 specifications, because they are the only ones currently available that are complete.

It is posted on the Microsoft Open Specification Promise Web page. We will post the promise elsewhere as needed to ease awareness and distribution of the specifications, and to maintain long term neutral stewardship and applicability of the promise. If any parties prefer, we will make the XML formats available under an open and royalty free license as an alternative. The Microsoft Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas and Ecma 376 are also available under the Covenant Not to Sue, the same covenant under which Microsoft previously made the 2003 reference schemas available.