“A panel of software experts yesterday unexpectedly rebuffed Microsoft’s bid to have its open document format, Office Open XML, recognized as an international standard. The decision complicates the company’s effort to extend its dominance to the emerging field of open documents.
After five months of electronic balloting, Microsoft failed to meet the two voting criteria to win a designation as an approved standard from the Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization, or the I.S.O., and the International Electrotechnical Commission, or I.E.C.
The fight over the standard, while technically arcane, is commercially important because more governments are demanding interchangeable open document formats for their vast amounts of records, instead of proprietary formats tied to one company’s software. The only standardized format now available to government buyers is OpenDocument Format, developed by a consortium led by I.B.M., which the I.S.O. approved in May 2006.”1
I am really glad to see that these standards committees stood up to Microsoft and did what is best for the community at large.
iron wil
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