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After a bitter, year-long fight filled with finger-pointing and muckraking, it's finally over.
Microsoft has won its battle to have its Office Open XML document format approved by the International Standards Organization (ISO). The OOXML format, which is already an ECMA-approved standard, failed to win ISO approval when it was first examined by the group's 87 member countries in September, 2007. However, due to a heavy and highly controversial lobbying campaign waged by Microsoft and several key member countries over the intervening months, a final ballot was called. Voting ended Saturday.
An official announcement from the ISO is expected later Wednesday [Update: The ISO has made it official]. The Geneva-based organization said it would only release a statement after all of the voting nations had been notified of the decision. However, the International Herald Tribune spoke with an anonymous source involved in the ISO vote who confirmed Microsoft's win. The software company released a statement late Tuesday applauding the impending announcement.
This is a huge win for Redmond. OOXML is the native
file format for Microsoft's latest versions of its Office suite of
desktop apps. Now that it's a standard, OOXML and newer versions Microsoft Office can be adopted by
governments and large institutions, many of which require ISO-approved
standards for all document storage, without worry. Microsoft was in
danger of losing the lucrative customer base for its Office suite – the company's second-biggest cash cow behind Windows – as long as it lacked the
ISO's rubber stamp.
The OOXML format received approval from 24 of the 32 countries eligible to vote in the process. The ISO's rules state that to win approval, you need the support of at least 66 percent of what it calls core voting members, with no more than 25 percent of the total ISO member countries opposing. Only 10 of the ISO's 87 member countries opposed the format becoming a standard. Brazil, Canada, China, Cuba, Ecuador, India, Iran, New Zealand, South Africa and Venezuela all stood opposed.
The yes vote comes at the end of a very long year during which Microsoft weathered accusations of fraud, heavy-handed tactics and old-fashioned skulduggery. Some ISO members have openly questioned the ISO's good standing, saying Microsoft unfairly exerted its influence over the voting process.
Many onlookers, like those at IBM, Sun Microsystems and legal analysis website Groklaw, have also heavily criticized Microsoft's format, branding it as proprietary and non-interoperable. They've also publicly taken issue with the tactics used by Microsoft to win approval.
They, like other open-source software advocates, favor the OpenDocument Format (ODF), an open-source office document format that's already an ISO standard. HTML and PDF are two other widely-used document formats approved by the ISO.
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