Arguments are often made that having two internationally-approved standards for document formats would encourage choice.  After all, isn’t competition good? South Africa’s Minister of Public Service and Administration, Ms. Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi addressed this issue from the perspective of governments in her opening address at the Idlelo 3 Conference currently underway in Dakar, Senegal:

“South Africa is amongst a growing number of National Governments who have adopted ODF over the past year...It is unfortunate that the leading vendor of office software, which enjoys considerable dominance in the market, chose not to participate and support ODF in its products, but rather to develop its own competing document standard which is now also awaiting judgement in the ISO process. If it is successful, it is difficult to see how consumers will benefit from these two overlapping ISO standards. I would like to appeal to vendors to listen to the demands of consumers as well as Free Software developers. Please work together to produce interoperable document standards. The proliferation of multiple standards in this space is confusing and costly.”

You can read her full address and also upload the video here. To understand why having one ISO-approved standard like ODF (ISO/IEC 26300:2006) means more choice and provides greater benefits to consumers and local IT developers alike, consider the following:

Citizens benefit from choice among competing software products, not competing standards. Document formats are not software products that you can buy. Formats are implemented in software products - applications like Open Office, IBM Symphony, StarOffice, and Google Docs.  File formats are behind-the -scenes, invisible, yet critical to allowing multiple products to share data. Citizens benefit from a single, agreed format implemented in a variety of competing software products, both proprietary and open source. 

Competition comes from, and innovation is built on, single open standards - look at the Internet.  HTML is the single agreed open standard which enables everyone to view web pages across different brands and versions of browsers, operating systems, and hardware.  Email works regardless of the service provider chosen because the provider implements the one open standard, TCP/IP.  Consider the alternative - dueling standards, where web sites are only viewable in a particular brand of browser and in a format controlled by a single software vendor, where messages are returned because the intended recipient uses a different email service. 

With a single standard, local IT investment is protected and development time and costs are reduced.  Small local players can enter the market with the assurance that a single standard is well known and accepted widely, and therefore their investment in time and resources will not be squandered. If multiple standards exist, an entrepreneur looking to launch a new product must weigh the costs and risk of paying extra to develop support for all these standards or guessing which one will succeed.  Whatever choice is made, the result is either at greater expense or greater risk, both of which will reduce the chance of success and might prevent the innovator from entering the market. 

Dual standards create interoperability problems for governments.  Many governments have expressed the general dissatisfaction with the prospect of having competing standards,” and independent experts and EU advisory bodies have called on industry to work towards a single format. With two standards, governments waste time and resources navigating the interoperability between the file formats to select, develop and/or implement so-called bridges - converters, adapters, and translators - that may not work perfectly and require user intervention. 

Dueling standards limit the usability and accessibility for citizens to the devices and applications that implement them.  Remember VHS and Beta.  Today, digital image formats (e.g., JPEG) and digital media formats (e.g., MPEG) are trumpeted as examples of where multiple overlapping standards co-exist. Yet these formats serve altogether different objectives (images and streamed video).  OOXML and ODF serve the same purpose - the production of office documents (text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations).  Moreover, many of the dueling formats cited (e.g., MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-3) simply represent updated versions of the same format.  Innovation and advancement yes, but around a single format.

You will hear the word “choice” being used repeatedly in defense of having two internationally-approved standards for document formats. What are customers - in this case governments like South Africa, significant consumers of IT products in their own right - saying? True choice results not from competing standards in which there is over 90 percent functional overlap (as is the case with OOXML and ODF), but from multiple implementations of the same open standard which compete on features, functionality and price. In other words, competing software products, not competing standards.