ODF (Open Document Format) has benefited from the two-year battle over the ratification of Microsoft's rival OOXML (Open Office XML) standard, which is native to its Office 2007 suite, Microsoft's national technology officer said Thursday during a panel discussion at the Red Hat Summit in Boston.

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.

Microsoft’s position is hardening as the ISO vote on OOXML (DIS 29500) in Geneva approaches at the end of this month. We know more clearly now how Microsoft and its proxy group, ECMA, will position Microsoft’s OOXML specification in advance of the vote. In short, Microsoft is betting that its influence with National Bodies will allow it to push through a specification which elevates its own interests over that of truly competitive, open international standards. In the end, it will be Microsoft’s own inflexibility that will be its undoing, and that undoing means knocking the OOXML out of approval for ISO status.

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.

The battle over office suites heats up after the OOXML BRM Convenor openly criticises Microsoft, which he once ushered and helped beyond his authority

It's been a while now, and I'm still trying to enforce HZN (Croatian national standards body, or CSI) to disclose the information on members of their TC that voted unconditional yes for Microsoft OOXML. It's no more about OOXML. It's about transparency, about my right to know who are the people that declare standards, and about my right to hold them responsible for their actions.

The following six questions relate to the application of the ECMA/MS-OOXML format to be accepted as an IEC/ISO standard. Unless a national standardisation body has conclusive answers to all of them, it should vote no in IEC/ISO and request that Microsoft incorporate its work on MS-OOXML into ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (Open Document Format).

At a Red Hat retrospective panel on the ODF vs. OOXML struggle panel, a Microsoft representative, Stuart McKee, admitted that ODF had 'clearly won.' The Redmond company is going to add native support of ODF 1.1 with its Office 2007 service pack 2. Its yet unpublished format ISO OOXML will not be supported before the release of the next Office generation.

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