Well done Microsoft...NOT!

Before the vote on the MS OOXML document standard in ISO, a lot of countries suddenly joined to be able to vote. Nearly all of them voted in favour of OOXML, a clear sign that Microsoft played a major role. As most people know, it didn't help them since the voted ended up being no anyway. It doesn't end there though, since all these new members only joined to vote on this one standard, they have not voted since. This creates a big unfortunate problem:

The result is that a very important committee has, in the words of its Secretariat Manager in frequent pleas to the non-responsive members, "ground to a halt."

Microsoft has repeatedly said that they care a lot about standards, so Microsoft - please fix this big mess you've made!

OOXML vs ODF - the stakes are high

Currently, Microsoft is trying to get their OOXML format to become an ISO standard and the success there is very important to them. If it is rejected then governments around the world is likely to choose the competing ODF format as their document standard. A thing Microsoft most certainly don't want. this rant from Rob Weir (an IBM employee) details some of the recent things that have happened, here is a snippet:

ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 recently had its annual plenary. This is the same group of ISO National Body (NB) members who voted in favor of ODF last year, and over the next few months many of them will be recommending positions on Microsoft's OOXML to their national standards bodies. I was on the delegates list for attending this meeting, as a representative of the US NB, but had to cancel at the last minute because of a family emergency. When I saw the attendance list, I was surprised to see that Microsoft had sent five people, this to a meeting of only 37 people. They practically darkened the skies with their employees. And what about the conspiratorial army that is hounding them at every corner? Zero people from IBM. Zero as well for Google, Sun, RedHat, Adobe, Oracle and Novell.

More on Microsoft's Office Open XML

Here is another article about how bad this "standard" is. It contains quite a few examples that really shows why it is bad and that it will be very difficult for anyone but Microsoft to implement it. Here is a nice quote:

This is not a specification; this is a DNA sequence.