Microsoft's Office Open XML Standard Could Not Get ISO Approval

    The ISO standard organization yesterday rejected the open standard for text documents, presentations and spreadsheets ISO / IEC DIS 29500 based on Open XML, which was proposed by Microsoft.

    The ISO / IEC DIS 29500 standard was originally known as Office Open XML (OOXML). It was submitted to the ECMA organization and adopted as the ECMA 376 standard, after which it was sent to ISO in December 2006.

    The voting procedure in ISO stretched for five months and ended on September 2, 2007. It was attended by national representatives of IEC and ISO from 104 countries. To adopt the standard, two-thirds of the votes were required, provided that no more than 25% would be negative. None of the criteria were met. The official results were announced yesterday: 53% of the votes for and 26% of the votes against.

    Discussion of the situation and adoption of an official comment on this ISO decision will take place in February 2008 at a special meeting organized by the ISO / IEC JTC 1. They also plan to discuss what to do next in this situation. Judging by the severity of the discussion on Habré on a related topic, this will not be an easy question.

    If the developers of the standard agree to make some changes to it, then some national ISO members can withdraw their negative votes, so that over time, Microsoft technology can overcome the milestone necessary for publication as an official ISO standard. If this does not happen within a certain period of time, then the procedure will be finally terminated. Judging by the comments of experts, the second option is more likely: “The OOXML format contains significant shortcomings that would be difficult to fix otherwise than starting the development from scratch or adding to the existing Open Document Format,” said Frederic Kouchet, representative of the French Association for Research and Development APRIL .

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