While all the drama is unfolding before the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva at the end of February and the subsequent 30 day period while countries can still change their vote, I thought I would point out something that I assume is fairly obvious to most people: Saving your documents in OOXML format right now is probably
about the riskiest thing you can do if you are concerned with
long term interoperability.

So ISO rubberstamped Microsoft's OOXML, a lame excuse for an 'open' format. The promise of ODF was that we could free the information inside office documents, making it available to new innovative programs and web services. Sadly, the real aim of OOXML was to maintain Microsoft's Office Monopoly.

Alex Brown, the convenor of the ISO's Office Open XML (OOXML) Ballot Resolution Meeting, has accused Microsoft of failure in its efforts to transform the document format into a genuinely open standard

India on Thursday gave Microsoft a thumbs-down in the war of standards for office documents. In a tense meeting at Delhi’s Manak Bhawan, the 21-member technical committee decided that India will vote a ‘no’ against Microsoft’s Open Office Extensible Mark Up Language (OOXML) standard at the ISO.

Microsoft is citing customer demand to explain its change of heart. While I doubt that many customers asked for ODF in particular, it's clear that there's sufficient demand for better document format standards in general. Microsoft believed that it could satisfy these demands by crafting its own format, and by pushing it through the ISO standards process.

After a recent meeting of the SC 34 committee, the ISO/IEC group responsible for OOXML, Groklaw are reporting that they believe Microsoft are trying to take control of the Open Document Format (ODF), the uncontroversial open document format standard.

" 28 August 2007: about 20 Microsoft partners appeared in the final minutes of yesterday's working meeting at SIS (Swedish Standards Institute) and pushed through a majority for a SIS approval of Microsoft's new OOXML file format as an ISO standard."

ISO conducted a Ballot Resolution Meeting on Friday in an effort to address some of the technical issues that plague Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) document format.

Ever since Open Document Format was standardized by ISO and Microsoft started pushing its own “open” format a significant portion of the Free Software community has been buzzing about how bloated, not really open and ultimately redundant Microsoft’s format is and moreover how Microsoft is using various “dirty tricks” to get its format approved as an open standard.