The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) has agreed that Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) should be accepted as an ISO/IEC international standard format.
Approval of the format required at least 66 per cent of the votes to be positive and no more than 25 per cent to be negative. A healthy 75 per cent of the votes were a ‘yes’ with only 14 per cent being a ‘no’.
IBM opposition
Despite the IBM-led campaign against Microsoft, the company went on record this week to state:
“While the final vote has not yet been announced formally, publicly available information appears to indicate that the proposed Open XML standard received extremely broad support.
“According to documents available on the internet, 86 per cent of all voting national body members support ISO/IEC standardization, well above the 75 per cent requirement for formal acceptance under ISO and IEC rules.”
Your comments (1) Click to add a new comment
dfarning
April 3rd 2008
1. I would like to point a number of issues that this article does not mention.
There is still a significant amount of discussion surrounding OOXML. In an unusual move the ISO identified a two month window for appeals before DIS 29500 becomes a standard. A number of countries including Norway are starting the appeals process. The EU has open up yet another investigation of Microsoft's actions.
All in all it could be a long time before DIS becomes an actual standard.
Alert a moderator
Tell us what you think
You need to Log in or register to post comments