Tonight’s big announcement about MS Office turned out to be that the next version of MS Office will default to an XML format. The file extensions are going to change to reflect this; .DOCX (for Word), .XLSX (for Excel) and .PPTX (for Power Point). Scoble has a video interview with Brian Jones about the XML format on Channel 9.
I watched most of the interview with Brian Jones and it seems like MS might actually be doing the right thing with this format. Of course the proof will be in the pudding and I won’t believe it until I see it in a shipping product. The files that Word, Excel and Power Point will produce are actually zip files with several XML files with in it, along with any other pieces that might be imbedded in the document, like an image. So the theory is that these new default formats will actually be smaller than the current binary versions because of zip compression.
This is huge news, but I’m having a hard time getting excited about it. For some reason this announcement feels akin to MS announcing that the year is no longer 2001, which everyone but MS already knows. So what is the big deal? Listening to Scoble and Brian Jones gush about how many new and great things they’ll be able to because the new format stores the document in plain text XML made me want chant Unix, Unix, Unix, Unix. Hello, a good portion of the world has already figured that storing things in plain text when ever possible is a good thing.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad MS is taking this step, and it is a big step forward for them. I guess I just expect more from a company that has more resources that many small countries put together. They should have someone there smart enough to push for something like this in MS Office years ago, otherwise what is the point of having $50+ billion in the bank?