ISO Rejects Microsoft’s Office Doc Format
The votes are in, and Microsoft’s Office OpenXML document format has failed to achieve status as a standard in the International Organization for Standardization’s (ISO) Fast Track process.
Microsoft’s OOXML — the native office doc format for Office 2007 — would have had to receive a two-thirds majority approval among the national bodies eligible to vote on the standard in the Fast Track process. On Sunday, the ballots came in at 53% yes, far short of the 67% required.
Furthermore, the format would have had to have won three-fourths approval from all member countries in the ISO. The vote in the the larger pool was much closer, with Microsoft’s proposal winning 74% approval — only one or two votes shy of a "yes."
The lack of support is a blow to
Microsoft, which was hoping ISO approval would speed the adoption of
Office 2007 — and Windows Vista — by governments and large
institutions, many of which require all documents and communications to
be archived in an ISO-approved format.
Of course, this doesn’t mean OOXML is dead in the water.
Many of the "no" votes cast in the Fast Track process were amended with comments about technical issues with OOXML. The comments raise issues with OOXML’s incapability to work with languages other than English, different date formats and an incompatibility with the existing, ISO-approved OpenDocument Format (ODF).
These issues will be addressed, and no doubt debated, in February at a special ballot resolution meeting being set up by the ISO. Between now and then, Microsoft will have time to make the tweak its standard proposal to make the format more appealing to those dissenting countries. At the resolution meeting, another vote will be cast, at which point Microsoft expects OOXML to win approval.
France is lobbying to have the format split into two segments — one which will be converged over the next three years with ODF, and one for "extensions" to ensure compatibility with Microsoft’s legacy proprietary formats for Word and Excel.
And considering how much energy Redmond has poured into gaining ISO
approval for OOXML, nobody expects them to go down without a fight. In
the weeks leading up to the vote, Microsoft was busy fending off
accusations of ballot-stuffing and other shady tactics it supposedly
employed to guarantee ISO approval. We can steel ourselves for more of
the same as the resolution meeting draws near.
