On the same day that I read that the South Africa standards body has filed an official appeal against the approval of OOXML with ISO/IEC, I find Patrick Durusau has written the following outrageous words [PDF] regarding Microsoft's announcement it will support ODF, and trust me when I tell you the opening is just a taste:

In our last blog posted on February 21, I proposed three test pitches for Microsoft to help judge the meaningfulness of its latest efforts to turn over a new leaf on interoperability. The first of these was to embrace the extant, multi-vendor ISO standard, ODF (Open Document Format) in lieu of its single vendor dominated efforts to create a new standard, OOXML (Office Open XML).

In the wake of the ISO rejecting Microsoft's OOXML document format as an international standard, Microsoft has launched its Document Interoperability Initiative pledging to work with industry to ensure its document formats remain interchangeable with industry standards.

How Microsoft embraced, extended, and extinguished companies and products; examples from Ulteo, sub-notebooks, VMware, and Novell

A recent News.com article by Martin LaMonica reports on the ODF vs OOXML war. The report mentions the arguments over one standard vs two competing standards. But shouldn't we be trying to solve - not prolong - the interoperability gap?

A few remarks about Microsoft "Oxite" and a video about "embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE)

I shall not complain that much about what happened with OOXML. In fact, the act of standardizing OOXML has not really brought any significant advantages to OOXML. ODF is an ISO standard and so is OOXML.

The EU Commission and Microsoft have done a draft of a deal. Lunch, anyone? They will do market testing of the browser screen for a while. And they have worked out a kind of draft solution on interoperability standards. Both solutions are working off of two suggestions Microsoft proposed itself. Here's Microsoft's statement...

Microsoft's national technology officer had an interesting comment during the Red Hat Summit in Boston about who "won" the ODF and OOXML battle. And the reason why is equally interesting.