Comments on: ISO approval 'unlikely for Microsoft Open XML'

ISO approval of OpenDocument will thwart standards-group certification of Microsoft's XML document, research firm says.

[rcrusoe]

No need to run MS XML

Businesses and governments can easily adopt ODF now that the
OpenDocument Foundation has developed a plugin for all
versions of MS Office back to O97. The world now has a
common format for office data exchange, which works with MS
Office, OpenOffice, and many other software packages.

I would hope Microsoft now elects to adopt ODF. In any case,
there is now a strong reason to not run a MS format. You gotta
admin, that's a first.

[Philips]

"Two standards" is in fact "No standard"

As have Tannenbaum have put it once, the beauty of standards is that there are many to chose from.

My point is that ISO wouldn't want to have two standards for the same thing under its roof. It make no sence for ISO. There are many other standard organizations M$ can apply to - e.g. ANSI. I think M$ moved to ISO approval only to undermine ODF. "If ODF can it - why can't we?" I bet they have thought.

I can only conclude that my employer - German industrial automation company - already internally adopted OOo about two years ago. Internal documentation kept in OOo documents, external documents are WinWord DOCs & Adobe PDF. Unlike many others, we have quite huge amount of internal documentation: external *editable* documents are not priority for us and PDF is used for most of external communication.

[stephenwalli]

ISO will accept it ...

I disagree. Gartner doesn't have the standards experience to understand how it will be accepted into the ISO process. Blogged it yesterday here:
http://stephesblog.blogs.com/my_weblog/2006/05/odf_acceptance_.html

[JLP]

OpenDocument Format (ODF) is all we need

I sure hope that officials at ISO and ECMA are smart enough and know that we need only one standard format for office documents. OpenDocument is all we need. We don't need another format which is controlled by only one company and which is not open as it should be.