" 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."

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.

I guess a dedicated Microsoftie could spin this in a positive way (rah! rah! 100% growth in DOCX format in three months), but it is getting harder. In eight months since Office 2007 was released to th general public (10 months since release to enterprise customers), there are under 2000 of these office documents posted on the web.

The U.S. delegate organization to the powerful ISO standards body is now almost sure to vote against approving Microsoft Corp.'s Office Open XML document format as an open standard this year.

As I reported on July 23, INCITS, the US balloting body on the OOXML vote, put out a ballot to see whether the US should vote to approve OOXML, with the ballot to close on August 9.

"We appeal that you release an update to the latest version of iWork suite to support ISO 26300."

When an animal gets cornered, it becomes afraid. That’s when it becomes irrationally aggressive. Microsoft has truly become an animal recently and it shows.

"Even though the JTC1 ballot closes on September 2 on Microsoft’s product description for Microsoft Office, namely OOXML or DIS 29500, this will not become an ISO/IEC standard in 2007."