IBM votes against Microsoft document standard

IBM voted against the certification of Microsoft Office document formats as an international standard at a general assembly of Ecma International on Thursday.

Microsoft submitted the document formats, called Office Open XML, to Ecma last year for standardization. On Thursday, the standards organization voted on whether to certify the specifications as Ecma standards and whether to submit them to ISO for consideration as ISO standards.

The vote was expected to pass. However, IBM representatives vote against the submission, said Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of standards and open source.

"It is an example of a real open standard versus a vendor-dictated spec that documents proprietary products via XML. ODF is about the future, Open XML is about the past. We voted for the future," Sutor wrote in his blog.