Is Microsoft’s Open XML document standard “so complex and so geared towards compatibility with legacy Office compatibility that it could never be implemented as a fully functional file format by any competing personal productivity applications (PPAs) like WordPerfect and OpenOffice”?That’s the question Adobe’s Andrew Shebanow revives in his Shebanation blog about Open XML, as he reflects on an October post by IBM open standards “guru” Bob Sutor now that the document standard has been approved.Shebanow cites a recent article by Microsoft Mac BU’s Rick Schaut as cause for his pause. The Schaut post describes “very eloquently why the Mac version of Office won’t support the Open XML file format until sometime next year.” This is proof-positive that Sutor’s concern/claim is real, writes Shebanow.From Shaut’s article:[…] a team of 5 developers will implement 25 handlers a week, which means that we’d have all the XML handlers written in 44 weeks. […] Nevertheless, we’ve taken a little less than a year to get the converters reading the new file format. We still aren’t writing the new file format, we have the RTF side of things to worry about, which is actually more complex than the XML side, and I’ve completely left out all of the design and coding for the intermediate representation of the file. The intermediate representation, itself, is at least 6 to 8 months worth of work.Shebanow writes: Got that? It would take 5 developers a year to do a quarter of the work. How can competitors afford to make that level of investment? Novell says they will support import and export for Open XML with financial and technical help from Microsoft. Corel says they’ll do it too. Guess we’ll need to wait and see how successful they’ll be at maintaining fidelity and compatibility, though given what Rick has to say, I’m not super confident.Looks suspicious … but is this just competitor angst, or is it MS behaving badly? Technology Industry