Choice in Standards?

When you send a probe to space, it is hoped that you use a single standard. NASA was recently affected by the problem of using multiple standards that resulted in wasted millions of dollars of public money. When you buy an electronic device, it is hoped that you don't have to buy all sorts of proprietary adaptors to be able to connect it to the power socket.

Have multiple choices for standards that solve the same requirements is plain stupid. Examples of stupid standards include: imperial and SI measurement units (use SI and not imperial); multiple power socket forms within a country; and ODF and OOXML. Microsoft could have adopted ODF and implemented it into theiri products by now. Instead, for whatever reason, they decided that they wanted to create their own competing document format.

We don't need both ODF and OOXML as a standard. They both essentially solve the same set of requirements. The biggest difference between the two of them is: OOXML is incredibly verbose and yet, is incomplete, which makes it incredibly difficult for anybody to implement it; it has unfavourable patent policies compared to ODF's patent policies, which makes it less favourable for many initiatives to implement it for fear of legal problems; it seems to be designed to make it difficult for anybody to implement that is not Microsoft.