"Brazil, India, and China, which together count for more than a third of the world's population, all voted against Office Open XML in voting last week before the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Russia was the only member of the so-called BRIC nations to vote in favor of ISO ratification for OOXML."

"we could never have done this by ourselves. By pushing so hard to get OOXML endorsed, even to the point of loading the standards boards in Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, and beyond, Microsoft showed to the world how poor their format is. Good standards just don't need that kind of pressure.

Yesterday we wrote about ugly denials by Microsoft and even ISO — denials that shortly afterwards turned out to be bald-faced lies. It new reports are correct, this appears to have also been the case elsewhere, further away from the sight of the western world.

Response to new disinformation from the Microsoft camp. Microsoft cheerleaders like Alex Brown and Jesper Lund Stocholm are quite deliberately misinterpreting or mis-presenting a vote related to OOXML by claiming that IBM "supports" OOXML.

Following criticism from the Open Source Industry Association (OSIA) over its ambition to have the Office Open XML (Open XML or OOXML) format accepted as an international (ISO) standard, Microsoft's group product manager for Microsoft Office, Gray Knowlton, spoke with Computerworld about why the world needs two standard document formats.

In an effort to win quick converts to its bid to have Microsoft Open Office XML (MOOXML) accepted as an ISO standard, Microsoft is deprecating parts of its widely-criticized MOOXML. But whatever the new Microsoft OOXML file format with deprecated parts will eventually look like (if such a format ever appears in an actual application), these cosmetic changes don’t really make a difference for Microsoft or the world.

Rob Weir has taken a look at some semantics and considered again what it is that the world calls a “standard”: 'So, it is a document, a written description, not an embodiment in the form of a product, that is standardized.

Alex thinks that Microsoft has failed to fulfill crucial promises upon which the approval of OOXML was based. He concludes that unless Microsoft reverses course promptly, "the entire OOXML project is now surely heading for failure."

Microsoft is buying the election and is set to decide on its non-existent proprietary formats next week