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ISO Says No To Microsoft's OOXML Standard
qcomp writes "The votes are in and Microsoft has lost for now, reports the FFII's campaign website OOXML. The 2/3 majority needed to proceed with the fast-track standardization has not been achieved. Now the standard will head to the ballot resolution meeting to address the hundreds of technical comments submitted along with the votes." Here is yesterday's speculation as to how the vote would turn out.
It ain't over 'till the fat man throws a chair...
Faux standard was not certified.
[A]bort, [R]etry, [F]ail?
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
This move is a non-story because regardless of what the ISO approves or disapproves, Microsoft will continue to go the way they want to go and the 90% of the Office customer base will follow them, just as will the pre-install bundled customers. Other office suites are advised to ignore the upcoming de facto standard at their own peril.
I'll get you next time, Gadget! Next time!
The banks will be happy with the fresh large money transfers
A small victory, but an important one. Maybe Massachusetts can now be persuaded to move to an actual open, easy-to-implement and reliable standard to preserve government records. It can join Russia and Norway in using ODF.
Film at 11.
Of course, Microsoft will address the changes and probably buy a few more votes. Their timetable is probably still not in jeopardy.
Like Jason at Halloween, they will just keep coming.
Can they re-try the fast track again, or is this forever tabled? If forever tabled, than ISO will be useless to MS. They would need to explain ALL of their work and they do not even know it, let alone explain it to others. Basically, iso for MS would be dead.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If Microsoft did force their "standard" on people, how much would it cripple the marketplace? Already at work we are dealing with Microsoft's proprietory components causing a severe case of "haves vs have-nots" in file sharing. And what is most fustrating, is how people do not grasp what they are doing, in that using the proprietory components, they are locking out their co-workers, reducing work output as we have to get them to export their documents into a more generally accepted form. And they turn around and blame the majority of the office. Too sad.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
The linked article above states the presumed "No" vote to be unofficial and according to unamed "sources". This could well go the other way and in fact be approved. Any celebration should wait until ISO offically releases the voting results.
I no longer presume "sources" to have any credibility.
"Insanity is doing the same thing over again expecting a different result."
It was a trap!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Because, as a Microsoft dev myself I like to think the technology field I base myself in is popular based on technical merits rather than stupid market hacking. Tactics like the OOXML fiasco only distract people from the actual benefits of MS technology.
Remember folks, for a company of several hundred thousand, unfortunately not all are going to be good guys - theres plenty more that are however.
Flame away.
throw new NoSignatureException();
The first time they chose ODF, that was about doing a standard. Now the OOXML is about buyouts, and has nothing to do with standards.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I submit though, that the job isn't over, but incomplete. The ISO seriously needs to look at fixing how Microsoft attempted to hijack the process to suit their own gain, and ignore the real purpose of International Standards.
Until this fixed, we'll see more of the same, on a greater scale. And not just by Microsoft. The end result would be the weakening of the usefulness of real standards, if the current system is left as it is.
Good luck to the ISO.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
In a recent development MSFT spokesman said that, one standard specifying body meets all is not a viable workable solution for the whole world. Mr Tong'n Cheek said that Microsoft will promote an alternative standard specifying body Open ISO. He said that Microsoft wants its customers to have a choice in international bodies creating standards, choice in standards themselves too. This way users can have various choices like, OpenISO certified OOXML saving MSFT product, or ISO certified OOXML saving MSFT product or, uncertified OOXML saving MSFT product or unsupported ODF saving MSFT product or...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...Microsoft doesn't have the air of legitimacy that ISO approval would have brought.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I thought it was [A]bort, [R]etry, [I]gnore...
breakdown by country votes: http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2007/09/03/ecma-37 6-dis-29500-ooxml-the-voting-so-far/
Note 7 countries ( marked *** ) just recently updated their status within ISO from 'O' (observer) to 'P' so they could vote. Those are mostly small countries and likely to be Microsoft puppets within ISO body. Which means MS can now actively block *any* new proposed standard and promote their own more easily.
Fair enough. I'm no fan of ODF, and I think OOXML has gotten a lot of crap for bogus reasons. But OOXML is a buggy, broken standard. Hopefully Microsoft will clean up some of the issues and we'll see a better standard as a result.
In the mean time, I'm going to continue sending PDFs around. Neither OOXML nor ODF provide the level of consistency in layout that PDF provides.
This information, and the consequences of it, leave no doubt Microsoft now meaningfully games the ISO process going forward.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I fail to see the fuss, both formats suck and really have no place as a desktop publishing format. They are crappy WYSIWYG data dumps that are heavily tied to rendering algorithms of their respective editor and really are not archival safe.
I can take 20 year old TeX documents and render them just fine. But you give me even a 10 year old WYSIWYG file and there is a good chance I won't be able to do anything with the file.
What is it going to be like 50 years from now when you try to pull up an old manuscript? You know how Popular Science likes to pull up magazine issues from 40+ years ago, I wonder how they are going to manage that 40 years from now when the proprietary and open file formats are unsupported and "obsolete".
Really the only safe choice is to make a hard copy and hope the OCR of the future is better than it is now.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
...of fair business practices and open standards I don't see why there is all this backlash against OOXML. I mean, it's gonna be a de facto standard anyway. Why fight it? Imagine if the same kind of stance were taken with operating systems. Some boneheads out there decide that they're going to take on Microsoft which owns the de facto OS platform and they put together their own OS. How far would that get them? Especially if they tried to get people to actually use it! I'd say that it would probably take them a good forty or fifty years of work to break even. Why bother? I mean, just imagine if something that monumentally stupid was attempted. We'd probably have compatibility issues for decades before anything got better! I say, just let Microsoft do what it wants and everything will be a-OK.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Now let's hope that ISO fixes their flaws with the voting process so that Microsoft have to actually fix all the flaws with the OOXML specification before it can be voted on again. Then make every attempt to game the system an automatic no-vote.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Press release:1 070
http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref
eknagy
This vote only reinforces my belief that Microsoft went about this completely the wrong way. The way I would have approached it would have been to support ODF (with extensions would be even better from a lock-in point of view) or to really create an open documentation standard.
I don't understand why they were so paranoid about competing on features. I'm not sure they would have lost any significant market share if they had competed fairly, because the truth is that MS Office is still the best office suite available today.
I think this has been a PR disaster and has undone a lot of the good work that many MS employees have been doing (including working with OSS) lately.
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. - Mahatma Gandhi
Microsoft puts its own spin on the result in this press release.
More information on the upcoming proceedings at ISO are explained in this discussion on the currently slashdotted noOOXML site. (my apologies for poor HTML in the original post that made <no>OOXML come out as OOXML.
Groklaw also has some commentary and more links.
It's clear that this is far from over. Microsoft will convince more countries to become O or P members in the respective committees and Further effort (exposing fraud, convincing your national bodies) is required to prevent OOXML from being accepted as a standard. But it is encouraging to see that resistance is not futile...it was Mussolini, not Hitler.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Why not integrate .odt into MS Office? It seems like Microsoft is just throwing its weight around when this is not a battle/war that they necessarily need to fight. Wouldn't it be cheaper than bribes to incorporate existing standards into new products?
The game.
I wonder if Microsoft's scandalous misbehavior in regard to this vote will follow them permanently? It seems as if people with deep roots in any field, be it literature or science, have longer memories than the population at large. Hopefully we have been reminded (again) that Microsoft's business model is currently dependent on leveraging its monopoly on the desktop, and that it will do *anything* to preserve that monopoly. Microsoft has shown only average or sub-par performance in driving revenue in sectors where its monopoly does not serve it as well, such as the Zune or the X-box or search or SaaS (Software as a Service). Microsoft's genius is not really engineering, where it is merely an average company, readily eclipsed by Apple or Google, for example. Microsoft's genius is really in marketing strategy, and until now, that strategy has been asserting a value proposition that has proven difficult to refuse by the various supply-side and demand-side players in the desktop space.
Now that a little polish has been taken off its faux standards, perhaps we will see a bit more free market competition enter into a previously broken market. I wonder how well Microsoft would compete in the Office productivity market if it were unable to charge exorbitant prices for its commodity office productivity solutions? I am betting that a large segment of the market is going say that OpenOffice.org is "good enough" for them, and abandon Microsoft.
At any rate, Microsoft's most recent round of bullying will serve as a visible reminder to the world why it is dangerous to allow Microsoft to continue to hold its monopoly: because it will abuse its power.
Venezuela voted along with the USA in supporting this....
In Washington there were sounds of heads imploding at the idea that they'd found something they agreed on. Meanwhile further evidence of the UK's distancing themselves from the US came with the UK voting a strong "no", but Australia with George Bush visiting today decided to go for the less politically charged "abstain".
Will Balmer declare a new Axis of Evil? News at 11.
Seriously though, its hard to argue even if you support OOXML that this isn't a bad thing as it now means that the standard will be subject to proper review, surely the least worrying decision from a committee of all time.
Steve
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Note in particular the importance of taking legal action now in those countries where corruption occurred, in order to discourage corruption from occuring now in those countries that have appropriately voted "disapprove with comments" in this round, but which are still able to change their votes.
I have only ideas of the Microsoft corporate culture.
At some point, I heard that a lot of developers would rather use actual open standards than Microsoft pseudo-standards but have no choice if they want to keep their jobs. Perhaps you and a lot of the other developers can get some momentum behind that idea in upper management?
Wait. Who am I kidding?
I like to hope, and have faith in humanity, but my cynicism over Microsoft's bad behaviors is too entrenched. Microsoft will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into using a standard they didn't invent.
as a Microsoft dev myself I like to think the technology field I base myself in is popular based on technical merits rather than stupid market hacking. Tactics like the OOXML fiasco only distract people from the actual benefits of MS technology.
There's a saying where I live that goes... "You just need to sample a single grain of rice to judge an entire pot..." Microsoft's dubious and nefarious tactics wrt OOXML have shown them to be ruthless cowards; and enemies of technical merit; as software developers like you must know.
Other than rewriting the same code every 3 years when MS decides to rebrand an technology and stop supporting old versions... what are these 'benefits' you see in MS technology? Spreading disinformation amongst the developer community is a very grave sin, in my book... much worse than 'Get the Facts' aimed at consumers.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I think the approach is flawed. You should not be working on the ISO committee - you should be working on industry and government. A numerically small membership can be bought and/or coerced and is thus de facto vulnerable to process abuse and vote rigging.
Let's turn this one on its head. I'm perfectly happy with MS ratifying a 6000+ page spec, because the moment they have the ISO standard status they will to abide by it to be compliant.
I don't think it would be wildly unfair to ask MS to then ensure AND PROVE BEYOND DOUBT that the product they supply is FULLY compliant with their ISO standard.
To me, that would mean:
(1) A full test suite needs to be constructed of which independent scrutiny is paid for by MS. MS Office needs to be fully compliant with statements as made in the specifications. No ifs, no buts, no maybe. Only full compliance means an acceptable product, but that's only 50% of the requirement - there's more, mainly addressing the reason the whole ISO standard compliance is required:
(2) The identification and demonstration of a mature, competing product that can read, edit and write the documents produced by the above compliant suite to a standard that makes it clear there is 100% interoperability.
The latter proves to the evaluating entity that:
(1) the standard is complied with, and is not just a marketing gimmick.
(2) the interoperability needs are addressed
(3) there is an alternative product which prevents vendor lock in (this is why I used the word 'MATURE' - you don't want some last-minute coded piece of junk from an MS friendly vendor pretending it's a product). A product has an established user base.
If the product on offer cannot meet those two requirements the story is over. Simple. If no 3rd party can create a competing product or, at a minimum, achieve unencumbered interoperability (i.e. not depending on a license) then the product is unsafe from a disaster recovery point of view.
So, if Microsoft's 6000+ page spec is a bit too much for either themselves or someone else to implement, the answer is easy - make one that works. That's all the world has been asking, simple unencumbered interoperability. I'm fully aware that that doesn't agree with their current business model, but they ought to read "who moved my cheese" - the supply is dwindling.
IMHO they had their opportunity with ODF. They blew it.
Insert
4. All of the above
According to the ISO/IEC press release, the decisive "Ballot Resolution Meeting" (BRM) next Februrary will be in Geneva, Switzerland, where e.g. Ecma is headquartered. How can Ecma be prevented from having a similarly corrupting influence on the "Ballot Resolution Meeting" as they had in the Swiss standardization organization SNV (SIUG appealed)?
Seriously, I don't believe the devs working within the company are bad, but you guys need to stage an uprising or something. YOU are the customer! You are paying Microsoft to continue with their existing tactics. YOU are the cause!
FFS! Take some responsibility for your actions people.
Deleted
What I wonder is, will there be consequences for ECMA, after approving a substantially flawed, vendor-locked specification as a standard. Quite obviously they failed to do the review required for approving a standard, so in my opinion they disqualified as a "category I liaison", a status they need for bringing standards to the fast-track procedure. Do ISO/IEC think the same way?
a horrible place
Ok, for the heck of it, I did a crude informal correlation between h.-r. records as per http://www.worldaudit.org/polrights.htm and the OOXML vote. (I may be slightly off due to the fact I don't want to waste too much time on this, but the results should be basically correct.)
Among those abstaining or disapproving, respectively, 88% had h.-r. records in the top half. 69% were in the top 50/150
Among those approving with comments, 69% had records in the top half and 56% were in the top 50/150.
Among those fully approving, only 16% were in the top 50 and only 32% had h.-r. records in the top half.
Costa Rica had the highest h.-r. record (28th) for approving, Germanic countries had the highest records for approving with comments, while Zimbabwe had the worst record to abstain and China (and to a lesser degree Thailand) was unique in having a poor record but disapproved
why is this news if the Final vote hasn't been made ye it won't be made until Feb 2008t
One Microsoft Way there may be furniture flying from Windows® ... ahem...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Which is saddest of all, given that a good chunk of the reason for Microsoft's ascent was their absolute committment to backwards compatibility (with a few key exceptions), no matter how much it compromised future developments.
I can't figure out why there are any Yes votes. It is obvious that their specification is full of proprietary crap that will harm the open standards overall. They don't meet the minimum requirements so why did any of them vote yes? They knew the specif was not in compliance with the votes and even a yes with comments is still a yes vote. There should have been all no votes (some with and some without comments).
At least it worked out for now. Pretty sad though that Microsoft tried to stack the deck. If some serious revisions in their policy toward joining and voting isn't changed we'll see more abuse by Microsoft until they finally get it passed.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
For the Windows APIs, yes. For document formats, no. Microsoft has been criticized for many years for making incompatibilities between versions. Just try to open any Microsoft RTF document from six or seven years ago in Office 2003 or Office 2007, or any non-trivial Word 95 document in new versions and you will discover that backwards compatibility has not exactly been a high priority item for the Office development teams.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There's a saying where I live that goes... "You just need to sample a single grain of rice to judge an entire pot..."
Here, a cereal analogy might be more applicable: You just need to sample a single flake to judge the entire bowl.
And you do not need to run software made for Windows. Why would you? Just choose any of the many, many alternatives.
People did business before Windows, they will do business after Windows. So stop pretending you can't run a business now.
This is just not so. Life is about choices. You've clearly made yours. Live with it. For me? No thanks.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You are describing a perfect standardization situation. It won't happen. If OOXML becomes a standard, it will be just another excuse for Microsoft to use in anti-trust cases.
Apparently he made the mistake of thinking they'd all been ... coerced ... when only a little less than 80% of them had been.
But what's the real news here? How about that many of those "O" (observer) countries are trying to upgrade to "P" (participator) status? And that if all those O votes become P votes in time for the next vote, this could get overturned and OOXML could become an ISO standard?
It looks almost like it's not a human-produced document but rather a dump of MS internal .doc memory structures translated to english.
And then to think that Microsoft put it on a "fast-track" through ECMA (=rubber stamped) and then ISO is amazing. I can think of only one reason why they are in such a hurry, and that must be that customers are hesitantly considering the merits of standardizing on ODF (the next-largest standard, at the top left of the graph).
That standard is so large, it would cost Microsoft weeks to implement with the developer capacity that they have. I wonder when they'll announce that Microsoft Office 2008 supports it 100% :-)
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Just try to open any Microsoft RTF document from six or seven years ago in Office 2003 or Office 2007, or any non-trivial Word 95 document in new versions
.docx files, and isn't likely to ever read any either. So what is the fricking point of that tag? If you're going to write a converter that can read Word95 .doc files, have it do the conversion of whatever "SpaceLikeWord95" means to something more meaningful.
Speaking of which, something that has puzzled me about the MS-OOXML spec (and the answer may well be buried in there but I'm not about to read all 6000+ pages looking). It has a few (not well defined) tags like "SpaceLikeWord95" or such. Now, Word95 never wrote no
If you open a Word95 doc in Word2007, then save it in docx, does it use that tag? Can Word2007 even open -- properly -- a Word95 doc file?
-- Alastair
There was a technical commitee 171 in Polish Normalization Committee working for a long time on the topic - over 80% of votes in this committee was NO for OO XML.
...
... ...
And then miracle happenned - the PNC moved the topic to technical committee 182...
and in a very short time of 3 weeks the vote was made and over 80% was YES !!!
To spice things up - when polish free software org who was on 171 but not on 182 tried to register
in 182 - for 2 weeks it was told that they will be registered in time to vote
One day before voting they were told - sorry but you submitted the application too late !!!
Bummer !!!
In addition - not a single major newspaper/media corp is mentioning anything on the topic
Similarly - rarely those media give any OpenSource friendly stories - I guess MS advertising
$$ is the only thing that matters
- User opens a document that claims conformance to an OOXML profile.
- OfficeClone validates the document in the background while opening it.
- If the loader finds errors, it puts a yellow notification bar in the top of the document's window, similar to that displayed by Firefox when it blocks a pop-up window: "OfficeClone has discovered 10 technical problems in this document while loading it. [ More Info... ]"
- User clicks "More Info..." to see a list of these problems. Above this list is a notice that problems are most often caused by the program that saved the file.
For step 4, does the OOXML proposal have any counterpart to HTML's <meta name="GENERATOR"> ?'Nuff said. I think.
I'd just be happy if some plugins were written to support ODF in Word Processors such as iWorks. A standalone viewer would be nice too. The more ODF based tools the better.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
As far as I understand it (me being dutch) we voted "no, without comments" because we were forced to. Let me explain.
Our group investigated the standard and made a huge list of what was wrong with it (certain things were being skipped over, while over things were listed twice in the standard's documents). These comments were then submitted with the first vote (we voted "No, with comments" the first time).
This vote, the second time, our group looked and saw that hardly any of our concerns were taken care off, so they wanted to submit a "No, with comments" again, with the SAME comments as the previous time. This however is NOT allowed by the ISO, hence the vote got changed to a "No, without comments"
It's good that OOXML failed, as it's clearly just not suitable to be an international standard. I'm not sure ODF is either, though.
ODF is distinctly lacking in the `X' aspect of XML, for one thing. No provision is made for inserting your own data and having it preserved by apps that work on the format (one thing that MS _did_ get right in OOXML), for example. Large areas are unspecified. The comments that it's quite closely based on OO.o's internal workings are also far from inaccurate.
ODF might evolve into a good standard in a few revisions, but it's not one now IMO. I'm glad it passed because it'll make it harder to get even worse standards in place (but a truly technically excellent one should be able to supercede it) and because it has the potential to be improved into a quality standard. Right now, though, I can't imagine why anybody would go past PDF/A for archival, and can live with the somewhat clumsy limits on the current editable formats.
Many governments are waking up to the fact that a foreign company holds the keys to vast sways of pubic information. Heck, the US governments at all levels should wake up to the fact that a private combine has them by the proverbial little ones.
It is just a matter of time before governments begin to mandate the use of open formats. It is simply illogic to allow such a situation to continue for long.
If MS was so certain as you are that everybody will continue to use their format, they surely would not be exhibiting themselves as the immoral, unethical bunch of bastards we all know they are paying princely sums of money to their partners and associates in so many different localities.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
How much are you paying for MS Office? Is that a fair price? Do you have any bargaining power as a costumer?
Could you access all your information if you don't continue using MS's software?
These questions are the crux of the matter.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
This merciless bully is beating us to death, but it is all right because he is giving us candies.
Honestly, what will it take for people to stop doing business with this company?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You gave them your money. You are part of the problem, so do not preach from a moral high ground in which you are not standing.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The individual actions of each consumer determine the future of companies, even if they are monopolies.
The defeatist "oh I am so small, then I better do nothing" is a dereliction of duty as a consumer frankly.
For the market to be as perfect as possible, in spite of monopolistic forces, one must act in a rational way when it comes to purchases and who do you favour with your costum. In extreme case boycotts can be organized, which although may not dent the profits of the offending party, it may damage their image, if you think that is not bad ask McDonalds about Mclibels.
Today maybe as little as 1% of desktops run Linux. That is 1% less of money for MS. Not much? Perhaps, but big enough for them to threaten with patent litigation, so it must be hurting them somewhere.
I will continue to avoid MS products, as I have done for 12 years, because I don't deal with companies that are unethical. Difficult? Perhaps, but I know is the correct decision, and if anything, the OSI fiasco just confirms this.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
MS treats their clients with utter contempt.
You can do the same with yours (I don't recommend it, but you can). So save us this bullshit about companies being at the mercy of their client no matter what, this is not the case, it has never been.
Simply explaining that you can't read that format will be enough (the immense majority of information shared between companies in Word documents could be exchanged in plain text, RTF or HTML) People have no shame in informing that they can read and older (or newer) version of Word and other people will try to accommodate to that. Why it should be any different in regards to not using Word at all beats me (hint: tell them you can't read the new version of word and ask for the format of your choice).
Unless the service you are providing is of the shittiest quality, most clients will be happy to oblige in order to keep a good commercial relationship.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
After technique 1 failing (buying their way), rest assured that "Embrace, extend, extinguish" is next on the list. They will find some feature that ODF lacks and customers really want, and the next version of Office will use "ODFm" or "ODF 2010". Hell to parse, locked in, and very similar to ODF, except that it will make any document break slightly when read by OO.o and others.
With Microsoft, you have to pray that a $50 billion company will care about your little problem. Good luck.
And remember, MS has a proven history of abandoning old data formats (such as Word 2.0). With Microsoft, you are basically guaranteed to be a loser, eventually, when your document gets old enough to be unsupported by the Monopoly -- as the grandparent poster learned the hard way.
Perpetual support of an old format may not be 100% certain with Open Office, but your changes are vastly better than with Microsoft.
They should find a "MS Open Standard" file, put it to desktop of a modern Linux (or OS X) and tell MS Lawyer,whatever to open it.
There goes open standard. They don't even bother to update their "Word Viewer" anymore or ship it for OS X, the de facto standard in DTP business.
AFFECT, motherfucker, AFFECT.
Effect is a NOUN.
Someone compared the voting behaviour to a corruption level study done in 2006: http://www.effi.org.nyud.net/blog/kai-2007-09-05.e n.html
I do it all the time using TextEdit on OS X - it opens word files with simple formatting, which probably comprises 95% of all word documents and 100% of those I receive. If I ever had a problem opening files (never have), I'd email and ask for rtf or files without extra formatting. On Linux or Mac you can use open office, it works for almost all
Why? This isn't the 1990s.
So no matter what people say or Linux becomes, you'll stick your fingers in your ears and say 'nah nah nah, I can't hear you'. I guess you're the perfect customer for MS - hope that works out for you.
PS, if you're using word for formatting you're using the wrong tool, get a proper page layout program. The information should be stored in a format that is easy to read (that means nothing like OOXML or binary
the truth is that MS Office is still the best office suite available today.
This is really only true because an "office suite" is an artificial category created by Microsoft to leverage off their good products (like Excel) to move their bad ones (like Word).
Congratulations. This comment (although is was modded Funny) is credited by Norbert Bollow as an inspiration for creating the openiso.org site, which is an attempt to become a truly open international standards organisation, an alternative to ISO. Interesting concept.
No resubmit needed - this didn't kick it out of the process, just from the fast-track process. OOXML is *still* in the ISO standards process, and the abuse of the ISO process that Microsoft has thus perpetrated will continue to aid them in the ongoing process.
The good news is, at this point in the process, Microsoft will have a difficult time getting OOXML accepted without significant changes.
The bad news is, Microsoft will undoubtedly continue trying to stack the deck even more, and they will focus on the least worthwhile changes that are being required. As things stand currently, they only need a few more percentage points yes, and a few less percentage points no. Unless something is done about their vote stacking soon, they'll have those, without doing any changes.
Hopefully, the countries that voted 'yes, with comments' will realize from the way votes were tallied that they in fact, voted 'yes, have a nice day' - but don't count on it. It may still be possible to convince some of those countries to correct their votes to what they really intended, but even if that's possible, it won't be easy in most cases.
Basically, we won a battle - we held the bridge. That doesn't mean Microsoft's army is defeated, merely that they need to go the long way around.