There seems to be a mis-apprehension of what OOXML offers in in terms of XML (it’s not what you expect from XML). There is, on the one hand, a sense of reality that governments are powerless to stop Microsoft’s next format and, on the other hand, a belief that anything XML is either good or an improvement on the past (since at least Microsoft is opening something — “…we’re not quite sure what” — to public scrutiny.

This policy will result in the same old constipation of common ICT systems, a clogging of peoples’ documents and, worse of all, it regiments — by government sanction — the purchase of more software designed by an American corporation to stop you from using competing software products.

Denmark will reverse on this path from recognition of the simple reality that a sanction of dual standards stops innovation, choice of applications and service oriented modular flexibility throughout the system stacks all over the country. Perhaps the lesser pain comes from the welding of a higher cost structure into the Danish document producing economy.