The extent to which Microsoft can go in its efforts to get OOXML is interesting. Microsoft has "persuaded" several non-profit organizations to bombard the Indian IT Secretary and the Additional Director General of the Bureau of Indian Standards with letters supporting its OOXML proposal.

Anivar Aravindcalls upon saner Indian community to write to BIS and ask them to stop adapting the proprietary standards of Microsoft. Open standards are the way to go. India shouldn’t fall into the trap of proprietary standards and go back to dark ages.

The LUG of the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi complains about attempts by Microsoft to poison Indian standards with software patents; LCA receives a wakeup call regarding Novell's malfunctioning Mono

Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), has made a final decision on the document file format OXML (Open eXtended Markup Language). Out of 19 members, five of them did not attend the meeting, one of them abstained, five voted in favor of ooxml, and the rest voted against.

Bill Gates has reportedly been making phone calls to the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Commerce to push the American National Standards Institute to ignore the votes of its advisory committees and vote "yes" on ISO standardizing Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) format, the one in competition with the OpenDocument Format (ODF) pushed by IBM and Sun.

Questions by Dr. G. Nagarjuna, Chairman FSF India, submitted to the Working Committee, Board of Indian Standards on Wordprocessing & answers from Microsoft's Vijay Kapur, followed by a response from Dr. Nagarjuna are used for this article in Grok law. Groklaw's PJ urge any of you interested in OOXML to read the other exchanges most carefully.

Multi-trade International Corporation for Research of Office Software Open Format Technologies (MICROSOFT) has announced their surprise decision, that they cease to support OOXML document format (Office Open XML), acknowledging at the same time, that the ANSI-developed & supported TXT format will be a better, universal, solution.

Microsoft's decision to add support to Office 2007 for the Open Document Format instead of its own OOXML office file format is due to backwards compatibility issues with OOXML, it has emerged.

In spite of their public opposition to Microsoft’s attempt to get the ISO standardization nod for its Office Open XML (OOXML) document format, IBM and Google quietly are supporting OOXML.