Standards Org Deals a Blow Against Microsoft’s OOXML Format

On Friday, the group which recommends the way the U.S. votes on international technical standards failed to approve Microsoft's Office Open XML office document format. The OOXML format, which competes with the open source OpenDocument Format used by competing office products, has strong support from Microsoft and its business parters. Microsoft's competitors and many in the open source community oppose its adoption.

The group, called the INCITS V1, has been debating whether the file format should be approved as a standard since the beginning of the year, and as IBM employee and INCITS V1 member Rob Weir points out on his blog, Microsoft appears to have tried to encourage its business partners to join the group and vote OOXML up:

An important factor in the V1 vote was the large number of members who joined very late in the process. At the start of the year, V1 had only 7 voting members. But by Friday's meeting V1 had 26 voting members. There was a clear pattern in the voting where the long-time V1 members voted for the "Disapproval, with comments" position as well as "Abstention, with comments" while the newer members voted overwhelmingly "Yes, with comments" and against "Abstention with comments." This is not surprising since the new members were largely Microsoft business partners.

If Rob's reporting is true (see his chart above, and on his blog) Microsoft is trying to seed the vote for standardization of its file format.

The International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) V1 is a committee which makes recommendations to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) about which way they should vote on ballots concerning technology standards. OOXML is currently listed with the International Standards Organization (ISO) as a "fast track" project. Its approval (or otherwise) is expected later this year.