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Sorry for jumbling dzone voting.

His "workarounds" are "Use Office". Sheesh!

Apologist much?

Ok, so the file format headaches are all caused by short-sited decision making instead of planning a real file format. Instead of thinking things through for compatibility, documentability, and expandability, they just dump data into a file and assume people working on it in the future will understand all the millions of arbitrary rules they made up in the past without noting them.
And yet somehow, MS's excuse for introducing OOXML instead of working with ODF is to preserve "backwards compatibility" (which it doesn't AT ALL) with older versions of Office... And they do this by basically documenting some of a memory dump of spaghetti code that has no real architecture into an XML format and we're all supposed to roll over and say "OK, I should use OOXML instead of ODF in my project because ???".

Give me one advantage to use current Office formats or OOXML that doesn't involve "MS uses it for their products".

Earlier on DZone: http://www.dzone.com/links/ooxml_is_defective_by_design.html

And now:

From February 25 to 29, 2008, national boards will meet in Geneva to discuss OOXML. The final vote is scheduled for end-March 2007, 30 days after the BRM. All countries that voted in the September ballot will be eligible to vote in March.

This website explains how to help your national ISO board do its job and reject OOXML.

http://www.noooxml.org/

I'm a big fan of Mr. Spolsky, but this is one of his weaker pieces. Probably because he is a former Microsoft Office developer, duh.
He justifies supporting age-old formats in 2008 by explaining they were once relevant in world full of 286-1MB-RAM computers. And claims this doesn't mean "insanely bad programmers". I say it means exactly that. Or more precise: The pathological air of fear and conservatism that a company is left with after all great minds left the development team. The product sells. Don't touch anything. Don't change anything. Don't move. It still sells. Let's fix some bugs. But now too much. Let's see if it still sells... etc pp.
Now MS is finally in a position that they absolutely have to update their formats, and they fail, because it's too little too late. OOXML (a bit cleaned up) would have been an okay solution. 5-6 years ago. Now it's just a technological failure and an marketing failure to boot.

I laughed at the "workaround" too. "Use Office"."Buy Windows Server". No. Just no.

Blog post on "Joel Spolsky's very bad advice":

http://collabowriter.blogspot.com/2008/02/joel-spolskys-very-bad-advice.html